Groups and Locations

history, science, technology, archive, telephone, map, flowchart, graham, bell, sound, electricity

Alexander Graham Bell’s Path to the Telephone is an innovative attempt to characterise the process of "invention" or creative discovery leading to a recognisable finished artefact, taking as its case study the telephone, as developed by Alexander Graham Bell (1847 –1922) in the 1870s. The site depicts the process using a flowchart structure, with clickable image maps providing successive levels of detail: through a mixture of diagrams (often reproduced directly from Bell's work), commentary and symbolic illustration, the viewer can trace the complex influences and developments involved. The site was created by a group of faculty and students connected with the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia [US], led by Michael E Gorman. Historians concerned at the teleological approach suggested by the site's title will hardly be reassured by the authors' early contention that Bell's route to the telephone was "more linear" than his competitors' on account of his "scientific" approach; in fact, however, the content is by no means historiographically simplistic. On the contrary, the introduction contains a thoughtful discussion of how the influences leading to an invention might be characterised: a series of "mental models" are proposed, but it is made clear that these are not to be taken as prescriptive. The purpose of this method of analysis is to trace the roles of diverse sources of inspiration in Bell's thinking, such as the apparatus developed by Helmholtz to simulate vowel sounds, Bell's role as a teacher of the deaf and human aural anatomy. Other important features of the site are an unannotated list of sources on Bell, the telephone, and the art of invention; and a complete transcript and facsimile of the first patent taken out by Bell on a telephonic device (dated 7 March 1876). A link to the text of a follow-up patent, stored elsewhere on the University of Virginia server, was broken at time of cataloguing: the site is now several years old and has a number of problems due to outdated links, the most serious being an inoperable search facility. While the site may be of some help to students seeking background detail on Bell and the telephone, it is not chiefly designed for this purpose, and is more useful for its contributions to the representation of invention. The analytical material will be of interest to research academics in the history or philosophy of technology, and the site might easily be used to provide inspiration for student work.