They had no faith in Bell 's telephone and were only interested in the telegraph. His backers, Hubbard in particular, were upset. Subsequently, Bell decided to cancel his teaching classes and devote himself solely to working on the telephone. Henry was extremely interested in Bell 's ideas concerning the telephone and urged him to devote his time to developing it rather than the harmonic telegraph. Seeking assistance, Bell went to Joseph Henry, the inventor of the electromagnetic telegraph. He knew that he was racing with a Western Union electrician, Elisha Gray, who also was trying to develop the telephone. They rented a room in a boarding house and went to work.īy the spring of 1875 he had made no progress on the harmonic telegraph. To help with the mechanical aspect of his endeavors, he enlisted the assistance of electrician Thomas A. In 1874 at the age of twenty-seven he became convinced that he could transmit any sort of sounds if he could only vary the intensity of the current exactly like the current of air varies when the sound is made. His backers particularly wanted him to invent a harmonic telegraph, a device that distinguishes musical notes, and makes it possible to transmit more than one message at a time across telegraph wires. These two men became his financial backers when he began experimenting with the telephone and the harmonic telegraph. In Boston he became friends of Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a lawyer, and Thomas Sanders, a wealthy leather merchant, the fathers of two of his students. As a young man, Bell traveled from England to Boston where he earned his living teaching speech to the deaf. Alexander Graham Bell, credited with inventing the telephone, came from an English family deeply involved in speech and elocution. No telephone history would be complete without a brief biography of the telephone's inventor.

Harmonic telegraph how does it work