The application of electricity in the 1800's meant the telegraph and by 1860, the nation had instant communications coast to coast. Since only one message could be sent per wire, the volume of messages was limited. The multiple telegraph for sending many messages simultaneously was a sought after invention and Alexander Graham Bell invented one.

Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh Scotland on March 3, 1847, and was of the third generation of a family of teachers of the art of speaking. This was to be of great help in his work of teaching deaf students to speak. He also received training in music from Signor Bertini, and from his musical skills knew about pitch, resonance, tone, and other fundamentals. He was also gifted with a "musical ear" in determining pitch. Helmholtz had used simultaneous vibration by electromagnets to produce complex vowel sounds. Could this methodology be extended to the telegraph?

Bell met Sir Charles Wheatstone when Bell was 21, and became fascinated with Wheatstone's invention of an ancient lyre which could play music by being attached to a pine rod which in turn transmitted vibrations of music played on a nearby piano.

Bell's family experienced the tragic deaths of Bell's oldest and youngest brothers to tuberculosis, and therefore hastily moved to Tutelo Heights near Brantford in Ontario Canada in 1870 to escape the fogs of England. Bell's father, Alexander Melville Bell, was contacted by the Board of Education in Boston, MA to teach deaf children to speak based upon his "visible speech" system. Melville turned the offer over to Graham who then started a successful teaching practice which included two students, George Sanders, son of Thomas Sanders, a successful leather merchant, and Mabel Hubbard, daughter of Gardiner Hubbard, a successful lawyer. The contact with the two fathers proved to be pivotal, for they became his business partners, and he subsequently married Mabel Hubbard.

Bell was encouraged in his research by Joseph Henry, of induction and magnetism renown, and by Sir William Thompson (Lord Kelvin). Bell showed Henry his discovery that passing an intermittent current through a helix of insulated copper wire could produce the pitch, but not the quality, of sound. He encouraged Bell to pursue his research and also to master the fundamentals of electricity. Sir William Thompson was later to witness Bell's demonstration of the "electric speaking telephone" at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876, and thought it to be "the greatest by far of all of the marvels of the electric telegraph".

Much work and insight was needed to bring about a successful and practical telephone.