Founders - #138 Alexander Graham Bell

Starting point is 00:00:00 I have my periods of restlessness, when my brain is crowded with ideas tingling to my fingertips, when I am excited and cannot stop for anybody. Let me alone. Let me work as I like, even if I have to sit up all night or even for two nights. When you see me flagging, getting tired, discouraged, put your hands over my eyes so that I go to sleep and let me sleep as long as I like until I wake. Then I may hang around, read novels, and be stupid without an idea in my head until I get rested and ready for another period of work. But oh, do not do as you often do. Stop me in the midst of my work, my excitement, with alex alex aren't you coming to bed it's one o'clock do come then i have to come feeling cross and ugly then you put your hands on my eyes and after a

Starting point is 00:00:56 while i go to sleep but the ideas are gone the work is never done. So you and I have talked about this idea many times that books are the original links, that they lead us to one idea or one person to another, just like the Internet does today. Right. And a few weeks ago when I was doing that multiple part series on Edwin Land, I realized I absolutely had to to read a biography on Alexander Graham Bell because so many times in Edwin Land's life, he referenced what he learned from studying the life story of Alexander Graham Bell from the from being motivated as Bell persevered through struggles when you're creating something new, like Edwin Land did, to ideas on how to market a brand new product. There was ideas that Edwin Land learned from from the marketing of the telephone that he applied to instant photography. So if you've already listened to this podcast, you're going to see a lot of similarities between Edwin Land and Alexander Graham Bell. And I just want to speak, the reason I'm bringing this up right up front is because I do think the more biographies I read, the more this pattern becomes apparent. There is something instinctual in our nature. This idea that we all look to the past and try to learn from their accumulated knowledge and push that knowledge down the generations.

Starting point is 00:02:28 Because not only, if you want to trace this tree of knowledge real quick, you know, Steve Jobs. A lot of the ideas that we credit to Steve Jobs really are ideas he learned from Edwin Land. A lot of the ideas that Edwin Land applied to work, He learned from Alexander Graham Bell. And we're going to see Alexander Graham Bell did the exact same thing where he learned from other people like Samuel Morse and the life stories that he read that helped shape his work and help push him through times where he wanted to give up. And he drew inspiration on the fact, Samuel Morse didn't give up. So why am I going to give up? And I just think that's something that is in all of us. So I want to start in the early life of Alexander Graham Bell. This may be the beginning of his of his lifelong passion of helping and teaching the deaf.

Starting point is 00:03:13 And then he applies the lessons he learned from teaching the deaf into his development of the telephone. So it says in the evenings, strange grunts and whistles often emanated from his father's study. Alex himself would communicate in an unconventional way with his mother, Eliza Bell, who was deaf. Alex had found a way to talk with her by speaking in a deep voice close to her forehead so that she could pick up the vibrations. And so what the author is referencing there about the strange grunts and sounds coming from his father's study, his father was a professor of elocution, which is the skill of clear and expressive speech. So today you would call him a speech pathologist. And so in the early days of Alexander Graham

Starting point is 00:04:02 Bell's life or the early career, rather, he followed in his footsteps and he was a teacher and he taught people, not only people with speech impediments, but also deaf people. So I'm going to spend a little bit more time on his early life. And here we see that his fierce independence, this is a personality trait that is present throughout his life. And it says, Alex asserted his independence early. Exasperated by being the third Alexander Bell in a row, he decided to add Graham to his own name. So he adds his own middle name just so he can be different, more about his personality and his relationship with his dad. He often retreated into solitude, particularly when he was preoccupied with a project. And we'll talk more about that

Starting point is 00:04:40 later. But he also referenced that in the letter to his wife, that he had these long, uninterrupted work sessions where he was just overtaken with excitement about an idea and he did not want to be interrupted. Alex's relationship with his father was more complicated. Throughout his life, he was torn between a gnawing hunger for Melville's approval and resentment of his domineering manner. Melville Bell was an authoritarian parent. And we'll see later on, Alex decides to go in the opposite direction when it comes to his own parenting. So at this time,

Starting point is 00:05:12 his family's doing fairly well financially, so they can send him to the Royal High School in Edinburgh. They're Scottish. They're living in Scotland at this time. Eventually, they emigrate to Canada, and then Alex winds up in Boston. But at this point, the reason I want to read this section to you is because we see that Alex had this personality trait that he's willing to go to great lengths to learn about things that he's interested in. And he's willing to do almost nothing on things that he's not interested in. So

Starting point is 00:05:38 he's a, when formal schooling is concerned, you know, not the best student by any means. So it says, Alex's school record was unimpressive. He was chronically untidy and late for class, and he often skipped school altogether to go birdwatching. So interesting to note, the author talks about some of the other famous alumni from this royal high school. They include people like David Hume, Adam Smith, Robert Burns, and Sir Walter Scott. So you had this huge tradition. Outside the classroom, however, he demonstrated the ingenuity and single-mindedness that would shape his later career. So he's interested in birdwatching, he's interested in photography. And to learn about these things, you know, there's nothing he won't do. So it says,

Starting point is 00:06:21 the process took hours and the results were often disappointing, but Alex would always persevere. So it says, knows how he worked as well later in life, he would play so intensely and with such concentration for so long, they would end up with a splitting headache. And so that part reminded me about one of Edwin Land's most famous quotes. He says, my whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had. So that's one of the lessons Edwin Land constantly taught in his company to try to do everything you can to avoid distractions, avoid interruptions, and just focus, deeply concentrate hour after hour. And you're going to realize there's things in your own mind that you didn't even know were there. So fast forwarding a little bit in the life of Alexander Graham Bell, he gets his first job and he's a teacher. He's going to wind up following in his father's footsteps.

Starting point is 00:07:27 It says, when Alex was 16, he left home to teach for a year at Weston House, which is a boys' boarding school. He's actually teaching some... Some of his students were actually older than him. He was teaching piano and elocution. And this is the main takeaway from this section. He reveled in his independence,

Starting point is 00:07:46 he finally got some distance between him and his overbearing father. And he relished that. And so it's during this time that we see that his ability he took, he would always take on more projects than he could handle. And sometimes it's led to, you know, health issues. And so in this, we see a preview of his, his early work habits that, that he continues, I would say, almost up, yeah, basically up until the day he dies. So it says, Alex's health would suffer. Alex's health certainly seemed to have been unreliable. He complained of headaches, depression, and sleeplessness. Perhaps this wasn't surprising considering the undisciplined intensity of his work habits.

Starting point is 00:08:23 In a pattern that would last a lifetime, he would sit up all night reading or working obsessively on sound experiments he stumbled towards his bed only when he saw the pale light of dawn seeping through the curtains so at this time in the story alex is living and teaching in london it's one of the dirtiest cities in the world at the time and there's a ton of infectious diseases that spread. It talks about he'd be taking a walk alone with his thoughts. And then somebody would yell out to him below, hey, watch out, I'm dumping my chamber pot, which essentially I'm just dumping my human waste onto the streets. And so there's an event, a tragic event that happens that causes his family to emigrate to Canada. And that's that Alex's older brother, his younger brother, and his nephew all die of tuberculosis, which at the time they called the Great White Plague.

Starting point is 00:09:13 I looked it up, actually. I was surprised to see that tuberculosis is still the deadliest infectious disease. It killed 1.5 million people in 2018. So it says, within a few weeks, the Great White Plague had taken the life of 25-year-old Melly. That's his older brother. It's hard to imagine the heartbreak in the Bell household. For 23-year-old Alex, the sorrow were intense. His home felt like a morgue. So they said, hey, we're going to get out of the city. They're going to move to what is referred to as the backwoods of Canada.

Starting point is 00:09:49 And so now Alex is not going to move to what is referred to as the backwoods of canada and so now alex is not going to have to work and this is where he starts taking his his interest in electric communications what he calls it and he starts doing his early experiments before that he leaves a note to himself that i think really demonstrates his personality says a man's own judgment should be the final appeal in all that relates to himself. Many men do this or that because someone else thought it right. So essentially, Alex is telling us, I'm going to think through things, diverse principles, not reason just by analogy, not because other people told me to do so. And then I'm going to live my life with the results of my conclusions. So before I get to his experiments i think it's important to to give you a context into which at the time that uh that alex is a young man the time

Starting point is 00:10:32 in history and i think there's analogy uh to bell's time and the time that we're currently living to as well so it says the mid 19th century was a wonderful time to be alive for a young man with a quick brain and endless curiosity. Today, we can understand the technological revolution of Bell's day only if we compare it with the impact that microprocessors have had on our own lives. The entrepreneurial spirit thrived in North America. It soon appeared as though every young go-getter had a blueprint for a new gadget in his back pocket. Okay, so he's in Canada, he's reading, he's thinking, he's doing his experiments, and let's just go right to it. So it says, it's hardly surprising that the electrical telegraph caught Alex's imagination, given his lifelong interest in communications. Temporarily freed from the obligation to earn his living, he allowed his mind to grapple with the

Starting point is 00:11:26 complexity of telegraph technology. He had returned to the book, it's always a book, isn't it? He returned to a book that he had absorbed. It's called On the Sensations of Tone, and it was written by this guy named Helmholtz. A single issue now preoccupied him. Could Helmholtz's theories on the nature of sound have any application for the electric telegraph? So this is probably an insight into Bell's greatest talent. He's not classically trained. He had a way to connect. He had a very powerful imagination. And what his breakthrough was, is connecting ideas and

Starting point is 00:12:06 unrelated fields and combining them to a new insight. And that's exactly how he came up with the telephone. In particular, could they solve a puzzle with which amateur engineers all over the United States were grappling? Nearly 30 years after its first commercial application, the telegraph system was still limited to sending one message at a time. The race was on to increase its capacity. And Alex was determined to join this race. So that is how that's the very beginning of what he's going to stumble into of the invention of the telephone. In 18, so now he's going to, Samuel Morse is mentioned over and over again in this book, just like Alexander Graham Bell is mentioned over and over again in the books on Edwin Land. And just like Edwin Land is mentioned over and

Starting point is 00:12:48 over again in the books on Steve Jobs. It's very important. I know I repeat this a lot, but this is so important because it just speaks to this instinctual nature that we have to want to learn from the life stories of other people, collect that knowledge and then push it down the generations. And I find it, frankly, very, very inspiring. In 1844, Samuel Morse had catapulted the world into a new era where he vastly accelerated the speed of communications. Alexander Graham Bell would invent something far more sophisticated. The young Scotsman would make instant communication accessible to everybody

Starting point is 00:13:21 and change the world forever. Now, he's doing all these experiments in Canada, and he also needs a—he eventually can change the world forever. Now he's doing all these experiments in Canada and he also needs a, he eventually can't stay unemployed forever. So he gets a job in Boston and I'm going to read this section to you. There's a lot that's taking place on this page. I'm going to give you my synopsis beforehand. So we see aspects of his personality that I feel never change. One, he takes his work very, very seriously. And two, he will not back down from doing what he wants to do. So he's teaching the deaf just like his father did. And they have a disagreement on the ways to do that. And this is very important to

Starting point is 00:13:56 understand. This was something that really surprised me. That's how Alexander Graham Bell, his passion in life was teaching the deaf, not inventing the telephone, although for a few short years, he was completely consumed by that. But even after that, let's say when he's 35 or thereabouts, for the rest of his 40 years in life, he never messes with the telephone again. He just lets, once the company's successful, once the invention's out there, once there's hundreds of thousands of telephones in the United States at the time, he goes on to inventing all kinds of other things. But the one thing that never leaves him is this passion for helping the deaf. So it says, for Alex, rescuing the hearing impaired was an end in and of itself. The

Starting point is 00:14:36 disagreement between father and son created a rift between them, a rift that widened as Alex refused to be cowed. Alex was good at what he was doing. And as much as he loved his father, he was not going to be bullied from a distance into abandoning his plan. So they're just having a disagreement on what method is best to achieve that end. Okay. As a young teacher, Alex was, as a young male teacher, Alex was a rarity in the New England school system. He found himself in high demand. Offers of employment reached him from all over the Northeast. So he's like, do I want to move away from Boston? Do I want to take this opportunity? And this is how he makes a decision on where he wants to be,

Starting point is 00:15:13 which is very fascinating. He decided he wanted to settle in Boston and establish himself as a teacher of the deaf there. He adopted the city's own view of itself. Though Washington is the political center he acknowledged Though Washington is the political center, center, he acknowledged Boston is the intellectual center of the States. And he wanted to stay connected to the intellectual center so he could pursue his scientific interests. So at this time, Alex is 26 years old. I want to give you an insight into what a typical day of a 26 year old Alexander Graham Bell was, was like he's his day job is as a professor, right? So it says George Sanders' grandmother offered Alex free room and board living in their home.

Starting point is 00:15:54 That was an 18-mile train ride from Boston in exchange for continuing George's education. Okay, so George Sanders is this six-year-old little boy. So in addition to working at a school and being a professor, he had a side job, side business rather, of private tutoring, one-on-one tutoring. This is actually how he's going to meet his wife and his future business partner. And so he's starting to teach this little boy. The little boy warms up. Alex was beloved by his students because he had such a passion for what he was teaching, right? And so he's like, okay, his grandma's like, why don't you just stay here? You don't have a lot of money. You can teach George. But this is how extreme his schedule was.

Starting point is 00:16:33 Alex gives the six-year-old his morning assignments before he caught the train into Boston. Then he works his day jobs, right? Works his day job all day. In the evenings, Alex walks back home from the train station as soon as the child saw his teacher so his his his george is so obsessed with alex that he'd sit by the window and wait to see alex walking home right um as soon as the child saw his teacher his eyes would light up after a little more instruction uh george would go to bed and alex would turn his attention to his experiments one day george stays up late goes goes into where Alex's room is, and he describes later on what he saw. I found the floor, the chairs, the table, and even the dresser covered with wires, batteries, coils, cigar boxes,

Starting point is 00:17:15 and an indescribable mass of miscellaneous equipment. So he works all night as long as he can, passes out, does the same thing over and over again. So by the time he's 27, he's completely obsessed with his experiments, and he's competing head-to-head with Elijah Gray and Thomas Edison, and he's exhausted. So he says he filled his notebook after notebook with sketches of harmonic telegraph devices. The early names of some of these products are hilarious. He read in the New York Times and heard from colleagues that other inventors were on the same track as he was. A professional electrician inventor named Elijah Gray had successfully transmitted music over telegraph wires.

Starting point is 00:18:01 In New Jersey, Thomas Edison was already bragging that he was close to introducing the quadruplex telegraph, which would basically send four messages at a time over telegraph lines. The competition unnerved Alex, and once again, his health began to suffer. He described himself that he was quite sick, that I've overworked myself. His obsession with telegraphy now overshadowed his commitment to deaf education. So when school is not in session, he leaves Boston every year and he goes back to the backwoods of Canada where his parents are still living. And this is where he experiences his eureka moment. And so it says he was struck by the way that the sound vibrations acting on a tiny membrane could move relatively heavy bones. So he's talking about he built um this this model of the human ear and he's he's deriving insights from

Starting point is 00:18:48 that model that he's going to apply to his invention um alex strolled out of the house towards the bluff overlooking the grand river a large tree had blown down there creating a natural and completely private belvedere which alex had dubbed his dreaming place so he's in the middle of nowhere it's complete silence and he's just left to his own thoughts, right? Far from the hustle of Boston and the pressure of competition from other eager inventors, he mulled over everything he discovered about sound. Alex now understood that sound waves travel through the air

Starting point is 00:19:16 in the same way that energy moves through the coils of a spring when a section of the spring is compressed and released. He now began to wonder whether electric currents could be made to mimic a sound pattern of compressions and refractions. If they could, any sound could be transmitted electrically. Alex had understood how sound was produced in the human larynx ever since he and his father had built their speaking machine all those years ago. And they were doing it to see if they could help teach deaf people.

Starting point is 00:19:47 So it wasn't even related to his invention. Now he understood how sound was received in the human ear. So he understands how it's produced and received. The next step would be to reproduce the action of the ear membrane and design an instrument to translate the vibrations into sounds. Suddenly, the idea struck him that it might be possible to create an undulating electric current that could carry sound along a telegraph wire in the same way that the air carried sound waves from the speaker to the hearer. The telephone receiver pressed to the

Starting point is 00:20:17 human ear could act like an electrical mouth. What an interesting way to think about a telephone. Current flowing through an electromagnetic, to an electromagnet, would cause the receiver's membrane to vibrate. The vibrations, reasoned Alex, would then hit the listener's eardrum, making it vibrate too. The listener's ear would interpret these vibrations

Starting point is 00:20:39 as the sound spoken by that person on the other end of the wire. This was the eureka moment for Alexander Graham Bell, his flash of genius. In his dreaming place overlooking the swirling waters of the Grand River, he had grasped the principle on which the telephone would operate. This extraordinary leap of imagination is what put Alex ahead of a pack of inventors scrambling to advance the technology of communication. No one else knew enough about the human ear. He's talking about they didn't have his experience in teaching. His imaginative breakthrough is also what makes

Starting point is 00:21:15 Alexander Graham Bell the quintessential inventor of the 19th century, the era when an untrained individual working alone could dream up such a crucial scientific advance. Okay, I'm going to fast forward. He's still doing these experiments. He has no business experience. He has no money. He doesn't know what to do or how to do it. And in a rare twist, lucky twist of fate, he meets the person that has all the skills that he does not.

Starting point is 00:21:41 So Alex at the time is still doing private tutoring, right? And one of his students is a 15-year-old named Mabel, Mabel Hubbard. And that's going to be the person he's going to marry, I think about like five years from now. So he's invited to go to dinner at the home of his student, right? The dad, her father is a patent attorney and currently founder. He started a company to take on Western Union's telegraph monopoly. So as far as the United States is concerned, many people feel the first American truly global company was actually Western Union. It definitely had a monopoly at the time. And so what we're going to learn here is each person, Alex and Mabel's father, had what the other one was missing. So it says Alex could not resist demonstrating one of his party tricks to his host.

Starting point is 00:22:32 Did they know that he asked that the strings of a piano would repeat a note sung into them? I didn't know this either. He lifted the lid of Hubbard's piano and in a resonant baritone sang into the strings. The strings began to vibrate and to echo Alex's note. This is him in his natural role as teacher. Alex explained to his host that the piano would respond to a telegraphic impulse having the same frequency. Gardner Hubbard, that's going to be his future partner. And maybe the person outside of Alex that's most responsible for the company's success. He's the one running it.

Starting point is 00:23:12 So he's an extremely formidable individual. I would say he has much more innate entrepreneurial skills than Alex does. So it says, Gardner Hubbard began to get very interested. Did this phenomenon had any value for communication? Alex gave an abrupt laugh as he blurted out his theory. The phenomenon should mean that a single telegraph wire could carry several messages at once. If they were all vibrating at a different frequency. Inventor and Yankee entrepreneur had found one another. Alex was unaware that Mabel's father was on the hunt for a multiple telegraph device. Gardner Hubbard had no idea that his daughter's teacher spent his nights crouched over a table covered with electromagnets and lengths of wire. Alex had the ideas that Hubbard needed.

Starting point is 00:24:06 Hubbard had the access to capital to finance them. Gardner was well aware of the exhaustive and competitive process involved in patent applications. He made a vital suggestion to Alex. Whenever you recall any fact connected with your invention, jot it down on paper, as time will be essential to us. And the more things actually performed by you at an earlier date, the better for our case. Remember, he had a huge background as a patent attorney before he was an entrepreneur. You must not

Starting point is 00:24:34 neglect an instant in your work so that we may file the application for a patent as soon as possible. Alex loved experimentation. He loved invention. He hated paperwork. If it was not for Gardner Hubbard, he would have never won what many people claim to be the single most valuable patent in U.S. history. So now it's go time. We see a lot in this section. One, confidence. He has a lot of confidence in his ability. He's willing to work and he's smart enough to know that it's go time. I love this section. I almost made it at the beginning of the podcast. So he's writing to his parents. He says, it is a neck and neck race between Mr. Gray and myself who shall complete our apparatus first. He has the advantage over me in being a practical electrician, but I have reason to believe that I am better acquainted with the phenomenon of sound than he is. So I have the advantage there. The very opposition seems to nerve me to work and I

Starting point is 00:25:26 feel with the faculties I have now, I may succeed. I shall be seriously ill should I fail in this now and I'm so thoroughly wrought up. The telegraph race consumed him. So through his association with Gardner Hubbard, he's able to get some money to hire assistants and to really push this thing forward. The first person he hires winds up being the most important assistant he ever has. His name is Thomas Watson. He's going to be the one that Alex calls on the very first telephone call. And what's interesting, Thomas Watson lived a remarkable life. I looked for a biography on him. I couldn't find one. He winds up founding a company that later gets bought by Bethlehem Steel. He just has a very interesting life. I looked for a biography on him. I couldn't find one. He winds up founding a company that

Starting point is 00:26:05 later gets bought by Bethlehem Steel. He just has a very interesting life. But we get a lot of insights into the life and mind of Alexander Graham Bell from Thomas Watson. So it says, Thomas began to appreciate that Alex was very different from the other customers he had met. So he's very similar to how Henry Ford sought out Charles Sorensen when I did that book, My 40 Years of Ford. Sorensen when I did that book, My 40 Years a Ford. Sorensen was very gifted in making models or essentially translating the ideas in Henry Ford's head into something they could look and touch. Thomas Watson plays the same role for Alexander Graham Bell. So it says, no finer influence than Mr. Bell ever came into my life, he wrote.

Starting point is 00:26:41 The books he carried in his bag lifted my reading to a higher plane. He introduced me to such people as Tyndale, Hemholtz, Huxley, and other scientists. Alex was thrilled to find someone who had the manual dexterity he himself lacked and who could quietly and accurately translate his scribbled sketches into neat constructions. His head, recalled Watson, seemed to be a teeming beehive out of which he would often let loose one of his favorite bees for my inspection. That's an analogy for ideas, obviously.

Starting point is 00:27:14 A dozen young and energetic workmen would have been needed to mechanize all of his buzzing ideas. I want to also reference a very important time in Henry Ford's life, where he's, remember at the time, almost all cars are electric, some are steam, very few had, there was no internal combustion engine. So Henry Ford makes the early prototype, he winds up meeting his hero, Thomas Edison. And he's able to explain to Edison what he's working

Starting point is 00:27:40 on. And he gets these words of encouragement. Edison's like, I think you're on the right path. Keep going. Same exact thing happens in Alexander Graham Bell's life. He gets wise words of advice from an older, wiser person. So it says Dr. Joseph Henry had been playing around with electricity for half a century. Alex was eager to show his telegraph equipment and explain his ideas to this venerable old warrior. He was an imposing figure with unnervingly direct gaze and a clipped manner of speech. The 78-year-old physicist listened silently as the young inventor explained his approach to telegraphy. I felt so much encouraged by his interest, Alex later wrote, that I determined to ask his advice about the apparatus I had designed for the transmission of human voice by telegraph.

Starting point is 00:28:27 He told the eager young inventor that his idea was the germ of a great invention, and he gruffly advised him to keep working at it. A huge grin spread over Alex's face, but then he remembered his own limitations. Since he lacked the necessary electrical knowledge he asked dr henry should he allow others to work out the commercial application of his idea this is a very important part memories of his own career must have sprung to the elderly scientist's mind although henry had been the first person to to convert magnetism into electricity it was

Starting point is 00:29:04 british scientist michael Faraday who had earned the credit for it because he was the first to publish his results. 44 years later, Dr. Henry didn't pause for a minute. If this young Scotsman was going to get the commercial payoff from his invention, he simply had to acquire an understanding of electricity. Get it, he barked at the 28-year-old. I cannot tell you how much these two words had encouraged me. So that reminds me, I think back to one of my favorite parts of the book Creativity Inc. written by the co-founder of Pixar, Ed Catmull, and he talks about as a child, his understanding of, hey, the United States and Soviet Union are in a race to space.

Starting point is 00:29:49 The Soviet Union wins the first battle by getting Sputnik in there. And he says the idea, he's like, my impression of the response from the leadership in America at that time in history was, that's fine. We'll just get smarter. And they did. This is exactly what Dr. Henry is telling him. Oh, you don't have those skills now? You don't have the knowledge now? Then go get it. But you're not going to give up. I got to start recording these things standing up so I can jump up and down because that section fires me up. Okay. The

Starting point is 00:30:13 stress of increasing debt and growing discouragement soon resulted in headaches and sleepless nights. This is so important. Most of the highlights I'm going to focus on today, we're going to see is just struggle after struggle. He has an innovation, a breakthrough. Then he goes through a period of struggle. Then he has another positive event that happens and goes through a period of struggle over and over and over again. It's so important for us all to realize there's no such thing as like an overnight success. It's not, oh, I had a great idea and it goes straight up from there. It's like, no, you have to push that thing. You have to force it. You have to persevere. These things do not happen on their own. And the Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the

Starting point is 00:30:49 telephone is a great illustration of that. I am now beginning to realize the cares and anxieties of being an inventor. He wrote home gloomily. He felt himself becoming almost unhinged by the pressure. What is he describing there? He's describing the emotional roller coaster. I just went back. I'm going back in and re-listening to a lot of old Founder episodes. I think in the one on Marc Andreessen, Marc describes the emotional roller coaster of doing anything new, of doing something hard perfectly. And he says, he's telling his partner this time, you know what the best thing about startups is? And his partner says, what? And he says, you only experience two emotions, euphoria and terror. And I find a lack of sleep enhances them both. And I think that is a really succinct way of describing it. Right. You get the highest of highs, but the lowest of lows. And that's exactly what this book that's very present in the story of Alexander Graham Bell for sure. This is another example of him drawing inspiration from the life of Samuel Morse.

Starting point is 00:31:46 He was frustrated by his lack of technical education and electricity. Although he tried to reassure himself with the knowledge that Morse conquered his electrical difficulties. Although he was only a painter and I don't intend to give up either until this is all completed. If you could only pick one of the, like, you have to ask yourself, like, why are some of the, why are almost all of the smartest and most productive people in the world, why do they always encourage you to read biographies? Like, why is that happening over and over again? These

Starting point is 00:32:17 are not silly people, right? And I think that may be this, yes, you get a lot of ideas, but that right there, you are able to draw inspirations in times when you want to give up by other people not giving up. That paragraph where Alexander Graham Bell is explicitly telling us what he learned from studying the life of Samuel Morse encouraged him not to give up. What was that? What's the value to him? He doesn't have the telephone yet. The value is is incalculable. Um, I went back and took notes on, on the, my favorite book that I've read so far for the podcast, which is the autobiography of James Dyson, because it's, you know, 250 pages, something that very short, very fun, very funny

Starting point is 00:32:55 read. And essentially it's just him telling you, Hey, I was able to invent, to, to, to build this company because I didn't give up. But in that, he talks about people that he admired. And one of them, I'm going to read his biography in the next few weeks. There's actually a vote of what are the 100 greatest Britons of all time. Number one, of course, is going to be Winston Churchill. Number two is this guy named Isambard Kingdom Brunel. This is what James Dyson said about them. He says, Isambard Kingdom Brunel was unable to think small,

Starting point is 00:33:24 and nothing was a barrier to him. The mere fact that something had never been done before presented to Brunel no suggestion that the doing of it was impossible. He was fired by an inner strength and self-belief almost impossible to imagine in this feckless age. I have tried to be as confident in my vision as he was. And at times in my life when I have encountered difficulty and self-doubt, I have tried to be as confident in my vision as he was. And at times in my life when I have encountered difficulty and self-doubt, I have looked to his example to fire me on. What James Dyson is doing there with Isambard, King and Brunel, Alexander Graham Bell is doing with Samuel Morse, Edwin Land did with Bell,

Starting point is 00:33:57 Steve Jobs did with Edwin Land, and there's countless other examples on this podcast. This is so important. This is so important for us to do. I have told myself when people tried to make me modify, going back to Dyson, I have told myself when people tried to make me modify my ideas that the Great Western Railroad could not have worked as anything but the vision of a single man pursued with dogged determination. Is that not a description of what Bell is doing with the telephone? That he was nothing less, that pursued with dogged determination that was nothing less than obsession. Throughout my i will return to brunel and to other designers and engineers

Starting point is 00:34:30 to show how identifying with them and seeing parallels with every stage of my own life enabled me to see my career as a whole and to know that it would all turn out the way it has the example that brunel gave to dys, the fact that he read and studied his life, that effect on James Dyson's life is literally worth billions of dollars in a book that you can pick up for $20. Why would you not do that? That quote that is in Poor Charlie's Almanac, that there is ideas worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book is not hyperbolic. That is a fact. That is truth. All right, let's go. Let's go back to the book. All right. He put tremendous demands on himself, his tendency to work around the clock and to alternate between states of fierce focus on one

Starting point is 00:35:15 goal and an inability to concentrate on anything else suggests a lack of balance in his temperament. For sure, he's a misfit. He was erratic in his habits and intellectually obsessive but it was his unconventional mind that made him a genius he refused to be hemmed in by rules he allowed his intuition to flourish he relied on leaps of imagination backed up by a fascination with the physical sciences to solve to solve the challenges he set for himself i referenced earlier how important the fact that his partner was a former patent attorney. And this patent, which again, many people claim is the most valuable patent that ever exists in U.S. history, was filed within a few hours.

Starting point is 00:35:56 If they filed it a few hours later, it could have very likely went to somebody else. In February 1876, without consulting Alex, he went ahead. This is Gardner Hubbard again. He went ahead and filed on Alex's behalf for a patent on the speaking telegraph. That's what they're calling the telephone at this time. At first, Alex was furious with Hubbard for taking matters into his own hands. But Hubbard's action was crucial. Two hours after Hubbard's call on the U.S. patent office, Elijah Gray filed a caveat.

Starting point is 00:36:24 So a caveat was essentially like a written warning that this is what I'm working on. It's not the same as a patent, but it could lead to a patent. The caveat or warning served notice to other inventors that Gray was working on a transmission of speech by electricity. Another thing to know about Alexander Graham Bell is he had a way to take the ideas, not in their current form, right, and today, but project what could they be if they continually improved on and over long distances of time right so this is very shortly after getting his patent so it says the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid on houses just like water or gas and friends converse with each other without leaving home in 1876 when three quarters of the population of North America spent

Starting point is 00:37:05 their entire lives in isolated rural communities in which they were born, when electric lighting was still a decade away, and when a reliable mail service was regarded as a miracle, most people dismissed his notion as fantasy. So I just want to pull out more things about his personality, because this is over and over again in the book. And I think these traits, although they can be off-putting to some people uh are very helpful and in in trying to accomplish something is very difficult he was stubborn determined independent and uncontrollable um so his partners can't control him he all he wants to do is invent and spend time and improve he doesn't want anything to do with the business or paperwork or anything

Starting point is 00:37:39 but he's essential to that so they have he needs to needs to do that. Um, we have all of us, all of us have our hands full with Alex. Uh, he has not yet sent his report to the Philadelphia Bureau of Rewards. So they go and they do all these demonstrations. It's always like world fairs and these gatherings for people to come and show off what they're inventing at the time. Right. And so Alex wins, but then you have to go home and you like to summarize it and send in paperwork essentially to get the medals, to finalize alex very much like claude shannon once he did that he once he he was satisfied with his own sake um he neglected the the extra work that usually comes after that so they're very they're like you know it'd be very um good for the marketing of a new product

Starting point is 00:38:22 if you could say hey it's won all these awards look at all these other people it's a social proof of their day right so says he has not yet sent in the report to the philadelphia bureau of awards required before the philadelphia exhibition medals could be sent to him and i can't make him do it he says that his brain won't work and he cannot make it alex was distracted because his intellect was so deeply focused on his experiments there is a sort of telephonic undercurrent going in my going on in my mind all the while he wrote more in his procrastination alex hated paperwork even your love he confessed to mabel at this point they're engaged so this is a few years into the future of the story fails to overcome the procrastinating spirit that leads me to put off

Starting point is 00:39:01 to the future to put off to the future, to put off to the future, the accomplishments of every difficult task. So this time they've already successfully demonstrated him and Watson, Thomas Watson have already demonstrated the photograph, the photograph, the telephone. And I love this idea. When he was in Canada, he, Bell made friends with a former Mohawk chief that had emigrated from the United States to Canada. And he taught him the Mohawk war dance. And throughout his entire life, when something went good, he'd bust out into a Mohawk war dance. So that was hilarious. It says within hours, the two men were enjoying their first two-way long-distance conversation.

Starting point is 00:39:42 When Watson got back to their boarding house, they're also living together, in the early hours of the morning, he and Alex were so excited that they took off their jackets, started whooping, and performed the Mohawk war dance together. The next day, their landlord says, if you ever do that again, you're getting kicked out. More on his, I would say his confidence in how important this invention was going to be. He's giving an interview. The reporter noted incredulously, Professor Bell doubts not that he will ultimately be able to chat pleasantly with friends in Europe while sitting comfortably in his Boston home. So he's got the prototype. It's working.

Starting point is 00:40:23 But again, he's not making any money. He goes for like seven years of being essentially very poor. This is's got the prototype. It's working. But again, he's not making any money. He goes for like seven years of being essentially very poor. This is more on the struggle. Now he's writing another letter. A large part of this book talks about how important his choice of spouse was for him because everything that just like his choice in business partners, they had all the skills he lacked. Alex was, you know, very passionate, very either up or down. His wife was very steady. She, she, she kept him grounded. She made sure he did all the work that he didn't want to do. Um, and so he would also, she was also very, uh, he relied on her

Starting point is 00:40:56 for emotional support. So he's writing to her. He says, when will this thing be finished? I'm sick and tired of the multiple nature of my work and the little profit that arises from it. Think about this. He could have given up. This is an invention and the company that makes money on the invention that allows Alex to never work again in his life. He spends the rest of his life just inventing and learning. Right. And he almost gave up making no money. This is I'm depressed. What's happening here? Other men work their five or six hours a day and have their thousands of dollars a year, while I slave from morning to night and night to morning and accomplish nothing but to wear myself out.

Starting point is 00:41:36 I expect that the money will come in just in time for me to leave it to you in my will. How I long for a nice little home of my own, a nice little wife in it attention to some early marketing efforts. They decide, Alex decides, hey, I'm going to give... His father would go travel around and give public lectures on this, this new form of language that his father invented called visible speech. It was trying to help. It's like an alternative to sign language for deaf people. Okay. And so Alex adopts that. He's like, I'm just going to go out and give public lectures and demonstrations and talk from the heart about my invention, which is perfect because people respond to passion. We're human beings,

Starting point is 00:42:22 right? So it says Alex appeared on stage and the audience broke into thunderous applause. Always at his best when teaching, he spoke fluently and easily without notes. He described to his audience not only how his invention worked, but its purpose. The why, right? It was not just an electric toy

Starting point is 00:42:39 that could link two speakers, he insisted. He went on to suggest that within a few years, people in different cities would be able to call each other up and have a chat. This led to a little bit of money, too, because it says, after seven lean years, Alex, who is now 30 years old, could finally dare to imagine a prosperous future. He had decided to charge $200 to any organization that wanted to sponsor one of his lectures.

Starting point is 00:43:05 So this is his primary source of income because it takes a long time before the telephone starts making money. And once it does, a lot of it because they have to win a patent lawsuit. We see another parallel between the life of Alexander Rembell and Edwin Land there. And then once their patents are successfully protected, then the company just takes off. His partner had a really smart idea, though, at the very beginning. And it says Gardner cleverly opted to lease telephones rather than sell them so that he and his partners could maintain control. So this is another smart move in certain circumstances that can build a fortune of a company, right? Don't sell your product.

Starting point is 00:43:44 Lease it. Say, I'm going to send it to you. You can pay me monthly or whatever the term is. I'm going to take care of the maintenance and service on it. This is how Howard Hughes, the senior. Right. Not the famous Howard Hughes. Right. His dad, his dad, I would argue, is a more accomplished and greater entrepreneur than Howard Hughes ever was. He did the same thing. Remember, if you listen to my podcast on Howard Hughes, I did. His dad invented a new drill bit that helped people seeking oil be able to drill in areas that they couldn't access before, right?

Starting point is 00:44:16 And he refused to sell them. He would lease them. So they'd constantly improve the bit. They provide the service for it. They provide the maintenance for it. But you could never buy it. and that has to be one of i i don't know if there's even if anybody has access to this data but i would guess that howard hughes seniors company hughes tool company i think is the name of it who's supply company i can't remember at the

Starting point is 00:44:37 off the top of my head but over the life of its of before it was sold by by his son it has to be one of the most profitable companies in history. So the same thing that Gardner is doing with early telephones, Howard Hughes' father did with drill bits. This section is just a reminder. It is not easy. There absolutely will be times where you want to give up. Thomas Edison had devised a new kind of receiver that did not infringe on Alex's patent and worked better than Bell's model. Edison started selling Edison telephones in England, and Alex grew steadily and steadily more depressed. Business is hateful to me at all times.

Starting point is 00:45:23 As the months in England dragged on and his hopes of cashing in on his invention slipped away, business became even more odious. And we see, fast-forwarding a little bit in the story, more struggle. Here's Alex almost giving up again. Of one thing I am determined, and that is to not waste any more time and money on the telephone. Let others endure the worry, the anxiety and the expense. I will have none of it. A feverish, anxious life like that I have been leading since our marriage would soon change my whole nature. Already it has begun injuring me and I feel myself growing irritable, feverish, and disgusted with life. Think about that. Those last three words, these are coming from the mouth of somebody that made one of history's greatest inventions ever. And he was disgusted with life that's how hard this was there the company that alex and his partner

Starting point is 00:46:12 start it'd be dead if they don't defeat western union western union says i don't give a shit about your patents i'm going to violate all over them remember they they were printing money i think western union was doing like 40 million in revenue, I think $3 million in profit. And this is 1900, maybe? I mean, this is an outstanding amount of money. And they were led by William Orton, who was an absolute savage. Oh, I'm also I was also wrong. This is not 1900 yet. We're still in the 1870s. So even sooner than that. Okay, so it says, Western Union employed all the ruthless tactics of a company bent on monopoly. It cut telephone rates. It was rumored that they'd go around and cut Bell Company's telephone wires. So at this time, Western Union is printing money.

Starting point is 00:46:54 Bell Telephone Company is in a serious cash crunch, and they have to fight this patent litigation against them. Bell Company employees had not been paid for weeks and were lending each other money. And suppliers were all pressing for payments owed to them. The Bell telephone company's future depended on a victory in their lawsuit against Western Union. And it's in this, this litigation. Remember, I did an entire podcast on the, the war between, uh, Kodak and Polaroid. Polaroid won the case.

Starting point is 00:47:23 It was the largest patent infringement judgment ever. It's almost a billion dollars at the time it happened. And the reason they won that is because of Edwin Land. And so this is where, again, the similarities between Alexander Graham Bell and Edwin Land are spooky. It's almost like Edwin Land was him reincarnated. Let me just give you some of these are just my notes. This isn't in the book, but I'll get to it in a minute. Land actually worked. He moved his laboratory into the building where Thomas Watson had received the first phone call from Bell. He used, Edwin Land used the same patent attorneys as Alexander Graham Bell did.

Starting point is 00:48:01 Land was the primary reason that his company won a landmark patent case. Same was for Bell. Both worked for long stretches of a time without interruption. Both thought of themselves as teachers, inventors, and scientists, more so than entrepreneurs, even though I argue that Edwin Land is one of the most important entrepreneurs in history. Their inventions both came after a streak of eureka, like a eureka moment. And then both worked a long time to actually realize that that eureka moment. Both of their new inventions were described by others as toys.

Starting point is 00:48:32 I mean, it goes on and on and on and on. All right. So it says Alex, Alex's majestic bearing, steady gaze and straightforward manner made him a formidable witness. You could say the same thing about Edwin Land. With his almost photographic memory and clear articulation, he radiated an unrivaled authority as methodically as he methodically laid out the sequence of events leading up to his patent submission. His testimony was nearly 100 pages long of the 600 page printed record. The result was the same for Bell as it was for Land. The final out of court deal was an expensive blow to the mighty company, meaning Kodak and Land's case, Western Union and Bell's case. Western Union had to get out of the business just like Kodak did. What a victory for Bell. The shareholders in the Bell telephone company held title to a monopoly on a wildly popular invention.

Starting point is 00:49:16 That sentence is exactly true for Edwin Land. They held monopoly on a wildly uh popular invention i want to i want to draw your attention to this argument that's happening between alexander graham bell and his wife because she's like why aren't you filing he'd make a bunch of inventions not file patents on or not take them to their like explore their commercial commercial viability and so in this exchange we see really what's important to alex uh he went on yes i hold it is one of the highest of all things the increase of knowledge making us more like God it was a strange way for a self-confessed atheist to frame his ambition he had brought he had purchased a new set of the Encyclopedia Britannica and had announced that he

Starting point is 00:49:58 was going to read it from start to finish however reluctant Alex was to exploit his inventions nothing would dampen his impressible urge to explore to discover and to improve so he is trying to his main goal in life is to learn as much as he can and then teach others what he has learned and he says i hold it as one of the highest of all things the increasing of knowledge making us more like god so the founder of intel bob noyce has this fantastic fantastic quote i think of all the time it says knowledge is power knowledge shared is power multiplied this is fast forwarding much in his later life this is him on parenting which i absolutely love he says there's a refreshingly modern ring to alex's attitude to parenthood during an era where where parents regarded themselves first and foremost as figures of

Starting point is 00:50:49 authority it's definitely a description of his dad he believed that play is nature's method of educating a child and that a parent's duty is to aid nature in the development of her plan so he was very busy during that. He had two daughters, very busy when they were kids. But when he's older, he was a fantastic grandfather. And his grandchildren loved him because he would stimulate them intellectually. Whether it's on a walk, they wind up, he spends the last 35 years of his life mainly in seclusion, not reclusive.

Starting point is 00:51:24 That's not how I would describe him. But he moves to the Nova Scotia area, Newfoundland area in Canada. I think it's a British colony at the time, though, that he's there. And he just spends time in nature. He's running experiments with a few assistants, stuff like that. But his grandchildren would visit him every summer. And he lit up their mind. He got them excited about how all the wonderful things in the world that you can learn.

Starting point is 00:51:51 And so that idea plays nature's method of educating a child and a parent's duties to aid nature in the development of her plan. I love that. Just a few more things in this section. So when he's not in Nova Scotia, that area, his family lives in Washington. And his house catches fire. And then it catches fire in the winter. So when they're putting it out, the water turns into ice. And his study is ruined. So we actually learn more.

Starting point is 00:52:21 I want to pull out some things from this section because we learn a lot more about bell's eccentric nature and it's from this secretary of his this guy that winds up working for him for like 30 years his name's charles thompson so charles is going to give us a lot of insights into the person who bell was and this is bell later in his life so he says um alex's study however was a mess the housekeeper had hired some men from a nearby rooming house to clear up the debris. Among them was a tall, good-looking African-American from Virginia, 18-year-old Charles Thompson, whom she had put in charge of the study because he could read and write. Half a century later, Thompson remembered this as a turning point in his life. So he's in there doing, trying to clean up. He says, the door to the study was pushed open. I turned around to see who had entered. I faced a

Starting point is 00:53:09 tall, heavily built man with black hair and black beard mixed with gray. Aha, here you are. Is this Charles? Yes, sir. Well, Charles, I am Mr. Bell. How are you? Extending his hand with a genial smile. He shook my hand as if he had known me for years to a young man accustomed to being treated as a second class citizen. This courtesy was extraordinary. Now, this direct quote from Charles. I loved Mr. Bell from from that moment. And if I had left that house that day and never seen him again, I never would have forgotten that handshake it electrified my whole being the young man uh so he talks about uh he's he's saying to charles hey if you if you see anything in here that has any kind of writing anything please don't throw it away these are my most important thoughts are in my room the room so it says the young man carried out these

Starting point is 00:54:00 instructions so conscientiously that alex decided to employ him permanently. Charles would remain with the Bells for the next 35 years. Alex would always, excuse me, and Charles would always greet his employer with the same words that Alex uses a telephone greeting. So instead of saying hello, he'd say, hoi hoi. uh charles most significant contribution to the household was that he lifted from mabel's shoulders the full weight of dealing with her husband's eccentricities and and his obsessive observance of rituals so let's get some insight here this is why i'm including this section he never liked for anyone to knock on his door before entering the room if he was following a train of thought and there was a tap at his door, his attention being diverted to the noise,

Starting point is 00:54:48 he very often lost the thread for days and would not be able to pick it up again. So this is what Edwin Land and Alexander Gabriel preached over and over again. Long periods of uninterrupted concentration brings about in you things that you didn't even know were possible. Alex once told Charles,

Starting point is 00:55:03 thoughts, my dear sir, are like the precious moments that fly past. Once gone, they can never be thought again. Caught again, sorry. Can never be caught again. Charles often saw his employer work for up to 22 hours without sleep, ignoring his wife's request

Starting point is 00:55:18 that he join her and the guests for dinner. Any disturbance was such anathema to the telephone inventor that he never had a telephone installed in his own study. His obsession with his routine made him maddening to live with. So for the rest of Alex's life, he never stopped being an inventor. He tried to invent human-powered flight before the Wright brothers. He invented hydrofoils, which is a technology used for boats that was left kind of undiscovered for 50 years and then picked up 50 years after Alex's death. He tried to find new ways to breed sheep. He just had all kinds of

Starting point is 00:55:56 weird experiments and stuff. He still would wind up being awarded a few patents, but he never had another commercially viable invention like he did with the telephone. The telephone generated enough wealth that it freed him from having to do that. And he just followed his intellectual curiosity and he just loved to experiment and to learn. And the personality traits we saw in a young Alex never left him. So the book goes on. This is a rather large book. It's almost 500 pages. So it goes on into great detail about that. But I want to fast forward to his death. Because one thing that I'm learning from reading all these biographies, one of the unexpected benefits of reading biographies, I would say, is going to sound a little bit weird. And it's a reminder of the fate. It's a constant. For me, it's a weekly reminder of the fate that we all share. And that is death.

Starting point is 00:56:49 And I think I don't have the communication skills to express what I mean, but Steve Jobs did. So this quote by Steve Jobs will explain better than I ever could what I mean about this. And there is a real value in this. So he says, remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment of failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.

Starting point is 00:57:35 There is no reason to follow your heart. So I'm going to read this section to you. This is the death of Alexander Graham Bell. And I found myself after, not only like a deep emotional experience that you have when you spend hours and hours and hours studying somebody's life, you feel like you know them and then it ends. But I went back and I looked at different pictures from different times in Alexander Graham Bell and I tried to find him at the same age I am now that he was.

Starting point is 00:58:00 And at the time he's married, he's got two kids. I just stared at his face for a very long time because all the stuff that was important to him, the same impulses that were important to Alexander and Rebel are the same ones we share. We all want to be loved. We all want to have family and friends and have close personal relationships. We want to succeed in our work. We want to enjoy our brief time that we have on the planet. Everybody shares this.

Starting point is 00:58:25 And somewhere along the line, a lot of us lose that thread, that understanding that this is an experience and that experience ends. So let's make the most of this experience. The end came fast, too fast for anybody to be ready. By the next day, Alex laid breathing heavily. On August 1st, he opened his eyes and called for his secretary to take dictation. Don't hurry, she said, and the old man smiled. I have to, he replied. Speaking was a supreme effort. Alexander Graham Bell paused, closed his eyes, winced. He could manage no more.

Starting point is 00:59:09 Daisy found herself standing at her father's bedside, watching him struggle for breath. Daddy is still here, she wrote to her sister, but I have the strange feeling that his spirit is struggling to get loose and is only held to his body by slender cords. That night, his family clustered around Alex's bed. Alex was breathing heavily, lapsing in and out of consciousness. They held a flashlight on the dying man's face so that his wife could watch his lips. Now and again, Alex squeezed Mabel's hand, occasionally opening his eyes and smiling at her.

Starting point is 00:59:47 She was by her husband's side, holding his hand. As she watched Alex's life ebb away, she was suddenly suffused with overwhelming grief. Don't leave me, she implored, as tears sprang to her eyes. Alex was beyond speech, but he managed to spell out NO into her palm. She held his wrist, willing the pulse to continue, yet she could feel his fingers still fluttering weakly as he tried to communicate.

Starting point is 01:00:19 Then the fingers were quiet, and he was gone. Mabel bowed her head as she took in the enormity of her loss. The man around whom her whole life had revolved since she was 17 was no longer there. The man who had conquered solitude and brought sound out of silence was now silent himself. That's 138 books down, 1,000 to go. There's a link in the show notes. If you buy the book using that link, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time.

Starting point is 01:00:53 And I'll talk to you again soon.

Your Ad Here

Founders - #138 Alexander Graham Bell

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.