A Connected World – Owing to a Talking Dog, Cadaver Ears
As unlikely a combination as can be, it’s the very things mentioned in the title that have contributed to the connectivity that we today take for granted.
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Updated November 2026. This was first published on 22 November 2022. The idea is the same. Any number below is what the original piece said then. It is not a new count.
Key takeaways
- As unlikely a combination as can be, it’s the very things mentioned in the title that have contributed to the connectivity that we today take for granted.
- Trouve the Terrier, a cadaver ear sent by post and an inspirational moment that saw the use of a bowl of water laced with acid all find themselves the main props of how this inventor created the telephone.
- Alexander Graham Bell’s invention - the telephone - has led to an industry that transformed the world.
As unlikely a combination as can be, it’s the very things mentioned in the title that have contributed to the connectivity that we today take for granted. Trouve the Terrier, a cadaver ear sent by post and an inspirational moment that saw the use of a bowl of water laced with acid all find themselves the main props of how this inventor created the telephone.
Alexander Graham Bell’s invention - the telephone - has led to an industry that transformed the world.
But little do people know that Bell was never interested in creating a telephone for the sake of connecting everyone. It just happened to be a series of steps, some to gain a stable income and others to foster his dream that eventually led to this idea. He was actually obsessed with a much bigger agenda – of allowing the deaf to visualise speech. The part he played in that area, though, has been the focus of much heated debate, with his intentions being considered misguided by many.
Whatever may be the case, his reluctant ingenuity still yielded an innovation that has resulted in our way of life.
And so the story begins – #
From a young age, Bell had been involved in his father, Melville’s, work. A prominent elocutionist, Melville’s life revolved around designing a universal phonetic alphabet, one that would be able to document any sound in any language. In essence, he was creating a versatile way of reading so that anybody could pick up a book in a different language and still be able to read it. Bell’s father called his alphabet ‘Visible Speech’ because it acted as an instructional guide on how to shape the mouth into different sounds.
While Melville was working at fueling his son’s interest in speech, his deaf mother, Eliza’s gentler influence, shaped her son’s attention to sensory detail.
As Katie Booth, the author of the “Invention of Miracles”, wrote in her book.
From his father, he (Bell) knew which parts of the mouth and throat controlled which sounds, how to read those sounds from an obscure alphabet, and how to give the speech the power to shock, to astound. From watching his mother lean her ear toward the piano as she played, he understood how to listen very closely to the tiniest shades of sound. From holding his mouth close to her ear and manipulating his own speech so that she could hear it, he began to believe that the transfer of information from his ears to her mind was a transfer of power, too. And from the way people respected her when she used her own voice, he understood how much power speech could contain and confer—not just before a captive audience but also in life.
Trouve The Family Dog #
In 1867, Bell busied himself with learning the nuances of human speech. His musically trained ears could pick up sound based on the vibrations in the air. Putting much of his experiments to work, Bell tried to teach his family dog, Trouve, to talk. Sometimes by depressing the hollow of the lower jaw and at others by moving the muzzle in particular ways, Bell eventually got his dog to say, “How are you, Grandma”.
A year later, he started to teach a small group of deaf children. It’s here that Bell discovered his life-long passion. Using his father’s Visible Speech and his talent with sound, he taught deaf children to speak simple phrases within a few weeks. More than that, he taught them the meaning of the sounds their mouths were making. The enthusiasm of his class and the laughter and joy he beheld within them changed him, and Bell now had a new path laid before him, one where he knew he could make his ‘contribution’ to the world.
Cadaver Ears and some more Bizarre Episodes #
By 1874, Bell joined the faculty of Boston University as the ‘professor of the mechanism of speech”, once again training deaf students in ‘oralism’ which is the system of teaching deaf people to communicate using speech and lip-reading rather than sign language. While he was good at what he did, he also started feeling that the success of oralism was largely dependent on him and his technique. He needed a more universal tool to help people who couldn’t hear.
While visiting MIT one day, Bell came across a unique contraption, the phonautograph. The device could transcribe speech into jagged lines that resembled sound waves. Could he teach the deaf to hear speech through their eyes?
He started to work on his own version of a phonautograph, a lip-reading machine of sorts. The more he tinkered with the device, the more the realisation dawned - the whole mechanism was startlingly similar to a human ear.
This saw him tapping into Dr Clarence Blake, an aurist who suggested that perhaps a pair of actual human ears were in order for his Bell’s experiments. His work with electrical impulses and his newfound grasp of ‘peoples aural abilities’ thanks to the cadaver ears gave birth to a novel idea.
The telegraph, by then, had been a phenomenally successful communication system for about 30 years. Using electrical currents, operators on one end would tap Morse code that would transmit electrical impulses through a wire. On the other end, the pattern would replay itself, and transcribers would translate the series of dots and dashes to alphabetic letters. The telegraph had just one limitation – it could only send one message at a time, resulting in many overhead wires running along the length and breadth of the city, which nearly choked out the sun.
Bell, who had a good understanding of sound and music, saw an opportunity to revolutionise the telegraph; Katie Booth writes.
His theory hinged on sympathetic vibrations… In the beginning, he saw how these vibrations could carry a sound from a speaker’s mouth to a deaf person’s sight. He mused that these vibrations could also carry telegraphic messages, tones in a pattern of short and long pulses…. A telegraph that could carry multiple messages at once wouldn’t help the deaf, not directly. But if it worked it could help secure Bell the income to keep at the work he had come to care about the most.
A bowl of acid #
By 1874, Bell started work on his concept with the backing of two investors. But, while Bell was a visionary, he was not an inventor. And so, he sought help from a young apprentice at an electrical workshop, Thomas Watson. Together with Watson, Bell, created a working model of the harmonic telegraph, which could initially send up to two simultaneous messages. It was a far cry from the 8-10 messages his investors were looking for. nonetheless, a patent was filed under his name on March 1875.
Around the same time, Bell met with Joseph Henry, the director of the Smithsonian Institution. It was with Henry that Bell shared his dream of transmitting voice using electrical impulses. Henry loved the idea so much that he called it “the germ of a great invention”. Egged on by Henry’s enthusiasm, Bell’s mind was now focussing on a new project.
One day while experimenting with the latest iteration of their harmonic device, Bell, who was waiting in a room with a receiver pressed to his ear while Thomas tried to fix his end of the transmitter, caught a whiff of vibration in the line. He realised he could hear Thomas in the other room, plucking the metal of his receiver.
For Bell, this was a significant discovery. It meant that sound indeed had the power needed to travel along the wires. On June 3 1875, the telephone was ready for testing, but as Thomas later wrote, “A meagre result, A bitter disappointment”.
On July 1 1875, he transmitted the varying pitch of a human voice over a three hundred-foot wire. It was still too weak to be comprehensible. Eventually, life took hold, and work on his invention hit a pause.
But, a few months later, word of his competitor Elisha Gray’s experimental success of a ‘speaking telegraph’ reached him. With this, both Watson and Bell earnestly got to work. In the race to patent the innovation, Bell eventually emerged a winner. But even on March 7, 1876, when the patent was awarded to him, he did not have a working model to show. On March 10, three days later, both Bell and Watson finished another iteration of the telephone’s prototype.
This time around, instead of using plain water that offered the variable resistance to a connected circuit, he laced his water with sulphuric acid (though it’s not entirely clear how he came up with the idea).
Once everything was set up, Thomas went to another room and, in his excitement, held the receiver so tightly to his ear that he detuned it. And it was this folly that resulted in the magical moment a few minutes later as Thomas clearly heard Bell saying over the receiver.
“Mr Watson, come here; I want to see you.”.
And so that’s precisely what Mr Watson did. he ran into Bells room and exclaimed that he had actually heard him. The telephone would rapidly transform the world as Bell intuitively seemed to know. On March 10, 1876, he wrote a letter to his father.
I have constructed a new apparatus operated by the human voice,” Bell wrote. I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem — and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid on to houses just like water or gas — and friends converse with each other without leaving home.
Moving On #
The telephone did take some work post that momentous episode to perfect. within a year and a half, Bell himself publicly demonstrated the worlds first phone call over telegraph wires that spanned 8 miles between two towns in Ontario, Canada. Just two months later, the long-distance reach of telephone technology was expanded to 143 miles.
In 1880, Bell patented the photophone, which applied his telephone principle to transmit words on a beam of light. Now recognised as the first wireless transmission of speech, it wasn’t until a century later that this idea would find widespread use. Today’s high-speed telecommunications finds its origins in the principles of this theory.
Questions and answers #
What is the main point? #
As unlikely a combination as can be, it’s the very things mentioned in the title that have contributed to the connectivity that we today take for granted.
What else did the original piece say? #
Trouve the Terrier, a cadaver ear sent by post and an inspirational moment that saw the use of a bowl of water laced with acid all find themselves the main props of how this inventor created the telephone.