Edison vs Bell

Who were Edison and Bell?

Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh on 3 March 1847. His father invented Visible Speech, a system of symbols for teaching speech, and his mother was deaf. He taught deaf students, emigrated to Canada in 1870 and to Boston in 1871, and experimented at night with sending several telegraph messages down one wire. That work led to the telephone. His patent, No. 174,465, was granted on 7 March 1876. He later founded the Volta Laboratory in Washington, worked on aeronautics and hydrofoils in Nova Scotia, and died there on 2 August 1922.

Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, on 11 February 1847, a few weeks before Bell. He had little schooling, worked as a telegraph operator, and was hard of hearing from boyhood. His improved telegraphs paid for a laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, opened in 1876, the first organised industrial research lab. There he invented the phonograph (1877), developed a practical incandescent lamp (1879) and an electric power system (Pearl Street station, New York, 1882). He moved to a larger lab at West Orange in 1887, held 1,093 US patents, and died on 18 October 1931.

Edison vs Bell: comparison table

The telephone: Bell's patent, Edison's transmitter

Bell filed his patent on 14 February 1876, the same day Elisha Gray filed a caveat (a notice of an invention in progress) for a similar idea. Bell's patent was granted on 7 March. Three days later, according to his laboratory notebook, he spoke the first clear sentence to his assistant Thomas Watson: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you” (punctuation simplified from the notebook). He showed the telephone at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in June 1876.

Bell's early telephone was faint. Western Union, the telegraph giant, hired Edison to make a better one. In 1877 he developed a transmitter using a button of compressed carbon, whose resistance changes with pressure from the voice. It made speech much louder and clearer. Western Union set up its own telephone company, the Bell company sued, and in November 1879 they settled: Western Union left the telephone business and handed its telephone patents, Edison's included, to the Bell company. Carbon transmitters were used in telephones for about a century.

The phonograph and the graphophone

Edison's phonograph grew out of telephone and telegraph work. In 1877 he was trying to record telegraph messages and wondered whether a needle attached to a vibrating telephone diaphragm could cut a record of the voice. In December 1877 his machinist John Kruesi built the first phonograph: a cylinder wrapped in tinfoil, turned by hand. Edison shouted “Mary had a little lamb” into it and it played back. The patent was granted on 19 February 1878. In the North American Review in June 1878 he listed uses he foresaw: dictation, books for blind people, music, family records and teaching speech.

Tinfoil wore out after a few playings, and Edison turned to electric light. Bell took the idea further. In 1880 France awarded him the Volta Prize, worth 50,000 francs, for the telephone, and he used it to found the Volta Laboratory in Washington with his cousin Chichester Bell and the instrument maker Charles Sumner Tainter. They replaced tinfoil with wax-coated cardboard cylinders and cut a groove instead of pressing a dent, which gave clearer and longer-lasting sound. They called it the graphophone and patented it in 1886. A wax disc recorded at the Volta Lab on 15 April 1885 carries Bell's own voice; it was identified and played by the Smithsonian and partners in 2013.

Edison answered with an improved phonograph using solid wax cylinders in 1887 and 1888. In 1888 the businessman Jesse Lippincott bought the rights to both machines to form the North American Phonograph Company. The recording industry grew out of this contest, and soon from Emile Berliner's flat-disc gramophone too.

Where they agreed and where they differed

Agreed: both believed invention should be practical and earn money, both founded laboratories with paid assistants, both depended on investors (Western Union and J. P. Morgan for Edison; Bell's father-in-law Gardiner Hubbard for Bell), and both fought long patent battles. Both were interested in sound and hearing: Edison was hard of hearing for most of his life, and Bell's whole career came from teaching the deaf.

Differed: Edison was a businessman inventor who wanted products and markets, from light bulbs to cement and film. Bell was a scientist teacher who cared most about speech and deafness, and after the telephone made him rich, he spent money on research for its own sake, including the journal Science, which he helped fund in the 1880s, and the National Geographic Society, of which he was president.

Both have records that need honest treatment. Bell argued in 1883 that deaf people should not marry one another and campaigned against sign language in schools; the Deaf community still regards his influence as harmful. Edison's company fought alternating current with a public campaign that included electrocuting animals; his former employee Nikola Tesla's AC system, backed by George Westinghouse, won. The Yuga debate the war of currents is set in 1888.

Did Edison and Bell work together?

No. They competed. Their contact ran mainly through companies, patents and courtrooms: Edison improved Bell's telephone for a rival company, and Bell's lab improved Edison's phonograph for a rival product. Neither left an important record of friendship or of a personal quarrel. Each made the other's best-known invention work better.

Questions to ask Edison and Bell

1. Bell: what were you trying to invent when you found the telephone?
2. Bell: how do you answer people who say Elisha Gray deserved the credit?
3. Bell: why did you use the Volta Prize money on sound recording?
4. Bell: why did you oppose sign language, and what did your deaf wife and mother think?
5. Edison: how did your telephone work lead you to the phonograph?
6. Edison: what did you think when Bell's lab improved your phonograph?
7. Edison: why did you think the phonograph would be used mostly for dictation?
8. Both: is invention more about one idea or about making it work?

Yuga lets you ask both by voice: Edison and Bell are AI recreations built from their papers and the historical record. They can be wrong, and credit for inventions is often disputed, so check claims against the patents and the papers at the Library of Congress and Rutgers. See did Edison invent the light bulb.

Which one for your project?

Choose Bell for a project on communication, deaf history (with its hard questions), or how a teacher became an inventor. Choose Edison for a project on the research lab as an invention, electric light and power, recorded sound, or invention as business. Choose both for a project on how rival inventors improve each other's work, and use our list of famous inventors and inventions for context.