The Bell Homestead National Historic Site, located in Brantford, Ontario, Canada, also known by the name of its principal structure, Melville House, was the first North American home of Professor Alexander Melville Bell and his family, including his last surviving son, scientist Alexander Graham Bell. The younger Bell conducted his earliest experiments in North America there, and later invented the telephone at the Homestead in July 1874. In a 1906 speech to the Brantford Board of Trade, Bell commented on the telephone's invention: "the telephone problem was solved, and it was solved at my father's home".
The approximately 4-hectare (10 acre) site has been largely restored to its appearance when the Bells lived there in the 1870s, and Melville House now serves as a museum to the family and to the invention of the telephone. A large visitor reception centre has also been added adjacent to Melville House.
The Henderson Home building was later added to the Homestead in 1969, being moved there from its original location in downtown Brantford. It was Canada's first telephone company business office, opened in 1877 as a predecessor of the Bell Telephone Company of Canada. After being moved to the Bell Homestead it was converted into an adjunct museum on the development of telephone technology. The Homestead is operated by the Bell Homestead Committee of the City of Brantford.
The Homestead was named a National Historic Site on June 1, 1996, and was listed on the national Register of Historic Places on June 22, 2009. The replacement for a federal commemorative plaque was unveiled the following year by Queen Elizabeth II during the 150th anniversary year celebrations for the birth of Alexander Graham Bell. Melville House has been described as "...this shrine, where lingers the spirit of the great inventor".
History
The Bell Homestead period began with the arrival of the Bell family in the summer of 1870 from their native Scotland, where two of their sons had died of tuberculosis and their middle son, Alexander Graham Bell, was additionally stricken and being consumed by disease. The Bell Homestead complex in the present day consists of several buildings with their own origins. The principal building at the site is Alexander Melville Bell's farmhouse, Melville House, along with its related greenhouse conservatory, outbuildings and fruit orchard. The farmhouse and its farmland were acquired for preservation as a museum in 1909. The Henderson Home, which had served as Canada's first telephone business office in downtown Brantford, was later moved to the site in 1969 and renovated extensively in 1970, to convert it into a separate telephone museum under the principal sponsorship of the county's largest telephone carrier, Bell Canada. As well, a tea house, a visitor reception centre with a mini audio-video theatre and related facilities were also added to the homestead to accommodate visitors and tour groups. The Tutelo migrated to the Six Nations Reserve after their 1753 adoption into the Cayuga. Their longhouse was across the street from the Bell Homestead.
Father and son
Professor Alexander Melville Bell, a Scottish-born British authority on speech and elocution, immigrated to Canada by steamship in July 1870 with his family and daughter-in-law, who had been widowed by the death of Bell's eldest son from tuberculosis in May of that year. The family's youngest son Edward had similarly died of tuberculosis three years earlier, and during their departure from the British Isles their middle son Alexander Graham now appeared to be faltering from the same disease.
Upon landing at Quebec City on 1 August 1870, the Bells transferred to another steamer to Montreal,Gray 2006, p. 21. and then took the Grand Trunk Railway to Paris, Ontario, residing at the parsonage of the Reverend Thomas Philip Henderson. Henderson was a Baptist minister and close family friend who likely went to school with Melville in Scotland, and who had previously invited the Bell family to immigrate to Canada. After a brief stay of only a few days with the Hendersons, the Bell family purchased a homestead of 5 hectares (13 acres) at Tutelo Heights (in the present day called Tutela Heights, named for the First Nations band that had previously settled the area), on the outskirts of Brantford, Ontario, for CA$2,600 (approximately CA$ in current dollars), with $2,100 being paid immediately.Patten & Bell 1926, p. 8. They were likely assisted in their search by the advance efforts of Reverend Henderson, who was also employed as a school board inspector. At the time of the Bell family's departure from the UK, Alexander Graham's health was threateningly poor, with "a chest condition... giving cause for concern" and his tall, broad-framed body being reduced to 59 kg (130 lb), leaving his face gaunt.Gray 2006, p. 20.Patten & Bell 1926, p. 7.
The city's largest newspaper, the Brantford Expositor, soon announced the Bell family's arrival, writing that it was "...pleased to welcome to our town and neighbourhood A. Melville Bell, Esq., Professor of Elocution, of University College, London [...who...] has purchased from Robert Morton a property containing 10.5 acres of land with a good orchard, beautifully situated on the Mt. Pleasant road some two miles from Brantford". At their new home Melville's surviving son Alexander Graham Bell created his laboratory inside the farm's converted carriage house, nearby to what he called his "dreaming place", a large hollow nestled in the elm trees at the back of the property, above the river where he could view its surface.Groundwater 2005, p. 34. Despite his frail condition upon arriving in Canada, Alexander Graham found the climate and environs to his liking, and he rapidly improved, regaining his health.Mackay 1997, p. 62. He later related at the unveiling of the Bell Telephone Memorial:
Alexander Graham frequented his "dreaming place", lying on a roll of carpet with a pillow and his books. He would relax, think, and "...dream away the afternoon in luxurious idleness" while also contemplating the undulating ripples of the Grand River below him. The younger Bell continued his previous interest in the study of the human voice, and when he discovered the Six Nations Reserve across the river at Onondaga, he learned the Mohawk language and translated its unwritten vocabulary into Visible Speech symbols, a written scientific vocabulary invented by his father. For his work Alexander Graham earned the tribe's friendship and was awarded the title of Honorary Chief and participated in a ceremony where he donned a Mohawk headdress and performed traditional dances. Thereafter Bell would break into a Mohawk war dance if he became intensely excited.Groundwater 2005, p. 35.
After setting up his laboratory–workshop in the Homestead's carriage house, the younger Bell also continued his earlier electrical experiments based on misunderstood translations of Dr. Hermann von Helmholtz's work on electricity and sound as described in Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (The Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music).Wing 1980, p. 10. He also modified a melodeon (a type of pump organ) so that it could transmit its music electrically over a distance. When the family was settled in and he had regained his health, both Alexander Graham and his father, an authority on the acoustics of speech, made plans to establish teaching practices. As the senior Bell was soon occupied with a lecture position at Queen's College in Kingston, Ontario, he sent his son to Boston in his place when a contract was offered to teach in that city for the handsome sum of US$500 (approximately US$ in current dollars). Over the next several years the younger Bell would live and work in the Boston area during the school year, and then return to his parents' homestead during the summer months to rest with his family and conduct further telegraphic, and later, telephonic research work.
During his summer vacation at the Homestead in 1874, Alexander Graham continued to contemplate electrical sound reproduction while viewing the undulating surface of the Grand River from his "dreaming place". He postulated that "it would be possible to transmit sounds of any sort" by the continuous variation of the intensity of the electric current. This method of sound energy to electrical signal transduction was fundamentally different from the on-or-off transmission methods used by other telephone experimenters. Alexander Graham held lengthy discussions with his father explaining what he thought he could achieve with a sound-driven transmitter producing an electrical signal which would instantaneously travel an electrical circuit to a receiver at another location where it would be converted back to sound. His record of a discussion with his father in their home's living room, wrote "If I could vary the intensity of the electric current in exact proportion to the variation of the air density in the production of words, I would be able to transmit speech by telegraph" (using the telephone's technical analog, the telegraph, as the former name had not yet been adapted). On 26 July 1874 in their living room the younger Bell realized the technical principles of telephony,Gray 2006, pp. 73–74. inventing the telecommunications device he is now closely identified with. Returning again to the Homestead the next summer in 1875 Bell wrote his first draft specifications of the telephone patent—commonly considered to be the most valuable patent in history—that September. He later built his first fully functional unit at Boston on March 10, 1876. Later that year, in August, Bell made the first successful voice transmission of any notable distance, between Brantford and Paris Ontario.
On July 26, 1974, the Post Office Department released a commemorative postage stamp honouring the centennial of the invention of the telephone stating "At Brantford... Alexander Graham Bell, a young teacher of the deaf, spent a few weeks of leisurely contemplation and invented the telephone." The stamp depicts three telephones of various time periods, including his famous Gallows model, considered the world's first telephone. In 1915 Alexander Graham referred to it saying "The instrument, just as you see it here, was invented in the summer of 1874, during a visit I paid to my father and mother in Brantford..." As well, one of the first successful voice transmission of any notable distance (6 km) was made on 4 August 1876, between the telegraph office in Brantford, Ontario and Melville House over makeshift wires.MacLeod, Elizabeth (1999). Alexander Graham Bell: An Inventive Life. Toronto, Ontario: Kids Can Press. p. 14 to 19.
Three great tests of the telephone
Only a few months after receiving U.S. Patent No. 174465 at the beginning of March 1876, Bell conducted three important tests of his new telephone invention and technology after he returned to his parents at Melville House for the summer. The third and most important test was the world's first true long-distance call, placed between Brantford and Paris, Ontario, on 10 August 1876. For that long-distance call Alexander Graham Bell set up a telephone using telegraph lines at Robert White's Boot and Shoe Store at 90 Grand River Street North in Paris via its Dominion Telegraph Co. office on Colborne Street. The normal telegraph line between Paris and Brantford was not quite 13 km (8 miles) length, but the connection was extended a further 93 km (58 miles) to Toronto to allow the use of a battery in its telegraph office.