History

2021

March 2021

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Visit https://www.census.gov/history every month for the latest Census History Home Page!

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U.S. Census Bureau History: Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland. At age 29,
he revolutionized the way people communicated when he made the first telephone call
on March 10, 1876. The invention of the telephone proved so popular that Americans
owned more than 1.8 million telephones and made in excess of 11 million telephone
calls, just 25 years after Bell made his first call to his assistant Thomas Watson.

Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Alexander Graham Bell changed the way the world communicates when he placed the first telephone call to his assistant Thomas Watson on March 10, 1876. Initially envisioned as a tool to assist people with disabilities to communicate more easily, American households and businesses quickly adopted the technology. In the decades that followed, Bell used his fame and fortune to teach Americans who were deaf, blind, and unable able to speak. He was also an inventor, advocate, and even a special agent of the U.S. Census Bureau.

Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland. His mother relied upon a hearing trumpet after the near total loss of her hearing as a child. His father was a prominent linguistics professor who mentored Alexander as he began teaching elocution in his mid-teens. Soon after the family immigrated to Canada in 1870, Bell's father began teaching his "System of Visible Speech" to the deaf. When offered a position to train instructors at a school for the deaf in Boston, MA in 1871, the elder Bell refused and recommended his son for the job. After training instructors in Boston and Northampton, MA and Hartford, CT, Bell opened his own School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech in Boston. Enrollment grew quickly and included his future wife Mabel Gardiner Hubbard.

In addition to teaching, Bell spent his free time experimenting with sound, electricity, and telegraph systems. In early March 1876, Bell received a patent for an acoustic telegraph that could carry multiple messages over a single telegraph wire, simultaneously. However, in addition to carrying the dots and dashes of telegraph messages, Bell's patent promised a method of transmitting sounds, including voices, between to a transmitter and receiver. On March 10, 1876, Bell succeeded in building the device described in his patent and placed the first telephone call in history to his assistant Thomas Watson. Watson reported clearly hearing Bell say, "Mr. Watson. Come here. I want to see you." This achievement was not without controversy. Many people accused Bell of liberally borrowing the ideas of fellow inventor Elisha Gray.

In the months and years to come, Bell demonstrated the telephone to an international audience at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, PA; oversaw installation of the first White House telephone for President Rutherford B. Hayes on May 10, 1877; placed the first two-way, "long-distance" telephone call between Boston and Cambridge, MA; and established the Bell Telephone Company, which survived mergers and acquisitions to dominate the North American telephone industry until 1984. By 1888, owners of the nation's 195,000 telephones were paying the Bell Telephone Company a fee to place each of the more than 1 million telephone conversations made every day.

Wealthy from his invention and investment in the nation's telephone system, Bell sold much of his interest to the telephone patents and Bell Telephone Company in the 1880s to devote himself to assisting people with disabilities, including the more accurate collection and tabulation of their census data. In 1889, Bell made recommendations to Census Bureau Director Robert Percival Porter to aid in the more accurate enumeration of the deaf and blind during the 1890 Census. Included among his suggestions were properly phrased questions to identify the true levels of disability, as well as their source (i.e., disabled at birth, disease, injury, etc.), and age at onset. Ten years later, Census Bureau Director William R. Merriam appointed Bell as an "Expert Special Agent of the Census Office" tasked with designing the 1900 Census supplemental questionnaire and preparing a report on the blind and deaf population. Bell poured much of his time and energy into overseeing the collection, tabulation, and publication of the data. Published in 1906, the special report, The Blind and the Deaf, was the most comprehensive in census history and included detailed statistics about individuals' levels of disability, cause, age at onset, school attendance, occupation, and methods of communication. For example, the report showed that in 1900, there were 41 partially blind blacksmiths in the United States (including 1 female smithy); the onset of total deafness occurred before age 20 for 90.5 percent of people so identified; and of the 89,287 people who were totally deaf, 55,501 were able to speak well, 9,417 spoke imperfectly, and 24,369 could not speak at all.

Despite Bell's dedication to the 1900 Census and optimism about the future of data collection for people with disabilities, the Census Bureau did not appoint Bell or any other experts to assist with the 1910 count. In a 1915 letter to a friend, Bell wrote that the 1910 data for the deaf and blind populations were "a perfect fizzle, not at all comparable to any former census." Bell died at his Cape Breton, Nova Scotia home on August 2, 1922. Two days later, every telephone exchange in the United States and Canada fell silent when Bell's funeral service began as a tribute to the man who helped the world communicate quickly and efficiently over great distances.

Between 1910 and 1990, the collection of data about people with disabilities was sporadic and inconsistent, with most collection and analysis focused on the ability of the disabled to work. Following passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the 2000 Census collected more detailed data about people with disabilities. Today, the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) continues to collect and publish data about people with disabilities. In addition to inquiries related to hearing and vision difficulties, the survey also collects data about respondents' cognitive, ambulatory, self-care, and independent living difficulties. Alexander Graham Bell's influence is evident in today's ACS questionnaires as the data he deemed critically important, like divisions of disability based on age, occupation, and employment status are now collected, tabulated, and published annually.

You can learn more about the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, and work for the Census Bureau using census data and records. For example:

• Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1847, and moved to the United States in 1871 to teach at schools for the deaf in Boston, MA, Hartford, CT, and Northhampton, MA. Soon after he opened his School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech in Boston, MA, where he tutored deaf pupils, including a young Helen Keller, who credited Bell with her success as an author, lecturer, and disability rights advocate.
• Alexander Graham Bell was one of 321,350 immigrants, including 85,455 immigrants from Great Britain, to arrive in the United States in 1871. Between 1820 and 1970, immigration from Great Britain peaked at 103,677 in 1877, while the flow of British immigrants nearly stopped during the Great Depression and World War II.
• Alexander Graham Bell advocated teaching the deaf to read lips and communicate orally—known as oralism —instead of relying solely on sign language. His sound research and development of the telephone grew out of his desire to help the deaf communicate more easily—particularly his own wife Mabel Gardiner Hubbard. Hubbard lost her hearing to scarlet fever in 1862, when she was 5 years old. Prior to the introduction of antibiotics in the early 20th century, scarlet fever was the leading cause of death among children. Shortly before Hubbard contracted the disease, the Census Bureau reported that in 1860, 26,402 children died from scarlet fever—7.4 percent of all childhood deaths that year. Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions considers infection with the group A Streptococcus bacteria to be generally mild with few, if any, long-term health consequences when antibiotics are administered.
• By the end of 1876, the year that Alexander Graham Bell made his first telephone call, there were 3,000 telephones in the United States. Ten years later, the number had grown to 167,000. The number of telephones reached 1,005,000 in 1899, 10,046,000 in 1914, and 103,752,000 in 1967. In 2005, 90.6 percent of American households had a landline telephone and 71.3 percent had a cellular telephone. Five years later, the number of households in the United States reporting they had a cell phone (87.2 percent) exceeded those reporting a landline (75 percent) for the first time. In 2019, the Pew Research Center reported that 96 percent of Americans owned some kind of cell phone.
• According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, congenital hearing loss affected about 2 to 3 infants per 1,000 live births between 1999 and 2007. In 2012, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Centers for Disease Prevention reported that 15 percent of American adults aged 18 and over—approximately 37.5 million—has some trouble hearing. Many people who are deaf or hard of hearing benefit from improvements and recent advances in technology—thanks to research by the nation's hearing aid manufacturers who are part of the Electromedical and Electrotherapeutic Apparatus Manufacturing industry (NAICS 334510). According to the Census Bureau's annual County Business Patterns Survey, 916 establishments in this industry employed 76,284 people nationwide in 2018.
• Although it was 80 years after the invention of the telephone that the decennial census began collecting data about telephone ownership, the Census Bureau's censuses and surveys have been more timely in collecting data about other popular technologies. For example, the 1930 Census questionnaire collected data on the 13,759,000 households that owned a radio just 10 years after Pittsburgh, PA, radio station KDKA began broadcasting. Soon after the first episodes of now-iconic television programs like The Tonight Show, The Twilight Zone, and Bonanza premiered, the 1960 Census questionnaire reported data for the 87 percent of households that owned a television. Less than a decade after Apple Computers, Inc. introduced its Apple I computer, the Census Bureau published 1984 Current Population Survey (CPS) data about the 8.2 percent of the nation's households that owned a computer. In 1997—years before companies like Google, Facebook, Paypal, and Youtube dominated the World Wide Web—the Census Bureau published CPS data on the 35.2 percent of adults with a computer and Internet access at home.
• Today, the Census Bureau collects data about Americans with disabilities as part of the American Community Survey (ACS). In 2019, the ACS reported that there were 41,089,958 people in the United States who reported that they had a disability, including 11,495,247 reporting hearing difficulty and 7,467,040 with vision difficulty. That year, 17.2 percent of people reporting themselves as American Indian and Alaska Native alone had a disability, followed by 14.1 percent reporting themselves as White alone and Black or African American alone. Just 7.2 percent of people identifying as Asian alone reported having a disability. People aged 75 and over were most likely to report hearing difficulty (4,544,851), while people aged 35 to 64 (2,850,102) were most likely to report vision difficulty.
• The 2017 Economic Census found that the United States is home to 2,605 Translation and Interpretation Service establishments (NAICS 54193), which includes firms engaged in providing sign language services. These establishments employed 35,105 employees and had sales valued at nearly $4.45 billion.

You can learn more about Alexander Graham Bell and his work for the Census Bureau, from the article, "Alexander Graham Bell and the 1900 Census."

Wealthy from his invention of the telephone and investment in the nation's telephone system, Alexander Graham Bell sold much of his interest to the telephone
patents and Bell Telephone Company to devote himself to assisting people with disabilities, including the more accurate collection and tabulation of their census data.

Appointed an "Expert Special Agent of the Census Office," Bell designed the 1900 Census supplemental questionnaire and prepared the 1906 special report
"The Blind and the Deaf" containing statistics about individuals' levels of disability, cause, age at onset, education, occupation, and methods of communication.

Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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Language Support

The Census Bureau published guides with instructions for each inquiry on the 2020 Census questionnaire in 59 non-English languages, Braille (Braille Ready Format), and large print for respondents with vision impairments.

A video of the American Sign Language guide was published on the agency's Youtube channel for Americans who have difficulty hearing.

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Did you know?

Frequently overshadowed by Thomas Edison—one of the greatest inventors in American history—Alexander Graham Bell discovered ways to improve many of the "Wizard of Menlo Park's " inventions or incorporate them into his own work on the telephone and technology to assist the deaf.

For example, soon after inventing the telephone, Bell purchased a microphone patent from Edison that improved voice quality on long-distance telephone calls. A laboratory Bell sponsored made improvements to Edison's phonograph.

In 1880, Bell received a patent for the electric photophone—a wireless communications device that transmitted speech on a beam of light.

For his lifetime of work and invention, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers awarded Alexander Graham Bell its Edison Medal in 1914.

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This Month in Census History

Despite the rapid adoption of Alexander Graham Bell's telephone following its 1876 invention, the U.S. Census Bureau did not begin tabulating telephone ownership data until 1960, when 78.3 percent of American households owned a phone.

In 2005, the American Community Survey became the Census Bureau's primary source of these data when it replaced the decennial census long-form questionnaire of sample inquiries.

The Census Bureau modified the telephone ownership question in 2019 to include calls using cell phones, land lines, or other phone devices. That year, the survey estimated that of the nation's 122,802,852 households, 78,188,040 owner occupied and 43,351,585 renter occupied housing units had telephone service.

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Visit https://www.census.gov/history every month for the latest Census History Home Page!