A NINETEENTH CENTURY ROMANCE.

A NINETEENTH CENTURY ROMANCE. An article by David Bodanis in this weekend’s Financial Times told a romantic story about an inventor. Bodanis focused on the lessons the story gave on how to innovate, but he told the story movingly. In the late nineteenth century, a poor young immigrant, a teacher, traveled to Nantucket to ask for the hand in marriage of one of his students, a girl from a wealthy family. He was turned away, not even allowed in the house despite a drenching rain. He resolved to make a great invention that would make him rich. He made the invention and became rich. And the invention grew out of the time he had spent teaching his future wife. If I were telling this story at the dinner table, I would make my listeners guess the identity of the inventor, giving more clues along the way, in the fashion of Bill Stern, and “MR. PRESIDENT’ and Paul Harvey, radio programs I grew up with. But here the answer would appear as the next post above this one. The poor young man was Alexander Graham Bell. His love was one of the deaf students he tutored. One of his teaching techniques was to have his students touch their throats and then his, to feel from the vibrations how the sounds were produced. The key to Bell’s invention was the translation of the vibrations in a diaphragm into electrical signals.