This Saturday, March 7, is the date on which Alexander Graham Bell was issued a patent for the telephone. Our country was celebrating its centennial during that year, 1876, and when Bell displayed his new device at the vast Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the foremost physicist in the world, England's Lord Kelvin, who was judging the competition in electrical entries at the fair, declared Bell's invention to be "the most wonderful thing I have seen in America." A year later, the Bell Telephone Co. was formed, and the rest, as they say, is history.
What a fantastic exhibition that must have been back in 1876! The country and the world were agog over the infinite possibilities that steam power and machinery of all types were bringing into everyday life, and inventors and scientists were just beginning to explore and tap the wonders of this strange new form of energy called "electricity."The invention of the telephone was dependent upon an understanding of the way electricity behaved, because it was the fluctuations in the field around an electromagnet that were being transmitted and subsequently reconverted to sound vibrations at the other end of the wire. Until about 1825, no one had yet discovered any relationship between electricity and magnetism, so a great many discoveries and a great deal of understanding had to take place before inventions like the telegraph and the telephone could be invented.
This is just how things work in the history of inventions; one idea springs from another, and the frustration of one inventor becomes the inspiration for someone else. In fact, inventions can tell us a great deal about the people and the age that produced them because there are knowable and identifiable reasons that those inventions came into being at the time and place they did.
My point here is that history does not have to be taught or learned as a succession of wars or rulers or centuries. What we, as parents, want our children to know about the history of the world is not only what and when, but how and why. We must find ways to make our children see events in history as having both cause and effect.
Famous inventions offer us an opportunity to look at history in a new way. When we understand why an invention sprang into being at a certain point in history, why it couldn't have come about any earlier, and how that invention changed people's lives at the time and contributed to future change as well, then we will see wars and rulers and centuries as somewhat useful backdrops to the real story of human history, and not as the entire story themselves.
This was the idea behind James Burke's 1979 BBC television series called "Connections," which is still being rerun on public broadcasting stations in this country today. In this series, Burke shows that inventions and events occur as a direct result of inventions and events that preceded them, and that they are both inextricably intertwined. If we can get our children to see such things as how the use of stirrups led to the Norman conquest of England, and why Gutenberg's printing press contributed to both the Renaissance and the Reformation, then they will be on their way to having a useful command of history, instead of the comparatively useless knowledge of historic dates alone.
You can find the book version of "Connections," as well as the guide to Burke's subsequent TV series, "The Day the Universe Changed," at bookstores and in the 609 section of your library.- Dr. William F. Russell's books for parents and children include "Classics to Read Aloud to Your Children" and "Classic Myths to Read Aloud." Send your questions and comments to him at Family Learning, 2400 E. Main St., Suite 266, St. Charles, IL 60174-2414.