Issued by India

Issued on Mar 10, 1976

Issued for : The Indian P&T Department deems it a great privilege to bring out a commemorative stamp in honour of this great man whose epoch-making invention has revolutionised the world of communications.

Type : Stamp, Mint Condition

Colour : Black and Yellow

Denomination : 25 Paise

Overall size : 3.91 X 2.90 cms.

Printing size : 3.56 X 2.54 cms.

Perforation : 13 x 13

Watermark : Unwatermarked Paper

Number printed : 30,00,000

Number per issue sheet : 35

Printing process : Photogravure

Designed and printed at : India Security Press

Name : Alexander Graham Bell

Born on Mar 3, 1847 at Edinburgh, Scotland

Died on Aug 2, 1922 at Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia, Canada

About : 

• Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the Telephone, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on March 3, 1847. He was educated at Edinburgh and London Universities. Son and grandson of teachers of speech, Graham Bell was from his childhood fascinated by experiments in speech conducted by his grandfather and the lessons which his father gave. Because of ill health, he moved with his father to Canada in 1870. In 1872 Graham Bell opened a School in Boston for training teachers of the deaf and also gave instructions in the mechanics of speech. The following year he became Professor of Vocal Physiology in Boston University.
• While working to devise a Multiple Telegraph, the thought of reproducing speech over distances constantly stirred his mind. On June 2, 1875, while working in Boston on Multiple Telegraph apparatus, Bell heard over an electric wire a sound corresponding to the twang of a steel spring at the other end. Recognising this as a manifestation of the undulatory current principle, he gave his assistant Thomas A. Watson, instructions for embodying it in a model of a telephone. This apparatus transmitted speech sounds the next day, June 3. Further experiments produced an instrument which on March 10, 1876, transmitted the first complete sentence: “Mr. Watson, come here; I want you“. This was the beginning of the telephone, the day of its invention.
• The telephone was first shown publicly at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. There the telephone attracted attention amidst its formidable rivals such as the first electric light and the first printed telegraph. Bell went to England and further perfected the two-piece device into a single instrument containing the transmitter and the receiver. Incredibly, the London Times described it as an American humbug. All the same, the first telephone exchange in England was established in London in September, 1876.
• Bell and Watson lived to inaugurate the first transcontinental telephone between Washington and San Francisco in 1915. Bell was the founder of the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf and of the Volta Bureau for increasing knowledge relating to deafness. He was for a time President of the National Geographic Society and was appointed a Regent of the Smithsonian Institution in 1898.
• The great pioneer and inventor died on August 2, 1922 at his summer home near Baddeck, Nova Scotia, Canada. A fitting tribute was paid to him when all the telephone stations on the Bell Telephone network in U.S.A. and Canada remained silent for one minute on the day of the funeral.

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Issued by Canada

Issued on Jul 26, 1974

Design : Each of the telephones portrayed in Canada‘s newest postage stamp has a durable place in history. The Gallows Frame was the world’s first telephone. Speaking of it in 1915, Bell said that “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….” The Pedestal or “Daffodil” model was very popular and is regarded by many as being symbolic of all telephones. The Contempra Phone was the first to be conceived, designed and manufactured entirely in Canada. 

Designed by : Ray Webber of Toronto photographed the three devices.

Type : Stamp, Postal Used

Colour : Multi colour

Denomination : 8 Cents

Dimensions : 40 mm x 24 mm – horizontal

Perforation : 12 and 12.5

Paper Type : Coated–one–side lithography

Gum Type : PVA

Quantity : 26,000,000

Pane Layout : 50 stamps

Printing Process : 4 colours lithography

Printer : Ashton–Potter Limited, Toronto

About : 

• At Brantford, one hundred years ago this July, Alexander Graham Bell, a young teacher of the deaf, spent a few weeks of leisurely contemplation and invented the telephone. This occurred while he was trying to perfect a device which would send several telegraphic messages at once along the same wire. The people of Brantford, of course, are proud of what he achieved in their city and have spared no effort to refute claims that his greatest idea was conceived elsewhere. Luckily, Bell settled any possible controversies when he stated that “it certainly is the case that the telephone was invented in Canada……Brantford has an indisputable claim to this distinction and is rightfully named ‘The Telephone City‘.” That such disputes should arise is not surprising since Bell and his partners had to fight approximately six hundred lawsuits to prove the originality of his work.
• In 1874, all the basic principles embodied in the telephone had been known for at last forty years. Bell‘s contribution and the mark of his genius was to reveal a “hitherto unappreciated” relationship between these principles , which were to be found in the seemingly unrelated fields of physiology, electricity and acoustics. He was fortunate to have had experience in each. On the other hand invention is a social process and the elements of individual genius and luck must not be allowed to create illusions. Inventors thrive only when they can draw on the work of others, when they have the opportunity to apply “systematic thought” to “a single product or process” and when they live in a community which cherishes the things of the mind. Bell, for example, was the intellectual debtor of many nineteenth century scientists including Hans Oersted, Michael Faraday, John Tyndall, Hermann Helmholtz, J. Baile and a host of others. Bell lived in an environment which allowed him to concentrate for lengthy periods on a specific and not immediately productive task, and which lionized and enriched the successful innovator. Invention was and is an ongoing procedure. Indeed, the telephone had no sooner appeared than Thomas Edison improved it.
• The telephone was particularly characteristic of the times into which it emerged, a generation of materialism, proud on its material accomplishments and philosophy. It is no exaggeration to say that another industrial revolution took place during this productive generation, especially in the fields of communications and electrical science. The growth of the press, the expansion of railway, postal, submarine cable and steamship services and the invention of the radio as well as that of the telephone increased the speed at which information travelled. Although late nineteenth century men and women never completely understood the phenomenon of electricity, they devised numerous fruitful applications for it, such as the light bulb, the successful dynamo, the induction motor, the radio and once again, the telephone. Bell himself was a reflection of many of his contemporaries. He was an agnostic and his philosophy of nature in the broadest sense was mechanistic. He wrote that “I catch glimpses of the harmonies of nature, of how one part fits into another like the wheel-work of a complicated machine”.

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