The Thing Is with Steve Canavan - February 2, 2017

Actually, it could have been John. The handwriting was appalling. But either way, thank you madam – or sir – for taking the trouble to correspond.

I immediately warmed to the letter writer for it started, “I don’t often read your columns”, which I felt an honest if harsh way to begin.

“However, I know you like strange facts,” it continued, “so did you know that Alexander Graham Bell hated the telephone so much that he wouldn’t allow one in his own house.”

At first this didn’t really interest me as I thought the author was referring to Alexander Bell, who scored 115 goals in 393 appearances while at QPR in the late 1950s and if he didn’t want to use a phone, then so be it.

Then I realised Joan/John meant the Alexander Graham Bell who actually invented the phone and suddenly I was intrigued.

This can’t be true, I thought. I mean with the exception of the chap who came up with the idea of the stink bomb, why invent something and then not want it in your house?

So naturally I have spent the last week reading about Bell to see if this is true.

He was born in Edinburgh and as an adult - because I like to deal with the most important stuff first - had a fabulous beard. Indeed it was so bushy and large that I’m told a family of starlings once nested there throughout an entire winter.

He was one of those blokes that seem impossibly intelligent and gifted. The book I leafed through noted, ‘with no formal training, Bell mastered the piano.’ What? How is this possible? When I was younger I had around 37 piano lessons from an elderly chap called Keith who lived at the end of our road and barely mastered four chords. Then again, Bell possibly inherited better genes; his father was a professor specialising in the study of speech, whereas my dad once drove his car through next door’s glass porch after accidentally going into first gear instead of reverse.

Bell invented things from a very young age. Aged 12, for example, he combined two rotating paddles with a set of nail brushes to come up with a device to sieve wheat. In comparison, aged 12 I was trying to chat up Karen Battersby (in my class at school and a real catch because not only was she beautiful but good at algebra too) and watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Bell, whom I suspect wasn’t as fixated about four fictional turtles living in sewers beneath New York city, became fascinated with speech and sound after his mother went deaf and began to study acoustics.

In one of his first experiments, and presumably without the RSPCA’s prior knowledge, he reached into the mouth of the family dog and manipulated the dog’s lips and vocal cords to make it say – and this is absolutely true - ‘How are you grandma?’ Neighbours used to flock round to see it done, and hopefully stayed long enough to hear the dog add, ‘for the love of god, will you get your hand out of my damn mouth and play fetch instead?’

While still a teenager – and after reading about the work of a German scientist who had got a machine to reproduce vowel sounds (naturally Bell read the book in German, translating it himself) – he realised that if one could do that, it would also be possible to produce consonants and then speech.

Bell set to work building the machine that would later be the telephone and in 1875, after finding the time to get a degree at Oxford and emigrate to Canada, patented his invention.

On March 10, 1876, he succeeded in getting his telephone to work, speaking the famous, if incredibly underwhelming sentence, ‘Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you’. No ‘one small step for mankind’ but a decent effort nonetheless.

Within 10 years more than 150,000 people in the US owned telephones and Bell was a rich man.

I do feel a bit sorry for his wife though. As well as spending every night of their marriage reading an encyclopedia (‘can we go out for dinner tonight darling?’, “afraid not love, I’m reading about the mating habits of the South African Sand Rain Frog”), Bell even took a telephone on their honeymoon and spent the entire two weeks tinkering with that instead.

But back to the start of this. Turns out the person who wrote in was correct - after his invention took off, Bell refused to have a telephone himself, the reason being that he considered it an intrusion 
on his real work as a scientist.

On reflection, that fact probably isn’t actually that interesting and thus not worthy of writing a column about … but too late now.

English breakfast was a bit 
lacking

I was in a café with a work colleague the other day, ordering some drinks during a break from a meeting about spreadsheets and diversity figures.

I ordered a strong coffee (I thought this was wise as during said meeting I’d nodded off when the main speaker began to talk about the benefits of Microsoft PowerPoint 2016 in lecture room settings), my colleague opted for a cappuccino and English Breakfast. After ordering he turned to me and said ‘two quid for English breakfast – that’s really good value’.

I remember thinking his comment was slightly odd but I was still half-asleep at the time so thought nothing more of it.

Five minutes later the girl serving brought over our order. My colleague – who is, by the way, a university lecturer and so, you’d think, fairly clued up – looked in puzzlement at the two drinks she handed him and said, in genuine bewilderment, ‘but I ordered a coffee and breakfast’.

The girl, speaking in very slow deliberate tones – as if speaking to someone just learning the English language – had to explain that English breakfast referred to a type of tea.

‘But I’d hoped for sausage, bacon and eggs’, my colleague could still be heard lamenting as he left the premises.

Least he’ll know for next time.