CHICHESTER BELL (1848-1924)

INDISPENSABLE AIDE TO HIS COUSIN'S GENIUS

 

Chichester Bell was born in Dublin in 1848 to David Charles Bell (1817-1902), a Scots-born teacher of speech, and his wife Ellen Hyland (alt. Ellen Altine Highland). He was the second child to survive in a family that would eventually number eleven in total; two brothers Alexander (2) and Robert (7), and a sister Esther (6) died in 1843, 1849 and 1850 respectively.

 

Chichester’s early education is uncertain, but the probability is that he attended the Wesleyan College, as did another notable young man of the era, George Bernard Shaw. In any case, their paths appear to have crossed in a significant manner when both were in lodgings at 61 Harcourt Street. 

 

Shaw, then in his early teens, was there with his father, a mill owner and flour merchant in failing health and fortune, whose wife had left for London, where she and an aspiring daughter shared a house with her amaneusis, George Vandeleur Lee (Lee, then in his early forties, had previously provided accommodation to the Shaws at his Dublin homes). Bell may have been there as a student lodger, since his family may by this time have left for North America.

 

Chichester graduated in Medicine from Trinity College Dublin* (the date generally given is 1869) and moved to London, where he became Assistant Professor of Chemistry at University College.

 

At about this time, David Charles Bell left his teaching position in Dublin and, with his wife and some of the younger members of his family, joined a household in Brantford, Ontario that included his younger brother Alexander Melville Bell, a noted teacher and researcher of voice production, and his nephew Alexander Graham Bell, A. M. Bell’s only surviving child by his wife Eliza Symonds.

 

A. M. Bell, who had been sent to Nova Scotia for some years as a child, returned to the country in 1870 when his small family of three sons was threatened with tuberculosis; one had died in 1867 aged nineteen, and a second would only survive arrival in Canada by a few months, dying in 1870 at the age of twenty-five.

 

The Bells quickly purchased a property at Brantford, Ontario that over the next decade would become the nerve-center for a range of experiments in telephony and sound recording and transmission, led by A. M. Bell’s surviving son, Alexander Graham Bell. Then in his early twenties, A. G. Bell would continue and expand the family interest in voice production during vacations from his work as an assistant professor at Boston University.

 

These experiments would result in several advances in both the processes and technical equipment for communication and in commercial exploitation of the new technology. The former Dublin elocution professor was appropriately involved in one of the most significant, when in 1876 he and his nephew communicated at a distance of linked by , the elder Bell reading passages from ‘Hamlet’ in the Brantford Telegraph Office and the younger receiving the transmission in the Wallis Ellis store at Mount Pleasant.

 

In 1880 the entire Bell family grouping moved from Ontario to Washington D.C., where they were soon joined by Chichester Bell. Over the next decade, he would be at the center of the most ambitious research program ever attempted in the area of communications, working with his cousin A. G. Bell and an instrument maker named Charles Sumner Tainter.

 

Using a sizeable cash award from the French Government (the Volta Prize), A. G. Bell set up the Volta Institute in the U.S. capital, working first from his father’s house and later in a purpose built laboratory.

 

For the first eight years of the partnership, Chichester Bell was involved in the whole range of product development at the experimental locations (mainly the family residences of A. M. Bell at 1325) and obtained a number of patents in his own right as well as jointly with his cousin and Mr. Tainter.

 

He was also involved in the promotion of scientific research on  a national basis, being among the founders of the Washington chapter of the Chemical Society.

 

Chichester Bell returned to London at about this time but seems to have continued his contact with both the Washington and Canadian outposts of the Bell family empire. A. G. Bell had already begun to put together 

 

Chichester Bell’s father, David Charles Bell, was by now well established as an author on voice production and would live on in Washington until his death in 1902 at the age of eighty-three. Chichester’s mother, the former Ellen Hyland, would live until 1897.

 

Chichester’s sister Laurie had married a Derry-born doctor named James Kerr, who was by now a professor of medicine at Georgetown University. Another sister, had married William Kerr. 

 

A brother Charles would become a prominent figure in Washington business circles, and would marry into the Hubbard family, already linked with A. G. Bell (the cousins in fact married sisters)

 

In 1889 Chichester Bell married Antoinette Ives in a ceremony in Montreal (he was forty-one, she thirty-nine).

 

In 1892 he helped to establish the Edison Phonograph Company in Britain

 

In 1924 Chichester Bell died on 11 March at Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford. He was seventy-six years of age.

 

 

*Some accounts have David Charles Bell as a professor of Elocution at Trinity, and Shaw as a student there, with Alexander Melville Bell later meeting Shaw and providing the background for the latter’s play ‘Pygmalion’. There is little doubt that elocution and its relation to oratory were important elements in the Trinity curriculum at the time, and when the brilliant young Cork scholar Edward Dowden was appointed to the first chair of English Literature at the college (and even in the entire world!) in 1867, his title was ‘Professor of Oratory and English Literature.’