The Invention He Came to Loathe
Be careful what you create—and what you grow
A daily column about freedom, exploration, life in general, and creating work and a life you actually like. There are stories.
Did you know that Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, rued the day he invented it? Yep, he did.
I’m relistening to a favorite book, Destiny of The Republic by a favorite writer, Candice Millard. This book reads like fiction and is largely about the, er, complicated assassination which led to the eventual death of President James A. Garfield.
Mr. Bell actually features prominently in the story—but you’ll have to read it for yourself to know exactly how. For the sake of not poorly summarizing an incredible story, and for the sake of time, today we’re just talking about his foundational work inventing the telephone. And creating work you actually like instead of loathe.
Within five years of debuting the telephone at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, Bell’s invention was a hit with seemingly everyone—but Bell.
In fact, he apparently:
…struggled to free himself from the overwhelming success of his first invention…While the telephone had lifted him from poverty, made him famous, and won him the respect of the world’s most accomplished scientists, it had also robbed him of what he valued most—time.
He liked the telephone, believed in it, but even he was surprised by its stunning adoption. In his own words and shared years later with the advantage of hindsight: “I did not realize the overwhelming importance of the invention.”
He yearned for the freedom he had lost, the time to think about other things. Not only did Bell chafe under the yoke of his invention, complaining bitterly that the business that had sprung up around it was ‘hateful to me at all times and would ‘fetter me as an inventor’ but he worried that it would prevent him from helping those who needed him most.
I like this guy.
One could argue that his success with the telephone provided the notoriety and financial capital necessary to fund future inventions more personally important to him.1 And perhaps the chaffing of his inadvertently getting “boxed in” was the thing that fueled his later creativity.
But it does make one think about not creating a business you end up loathing. He liked the work, but not the business of this particular endeavor (the telephone). Granted, he couldn’t have anticipated just how quickly popular it’d become, how much time he’d spend in court defending his patent, or how much he’d dislike all of it.
We can’t anticipate everything either, but we can at least be wary of growing work we already don’t like. If you don’t like it now, you’re almost certain to find it as loathsome as Mr. Bell did his telephone. And nobody wants that—am I right?
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https://www.belllegacy.org/articles/alexander-graham-bell-inventions/
Great story Emily. I had no idea about this story!
In a much smaller way, I opened my yoga studio in 2004 as a side business. The timing, location and demand took me on a 17 year roller coaster ride. It turned my love of yoga and teaching into a non-stop business that left me drained. After selling it I took three years off of yoga. I was spent. I now teach at someone else's studio once per week and enjoy practicing again.