[1] Alexander Graham Bell conceived the technical aspects of the telephone and invented it in July 1874, while residing with his parents at their farm, Melville House, now a National Historic Site of Canada.

[2][3][Note 1] One of the first successful voice transmissions of any notable distance was made on 4 August 1876, between the telegraph office in Brantford, Ontario and Bell's father's homestead over makeshift wires.

[7] That same year the association was formally organized and incorporated by an Act of the Legislature of Ontario with the stated aim of commemorating the invention of the telephone in Brantford and to name Bell as its inventor.

[9] The duality of the monument with its dedication to both the inventor and to his invention, with its emphasis on the latter, likely persuaded Alexander Graham Bell, normally modest, to accept the invitation to its public unveiling.

[8] Donald Howard, 3rd Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal became its first honorary president and upon his death, he was succeeded by the Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, a former Governor General of Canada.

[11] William Foster Cockshutt, the local federal Member of Parliament who had originally proposed the memorial in 1904, became the association's president, and was assisted by another MP, Lloyd Harris, who served as vice-president.

[13][14] The Association's public appeal quickly raised CA$35,000 within its first months, rising to $44,000 by September 1909, eventually collecting over $65,000 through donations from various citizens worldwide.

The project proceeded slowly in part due to Allward's concurrent work on several other commissions at the same time, including the South African War Memorial, a major monument erected in Toronto.

[25] For various reasons the memorial was not completed until 1917, with World War I, material shortages, an embargo on exports of French moulding sand and transportation limitations creating lengthy delays.

[16] The Brantford monument was finally unveiled in a driving rain on 24 October 1917 by then Governor General of Canada Victor Cavendish, 9th Duke of Devonshire before an audience in the thousands.

They were greeted by a children's chorus, honour guards, the band of the 125th (Brantford) Battalion and the chimes of Grace Anglican Church located only a few dozen metres from the memorial.

[28] After the Governor-General completed his address at the monument and unveiled its shrouds, he withdrew to the city's Old Opera House due to the driving rain, along with large numbers of the crowd.

[32] At the time of its unveiling, the memorial was one of the most impressive monuments of the day in Canada, designed to depict the vast distances on the Earth being "annihilated" by the telephone.

[Note 8] Three ephemeral ghostly figures, two of which are cast in mid-relief and one in high (alto-rilievo) relief, depict Knowledge, Joy and Sorrow, transmitted to man by the telephone.

[8] The model for 'Man, discovering his power to transmit sound through space' was Cyril William George Kinsella, a wounded war veteran and a former resident of Brantford.

[35] Born in the UK he had become one of approximately 100,000 disadvantaged British children and orphans, a "Home Child", sent to Canada and other Commonwealth countries to find better lives in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Underaged, but a healthy 178 centimetres (5 ft 10 in) in height in 1914, he enlisted in Brantford's 125th Battalion for service overseas where he fought in Belgium and France with the Canadian Expeditionary Force during World War I.

[14] Kinsella was wounded and shell-shocked at the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium and, after being invalided and discharged back to Canada in 1916, met Allward in Toronto while convalescing and then worked as his model, saying later "The posing was exacting and took about two months.

[14][36] At the memorial's crest is a series of steps leading to the main portion of the monument, a wide mass of white Stanstead granite, faced by the largest single bronze casting created up to that time, which taxed the capacity of its foundry.

On both sides of the main portion of the monument are two "heroic" female figures representing humanity in bronze on granite mounts, one depicted in the act of sending, the other of receiving a message over the telephone.

[13][38] Beneath the central bronze casting is a large carved inscription: "To commemorate the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in Brantford 1874.

It noted Allward's designation as a person of national historic significance due to his "...original sense of spatial composition, his mastery of the classical form and his brilliant craftsmanship.