Bell, Alexander Graham

Bell, Alexander Graham (1847-1922), inventor, b. Edinburgh, Scotland.

Alexander Graham Bell was the son of a teacher with a special job. This was teaching deaf and dumb children to speak.

Graham, too, became a teacher, and he helped his father in his work. For a time they worked in London. Then Graham became ill and the family moved to Canada. His father said he would get better there.

He soon did, and then he went to Boston in the United States and opened a school for the deaf. In 1873 he became a professor at Boston University.

Bell kept learning more about speech and hearing and this gave him the idea of inventing a way of sending voices over the telegraph. He set to work to invent a telephone, helped by an electrician named Thomas A. Watson.

On 10 March, 1876 Watson heard Bell's voice from another room saying, 'Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.' The voice came from the telephone receiver. It was the first telephone message.

Bell was at this time only twenty-nine years old. He went on experimenting for the rest of his life, and also working to help deaf people. His wife, Mabel, was deaf.

He invented a number of other devices, many of them concerned with passing messages.

Essential reading: Charlotte Gray Reluctant Genius: Alexander Graham Bell and the Passion for Invention