The American inventor and scientist Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father, Professor Alexander Melville BelI, was a respected phonetician and his mother, Eliza Grace Bell, was a hearing disabled person.
Bell became interested in the science of sound to help his mother communicate. Bell’s father, who was an authority on elocution and speech, invented a system of phonetic symbols to represent the position of the speech organs in articulating sounds. He called this system ‘visible speech’. Bell became a student under his father and soon became an expert in the field.
In 1870 his family moved to Canada, where Bell continued his efforts to help the hearing disabled. He opened a school called the “School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech” in 1872 in Boston, in the United States. Eventually, his work on hearing and speech led him to experiment with hearing devices and sending voice messages down a telegraph wire. In an experiment conducted by Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson on March 10, 1876, Bell sent a voice signal to an adjoining room using a liquid transmitter. The first words ever spoken over a telephone were “Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you”!
Upon obtaining a patent for his invention Bell attempted to sell his invention to the world’s most important communications company at that time – Western Union. Western Union declined his offer and Bell eventually formed the Bell Telephone Company in 1877, which is known today as AT&T.
Bell did not stop with the telephone. He went on to invent the metal detector, the audiometer (used to detect hearing problems) and a device to help find icebergs. He died of complications arising from diabetes on August 2, 1922 at the age of 75.
This year we celebrate the 176th birth anniversary of this legendary inventor.
Picture Credit : Google
