BELL, ALEXANDER GRAHAM (1847 - 1922)

He was a Scottish-born scientist who invented the telephone. Other inventors had tried to send speech by wire, but Bell was the first to succeed.

Bells upbringing had a great influence on his career. His father was a successful teacher to

deaf-mutes and had invented a code of symbols called visible speech to help them learn. Bell aided his father in his work, and also taught speech and music as a student teacher at a boy’s school in Edinburgh.

In 1870, Bell moved with his family to Ontario, Canada, as he was suffering from Tuberculosis from which both his brothers had died. He soon recovered, and went to Boston, Massachusetts, where he set up a school for teachers of the deaf.

Bell was made a professor at Boston University, but he still continued with his electrical experiments. He found doing all the work by himself rather difficult. So he enlisted help from a skilled electrician called Thomas Watson.

Together they proceeded with experiments. Bell connected up a transmitter, a device which converted sound waves into electrical, to a receiver, which picked up electrical signals and converted them back to sound. They finally achieved success in 1875, when Bell heard a sound made by Watson coming through the receiver. The first spoken sentences were heard the following year when bell spoke into the transmitter and was heard by Watson in a separate room. The Bell Telephone Company was founded in 1877, the first of its kind.

Bell continued to experiment and invent. He helped develop the first phonograph record, and finally financed flying experiments. The promotion of teaching the deaf to speak was still one of his chief concerns. He became an American citizen in 1882. He died in Nova Scotia in 1922.