The Life and Times of the Man Who Invented the Telephone
Alexander Graham Bell is remembered today as the inventor of the telephone, but he was also an outstanding teacher of the deaf and a prolific inventor of other devices. Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a family of speech educators. His father, Melville Bell, had invented Visible Speech, a code of symbols for all spoken sounds that was used in teaching deaf people to speak. Aleck Bell studied at Edinburgh University in 1864 and assisted his father at University College, London, from 1868-70. During these years he became deeply interested in the study of sound and the mechanics of speech, inspired in part by the acoustic experiments of German physicist Hermann Von Helmholtz (1821-1894), which gave Bell the idea of telegraphing speech.When young Bell's two brothers died of tuberculosis, Melville Bell took his remaining family to the healthier climate of Canada in 1870. From there, Aleck Bell journeyed to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1871 and joined the staff of the Boston School for the Deaf. The following year, Bell opened his own school in Boston for training teachers of the deaf; in 1873 he became a professor of vocal physiology at Boston University, and he also tutored p
Montgomery, Elizabeth Rider. Alexander Graham Bell. 1963 Garrard Publishing Company, Champaign, Illinois. Pelta, Kathy. Alexander Graham Bell. 1989 Silver Burdett Press, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Early in 1874, Bell met Thomas A. Watson (1854-1934), a young machinist at a Boston electrical shop. Watson became Bell's indispensable assistant, bringing to Bell's experiments the crucial ingredient that had been lacking--his technical expertise in electrical engineering. Together the two men spent endless hours experimenting. Although Bell formed the basic concept of the telephone--using a varying but unbroken electric current to transmit the varying sound waves of human speech--in the summer of 1874, Hubbard insisted that the young inventor focus his efforts on the harmonic telegraph instead. Bell complied, but when he patented one of his telegraph designs in February 1875, he found that Elisha Gray had patented a multiple telegraph two days earlier. Greatly discouraged, Bell consulted in Washington with the elderly Joseph Henry, who urged Bell to pursue his "germ of a great invention" --speech transmission.
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Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)
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