Alexander Graham Bell

Lore & Background

Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847, to Alexander Melville Bell, a phonetician, and Eliza Grace Bell. At age 10, he asked for a middle name and adopted 'Graham' at 11, after a family friend. He built his first invention at age 12—a dehusking machine using rotating paddles and nail brushes—which was used for years at a neighbor's flour mill. Bell's mother began losing her hearing when he was 12, leading him to study acoustics and develop a manual finger language to communicate with her. His father taught him Visible Speech, and Bell became skilled enough to demonstrate it publicly. He attended the Royal High School in Edinburgh but left at 15 with an undistinguished record, later studying at the University of Edinburgh and University College London, though he did not complete his studies due to his family's emigration to Canada in 1870 after his brothers died of tuberculosis. Bell's early experiments with sound included building a talking automaton head with his brother and teaching his dog to produce crude speech-like sounds. He was influenced by Hermann von Helmholtz's work on vowel sounds, which he mistakenly believed had been achieved electrically, spurring his own research on transmitting speech.

Reader's Guide

Alexander Graham Bell's significance lies primarily in his patenting of the first practical telephone on March 7, 1876, and his co-founding of AT&T in 1885, which shaped modern telecommunications. However, Bell considered the telephone an intrusion on his real work as a scientist and refused to have one in his study. His later inventions included contributions to optical telecommunications, hydrofoils, and aeronautics. He also served as second president of the National Geographic Society from 1898 to 1903, writing for its magazine under the pseudonym H. A. Largelamb. Beyond engineering, Bell made a notable contribution to basic science through his study of human heredity, described as 'the soundest, and most useful study of human heredity proposed in nineteenth-century America.' His legacy is that of a multifaceted inventor and scientist whose work on hearing and speech, driven by personal experience with deafness, led to a world-changing invention, even as he pursued broader scientific interests.

Did You Know?

• Bell's mother and wife were both deaf, which profoundly influenced his life's work.
• He wrote for National Geographic under the pseudonym H. A. Largelamb, an anagram of his name.
• At age 12, Bell built a dehusking machine that was used for years at a neighbor's flour mill.
• Bell considered his telephone an intrusion on his real work as a scientist and refused to have one in his study.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"Mr. Watson — Come here — I want to see you." — Alexander Graham Bell "The final result of our researches has widened the class of substances sensitive to light vibrations, until we can propound the fact of such sensitiveness being a general property of all matter." — Alexander Graham Bell "There cannot be mental atrophy in any person who continues to observe, to remember what he observes, and to seek answers for his unceasing hows and whys about things." — Alexander Graham Bell "Before anything else, preparation is the key to success." — Alexander Graham Bell