Alexander Graham Bell
1847 – 1922 · United Kingdom
Known for: Inventor of the telephone and lifelong teacher of the deaf
“He gave the human voice a road across the world, and never stopped teaching those who could not hear.”
Biography
Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh on 3 March 1847 into a family that had made speech its profession: his grandfather, his uncle and his father were all elocutionists, and his father devised Visible Speech, a written notation for the positions of the mouth. His mother began to lose her hearing when he was twelve, and the boy learned to spell on his fingers at her side and to speak in low, measured tones directly against her forehead so that she could follow him. He was an indifferent pupil and left the Royal High School at fifteen, but a year with his grandfather in London gave him a love of study, and by sixteen he was teaching elocution and music himself at Weston House Academy in Elgin. After both his brothers died of tuberculosis the family emigrated to Canada in 1870, and Bell soon moved on to Boston to teach deaf children and to train their teachers.
Work on hearing and speech led him to electricity. While trying to send several telegraph messages along a single wire he came to believe that a current shaped like a sound wave could carry the voice itself, and with the young mechanic Thomas Watson he built the instruments to test it. The first United States patent for the telephone was granted to him on 7 March 1876, and within days speech had passed between two rooms of a Boston boarding house. The Bell Telephone Company grew out of that work, and in 1885 he helped found the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. He regarded the telephone as an intrusion upon his real work and would not have one in his study. He married Mabel Hubbard, deaf since childhood and once his pupil, and remained a teacher of the deaf all his life.
Bell's later years at Beinn Bhreagh in Nova Scotia were as inventive as his youth. He built the photophone, which carried speech on a beam of light, took up aeronautics with the Aerial Experiment Association, whose Silver Dart made the first powered flight in Canada in 1909, and developed hydrofoil craft that set a world marine speed record in 1919. He was the second president of the National Geographic Society and shaped its magazine, and he helped to found the journal Science. He died at Beinn Bhreagh on 2 August 1922. During his funeral telephone service across North America was halted for a minute, a silence that measured what the voice on a wire had come to mean.