Select Language 
Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) Bell was born into a successful and smart family on March 3, 1847. He was the son of Alexander Melville Bell, a teacher at University of Edinburgh and the grandson of Alexander, who both made a life study of visible speech for the deaf. Bell was educated at the University of Edinburgh and The University of London before he moved with his father to Canada because of failing health in 1870. In 1872, Alexander Graham Bell opened a school for training teachers of deaf pupils in Boston and taught mechanics of speech there. The next year, Bell became teacher of Vocal Physiology at Boston University. Bell made analyses of variations and effects of sound waves and experimented with a multiple telegraph apparatus. In the winter of 1874-75, a device to send the human voice over a wire was perfected and preparation for a display of it began. On March 10,1876, Bell exhibited the apparatus embodying the results of his studies in the transmission of sound by electricity when the first actual wire message on record was transmitted by Bell to his assistant Thomas A. Watson in a Boston hotel. This invention, with improvements and modifications constitutes the modern telephone. On January 25, 1915, Bell repeated the message in New York City received by Watson over a wire in San Francisco. Bell also invented the telephone probe for discovering the location of bullets in a body. The tetrahedral kite, and the photophore, an instrument for transmitting sound by vibrations in a beam of light and of phonographic apparatus, are also creations of Alexander Graham Bell. He also had much interest in the problems of mechanical flight. Bell gave numerous addresses and published many monographs, including one in the formation of a deaf variety in the human race. He also founded the American Association to Promote Teaching of Speech to the Deaf and was the president of the National Geographic Society for a few years. In 1898, Congress appointed Bell regent of the Smithsonian Institution, to coincide with the many other learned societies in which he was a member until his death August 21, 1922 in his summer home near Baddeck, Nova Scotia. Bell was the greatest American inventor of the 19th century and probably influenced Einstein. His work and influence has greatly changed the way we live by modernizing life and making life easier and better.
|