Alexander Graham Bell
Inventor
1847-1922
Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do so you will be certain to find something that you have never seen before. Follow it up, explore all around it, and before you know it, you will have something worth thinking results of thought."
-Alexander Graham Bell
Born and educated in Scotland, Alexander Graham Bell was the son of Alexander Melville Bell, the inventor of visible speech, an alphabet that used symbols to represent human sounds. As the son of a deaf mother, he had a true appreciation of the effort required to live in a hearing world. These two factors helped set Bell on the road to the telephone. n 1862, Bell enrolled as a "student teacher" at a boy's school near Edinburgh, Scotland. There he taught music and elocution in exchange for instruction in other subjects. Later, he became a full-time teacher, using Visible Speech in teaching a class of deaf children.
The Bell family emigrated to Canada in 1870, and in 1871 young Alexander moved to Boston, Massachusetts as a very successful teacher to the deaf. He worked on ways to translate the human voice into vibrations, and came up with the idea for an "electrical speech machine" (the telephone). In 1875 Bell began working with Thomas Watson, a mechanically-inclined electrician; by 1876 Bell had uttered the first intelligible sentence over the phone: "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you."
The invention of the telephone freed Bell from further concerns with earning a living. As a result, he was able to dedicate his life to discovery and invention, including the precursor to the phonograph and a flying machine. His wife Mabel, and several young associates, helped him share his many discoveries with the world. In addition to his inventions, Bell also founded the National Geographic Society.
When Bell died in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, on August 2, 1922. all telephone service stopped for one minute throughout the U.S., in simple respect for a life well-lived.