On invention:
“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 about to occupy your mind.
All really big discoveries are the results of thought.”
— Alexander Graham Bell

On the telephone:
“The day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid on to houses just
like water or gas — and friends will converse with each other without
leaving home.”
— Alexander Graham Bell in a letter to his father in 1876

Alexander
Graham Bell

Edinburgh, Scotland; March
1847

Alexander Graham Bell is most well known for inventing
the telephone. He came to the U.S as a teacher of the deaf, and
conceived the idea of “electronic speech” while visiting his hearing-impaired
mother in Canada. This led him to invent the microphone and later the
“electrical speech machine” — his name for the first telephone.

Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on March 3, 1847.
He enrolled in the University of London to study anatomy and physiology,
but his college time was cut short when his family moved to Canada in
1870. His parents had lost two children to tuberculosis, and they
insisted that the best way to save their last child was to leave England.

When he was eleven, Bell invented a machine that could
clean wheat. He later said that if he had understood electricity at
all, he would have been too discouraged to invent the telephone. Everyone
else “knew” it was impossible to send voice signals over a wire.

While trying to perfect a method for carrying multiple
messages on a single wire, he heard the sound of a plucked spring along
60 feet of wire in a Boston electrical shop. Thomas A. Watson, one of
Bell’s assistants, was trying to reactivate a telegraph transmitter.
Hearing the sound, Bell believed that he could solve the problem of
sending a human voice over a wire. He figured out how to transmit a
simple current first, and received a patent for that invention on March
7, 1876. Five days later, he transmitted actual speech.
Sitting in one room, he spoke into the phone to his assistant in another
room, saying the now famous words: “Mr. Watson, come here. I need
you.” The telephone patent is one of the most valuable patents
ever issued.

Bell had other inventions as well — his own home had a
precursor to modern day air conditioning, he contributed to aviation
technology, and his last patent, at the age of 75, was for the fastest
hydrofoil yet invented.

Bell was committed to the advancement of science and technology.
As such he took over the presidency of a small, almost unheard-of, scientific
society in 1898: the National Geographic Society. Bell and his
son-in-law, Gilbert Grosvenor, took the society’s dry journal and added
beautiful photographs and interesting writing — turning National Geographic
into one of the world’s best-known magazines. He also is one of
the founders of Science magazine.

Bell died on August 2, 1922. On the day of his burial,
all telephone service in the US was stopped for one minute in his honor.

Resources:
— Alexander
Graham Bell CD-Rom excerpt
— Who
Was Alexander Graham Bell?
— Alexander
Graham Bell’s Path to the Telephone
— More
about Alexander Graham Bell

PBS Online – – Site
Credits – – Photo Credits – – Feedback