Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell was a prolific American inventor and a teacher of the deaf. Bell taught speech to deaf students using the “visible speech” method invented by his father and opened a school in Boston to train teachers of the deaf. Through his research on hearing, he experimented with sound technology. Discovering that sound could be transmitted through telegraph wires, he developed the telephone in 1876. Bell and his father-in-law formed the Bell Telephone Company in 1877, and in 1885 he helped to establish the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). He was a cofounder of the academic journal Science, and in 1888 he was a founding member and president of the National Geographic Society.