The Life and Times of the Man Who Invented the Telephone
Alexander Graham Bell is remembered today as the inventor of the telephone, but he was also an outstanding teacher of the deaf and a prolific inventor of other devices. Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a family of speech educators. His father, Melville Bell, had invented Visible Speech, a code of symbols for all spoken sounds that was used in teaching deaf people to speak. Aleck Bell studied at Edinburgh University in 1864 and assisted his father at University College, London, from 1868-70. During these years he became deeply interested in the study of sound and the mechanics of speech, inspired in part by the acoustic experiments of German physicist Hermann Von Helmholtz (1821-1894), which gave Bell the idea of telegraphing speech.When young Bell's two brothers died of tuberculosis, Melville Bell took his remaining family to the healthier climate of Canada in 1870. From there, Aleck Bell journeyed to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1871 and joined the staff of the Boston School for the Deaf. The following year, Bell opened his own school in Boston for training teachers of the deaf; in 1873 he became a professor of vocal physiology at Boston University, and he also tutored p
This is an excellent book for anyone wanting to learn about the life of the man who invented the telephone. Back in Boston, Bell and Watson continued to work on the harmonic telegraph, but still with the telephone in mind. He and his wife united two numerous and close-knit families. In addition, for many years he presided over brilliant salon of Washington scientist and men affairs. For more than a quarter century he spent weekends in the total seclusion of his household. Bell also worked with the possibility of transmitting the human voice, experimenting with vibrating membranes and an actual human ear. In particular, he experimented with development of the harmonic telegraph --a device that could send multiple messages at the same time over a single wire. Although Bell formed the basic concept of the telephone--using a varying but unbroken electric current to transmit the varying sound waves of human speech--in the summer of 1874, Hubbard insisted that the young inventor focus his efforts on the harmonic telegraph instead. In addition, the gallantry of his long battle against disappointments to make his life after the telephone something more than a long anticlimax enlists our sympathy and admiration. Throughout his life the first transatlantic cable exchanged between Britain and the United States (1858); Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation (1863); San Francisco's cable streetcar system began service (1873); Kentucky Derby was run for first time (1875); the first telephone switchboard installed in Boston (1877); Boston Pops were founded (1885); George Eastman introduced Kodak camera (1888); Sitting Bull killed for performing outlawed Ghost Dance ritual (1890); Edward Kleinschmidt invented teletype machine (1914).
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