Alexander Graham Bell, an Inventor of The Telephone

Alexander Graham Bell was a very important inventor. His life was very different than ours are today. Bell’s life was very interesting. Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3,1847 in Edinburgh,Scotland and died on August 2,1922 in Nova Scotia,Canada at the age of 75. He had two brothers, his mom’s name was Eliza Grace Symonds, and his dad’s name was Alexander Melville Bell. Alexander got married on July 11,1877 to Mabel Gardiner Hubbard and they had two daughters, Elsie and Marian, and at his wife’s request,Bell went by the nickname Alec. By the time he was 20, he was in very poor health and returned to his home which was now in London. When he was 23 both of his younger brothers had died of tuberculosis, which left him the only child still alive. At age 23 Bell and his parents moved to Canada. By 1870 Bell’s health began to improve. He proceeded his death in 1922 after his brothers because he was ill for some months with complication from diabetes.

Bell’s life reflected his education. Bell went to a lot of schools. Bell was homeschooled by his father until he was 11. When he was 16 he enrolled at Weston House Academy in Elgin,Scotland, where he learned Greek and Latin. At the age of 16, Bell got a job as a student and a teacher of elocution and music in Weston House Academy. He attended Edinburgh’s Royal High School for 4 years. He also attended the University of Edinburgh. Bell studied the human voice and worked with various schools for the deaf. He studied the human ear to discover the importance of the membrane and learned to transmit multiple electrical messages through a single wire. With the good education he got, Bell had good careers.

Alexander Graham Bell’s most important career was being a scientific inventor. Bell moved to new schools most years, either teaching elocution or improving his own education. At Weston House Academy Bell earned money for teaching elocution. When he was 25, Bell opened his school of vocal physiology and mechanics of speech in Boston, Massachusetts, where he taught deaf people to speak. He taught at Somersetshire College in Bath,England from 1866-1867. Bell help form the National Geographic Society. He became the first president of the American Association to promote teaching of speech to the deaf in 1890. Bell’s careers helped him invent what he did. Bell invented a lot of important things that we use a lot today. His most important invention is the telephone.

Thomas Watson helped him invent the telephone. Some of Alexander Graham Bell’s other inventions are the audiometer which is a device used to detect hearing problems, a device to help locate icebergs, the metal detector, and did experimental work on aeronautics. He was the founder of the Bell Telephone Company which is now AT&T. At age 23, Bell built a workshop in the new family home in Ontario and experimented there with converting music into an electrical signal. During the mid 1800s, he improved Thomas Edison’s Phonograph. In 1888 Bell was one of the founders of the National Geographic Society, and in 1897 became its second president. Some of his quotes include, “Before anything else preparation is the key to success”, and “ A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with- a man is what he makes of himself”. Bell was serious but also had a lot of interesting things about him.

Alexander Graham Bell was an inventor, but there are other things that make him unique. He became an excellent piano player at a young age. Bell did not get the middle name Graham until he was 10 when he asked his father to give him a middle name like his brothers. His mother and wife were both deaf. His grandfather, father, and Bell himself all taught elocution.

Alexander’s father, Alexander Melville Bell, was a professor of speech elocution at the University of Edinburgh, he also wrote definitive books about speech and elocution, which sold very well in UK and North America. As a teacher of the deaf, Bell did not want deaf people to teach in schools for the deaf, he also against the use of sign language. While living in Brentford, Bell learned the Mohawk language and put it in writing for the first time, the Mohawk people made him an honorary chief. Bell invented the metal detector because after President James Garfield was shot they needed something to locate the bullet precisely, unfortunately the bullet in the president’s body was too deep to be detected by the early detecting equipment. Bell died of complications from diabetes. Upon his death, every phone in North America was silenced for a short period of time to honor him. Alexander Graham Bell will be remembered for what he invented.