Alexander graham bell profession

Alexander Graham Bell, (born March 3, 1847, Edinburgh, Scot.—died Aug. 2, 1922, Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia, Can.), Scottish-born U.S. audiologist and inventor. He moved to the U.S. in 1871 to teach the visible-speech system developed by his father, Alexander Melville Bell (1819–1905). He opened his own school in Boston for training teachers of the deaf (1872) and was influential in disseminating these methods. In 1876 he became the first person to transmit intelligible words through electric wire (“Watson, come here, I want you,” spoken to his assistant Thomas Watson). He patented the telephone the same year, and in 1877 he cofounded Bell Telephone Co. With the proceeds from France’s Volta Prize, he founded Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C., in 1880. His experiments there led to the invention of the photophone (which transmitted speech by light rays), the audiometer (which measured acuteness of hearing), the Graphophone (an early practical sound recorder), and working wax recording media, both flat and cylindrical, for the Graphophone. He was chiefly responsible for founding the journal Science, founded the American Association to Promote Teaching of Speech to the Deaf (1890), and continued his significant research on deafness throughout his life. Related Article Summaries

Alexander Graham Bell received the fundamental U.S. patent for the telephone and telephone system in 1876. Bell’s background was in hearing and speech, not electrical technologies. He came from a family of professional speech teachers, and his mother and his wife were both deaf. His early professional career focused on educating those with hearing and speech impairments. In the early 1870s, while teaching in Boston, Bell had been studying acoustics at the Institute of Technology (now MIT). His experiments there, especially collaborating with a physician to construct a phonautograph based on the operation of the human ear, gave him the idea for the electric telephone and influenced his work on sound recording. Bell’s ear phonautograph (replica). While studying a French phonautograph at the Institute of Technology (now MIT) in Boston, Bell made his own version of the machine in 1874 to enable his deaf students to visualize sound vibrations translated into mechanical motion. His instrument used a corpse’s ear; sound caused the eardrum to vibrate, and an attached stylus traced a line representing those vibrations on a soot-coated glass plate.

When the word "inventor" is mentioned, Alexander Graham Bell, creator of the telephone, is undoubtedly one of the first names that springs to mind. Bell was born on March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland and was educated at the University of Edinburgh and the University of London. He immigrated to Canada in 1870 and to the United States in 1871. He was an early student of sound and speech, inspired, perhaps, by the fact that his mother, Eliza, was almost totally deaf, and his father, Melville, developed the first international phonetic alphabet. In his early 20s, Bell himself taught deaf children to speak and gave speech lessons at schools in his community. As a boy, Bell built a speaking robot and found that he could touch his dog's throat in ways that seemed to form his barks and growls into words. Once, he successfully obtained a human ear from a medical school, which he used to conduct experiments tracing sound patterns. Bell was also a gifted pianist, who learned to discriminate pitch very well. As a teenager, he noticed that a chord struck on a piano in one room would be echoed by a piano in another room. He realized that chords could be transmitted through the air, vibrating at the other end at exactly the same pitch. With this discovery, Bell set out to develop a multiple telegraph, using Morse code to convey several messages simultaneously, each at a different pitch. He knew his greatest challenge would be finding a way to convey pitch across a wire. He ascertained,...