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Alexander Graham Bell was born in Scotland on March 3, 1847. He was the
second son of Alexander Melville Bell and the former Eliza Grace Symonds.
He recieved an education at the University of Edinburgh and the University of London.
In the 1860's, while they were still living in Scotland, a terrible disaster struck
the Bell family. Aleck's younger brother, Edward Charles died of
tuberculosis. Soon after this terrible incident, his elder brother, Melville James died
from the same disease. Doctors warned his parents that Aleck, too, was
threatened by the disease.
His father, promptly sacrificed his career as a noted teacher of speech and
researcher into the problems of the deaf. In July, 1870, his father sailed with
his family for Canada in search of a better climate. Upon arrival, the
Bells bought the property at Brantford, now known as the Bell Homestead.
Alexander Graham Bell was, at this time, 23 years old. In this wondrous new
climate, Bell's health was quickly restored.
Like his father, Bell was a teacher of speech, and in the spring of 1871,
he accepted an invitation to teach in Boston and moved there to pursue his
career. In 1872, he opened a school of his own for teachers of the deaf
and, the next year, became Professor of Vocal Physiology at Boston
University. The deafness of his mother no doubt provided an inspiration for
Bell to follow in his father's footsteps with work in speech studies. It
was this work that led Bell to both his bride, Mabel Hubbard - left totally
and permanently deaf from Scarlet Fever when she was five years old - and
to his ideas for the telephone.
At Christmas, during the summer vacations, and at every opportunity, Bell
came home to Brantford. On July 26, 1874, while visiting the Homestead, he
talked far into the night while disclosing the telephone idea to his father.
After young Bell returned to Boston, he began to work in earnest on his new
invention and, on June 3, 1875, succeeded in transmitting speech sounds.
During a visit home to Brantford in September of that same year, he wrote
the specifications for the telephone.
On March 10, 1876, at Boston, through the Liquid Transmitter he had
designed, Alexander Graham Bell uttered the first words to be carried over
a wire - "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!"
In the summer of 1876, back in Brantford again, young Bell conducted three
great tests of the telephone. In the first of these three tests, Bell
received the first successful telephone call carried between two
communities on August 3, 1876 from Brantford to Mount Pleasant. The second
great test was made on August 4, 1876, when a large dinner party at the
Bell Homestead heard speech recitations, songs, and instrumental music from
the telegraph office in Brantford over a line three and one-half miles long.
The third great test is hailed as the first long-distance phone call in the
world made on August 10, 1876 from Brantford to Paris, Ontario. At last!
The invention of the telephone was complete. In his later years, Bell
interested himself in the problem of mechanical flight, carrying out
experiments with man-lifting kites, working with these at his summer home
at Baddeck, Nova Scotia. Bell died at his beloved home at Baddeck on August
2, 1922, and is buried there.
Alexander Graham Bell's dream was to overcome the solitude of those shut
away from all sound - the deaf - and his great achievement, the telephone,
changed the way all people communicate with each other today.
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