Abstract
THE name of Alexander Graham Bell, who was born in Edinburgh on March 3, 1847, will always be associated with two memorable achievements : the invention of the telephone and the education of the deaf. His interest in the human voice was inspired by his father and grandfather, both authorities in phonetics and elocution. From his mother he inherited a remarkable appreciation of tone values. In 1868 he began to teach his father's system of Visible speech' for the deaf at a school in Kensington. Two years later he accompanied his parents to Canada, and in 1873 he was appointed professor of vocal physiology at Boston University. It was his simultaneous study of the air waves in the ear during the utterance of voice sounds, and of a tuned system of multiple telegraphy, which led to the invention of tne telephone. In June 1875 he made his first telephone at Boston, and on March 10, 1876, sent the first intelligible message : "Mr. Watson, come here ; I want you". His novel machine was demonstrated before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston two months later, and was introduced to the world at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. The Bell Telephone Company was inaugurated in the following year. With the Volta Prize of 50,000 francs awarded by the French Government in 1880, Bell financed the Volta Bureau in Washington for the increase and diffusion of knowledge relating to the deaf. Interested in the subject of marriage of the deaf, he took up the study of eugenics, while after 1895 aviation chiefly engaged his attention.
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Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922). Nature 159, 297 (1947). https://doi.org/10.1038/159297a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/159297a0