Alexander+Graham+Bell

Background Information[[image:da103-keyinnovatorscaitophilminer/Alexander_Graham_Bell.jpg width="225" height="229" align="right" caption="Alexander Graham Bell"]]
Alexander Graham Bell is remembered by most as the inventor of the telephone. He was also an excelent teacher who worked with the deaf. He is also credited with the creation of other inventions such as the: graphophone, this was the first sound recorder, he also invented photo-phone, which dispatched speech by light rays. His other great inventions also included audiometer, this was a device used to measure hearing; the induction balance, this was used to locate metal objects in the human body; and disc and cylindrical wax recorders for phonographs.

Early life
Bell was born in 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. His family was famous for being great speech educators and musicians. His father, Alexander Melville Bell, taught speech to people who could not hear and/or talk. He also wrote textbooks on correct way to talk. Bell 's mother was a portrait painter and a great musician. Bell was home schooled early on and he graduated at age fourteen from the Royal High School in Edinburgh. Bell then enrolled as a student teacher at Weston House, which was a boy's school that was close by.This is where he taught music and speech and, in return, was given help in other subjects.

Experiments with Harmonic Text
Bell 's father created “visible” speech, a code of symbols for all spoken sounds, this was used to teach deaf people to speak. Bell studied at Edinburgh University in 1864 and helped his father at University College, London, from 1868 to 1870. During those years, he became facinated with the study of sound, especially the affects hearing and speech. Bell followed his facnination throughout his life, he was inspired by the acoustic experiments of German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), this gave Alexander the idea of telegraphing speech. His interest in speech and communication led him to investigate the transmission of sound over wires. With financial help from Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, these were very grateful fathers of two deaf pupils he taught, Bell experimented with creating the harmonic telegraph, a device that could send many messages at the same time over just one. Using vibrating membranes and an actual human ear in his tests, Bell also investigated the possibility of transmitting the human voice by wire.

Invention of the telephone
Early in 1874, after having moved to the United States a few years earlier, Bell met Thomas A. Watson (1854–1934),who was a young machinist and technician with a lot of knowledge in electrical engineering. Watson became Bell 's most important assistant and the two spent a lot of time together experimenting with sending sound. During the summer of 1874, Bell created the basic principle of the telephone using a diffrent but unbroken electric current to transmit the sound waves of human speech over a wire. At the urging of his financial supporters who were more interested in the possibility of the harmonic telegraph, Bell did not really think about the idea of the telephone for many months. He rebegan work on it in 1875 and, by September, began to write the required patent specifications. Bell received his patent on March 7, 1876, and on March 10, the first official message was sent by telephone passed from Bell to Watson in their workshop: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!”

Founds Bell Telephone
After a year of tuning the new device, Watson and Bell, along with Hubbard and Sanders, created the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. The Bell Compan y built the first

long-distance line in 1884, which connected Boston and New York. Bell and others organized the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885 which was used to operate on other long distance phone lines. By 1889, when insulation was perfected, 11,000 miles of underground wires travelled through New York City. Bell 's claim to his "creation" of the telephone created a anger and was challenged in more than six hundred lawsuits. The courts eventually approved Bell 's patent, and the Bell Company's principal competitor, Western Union Telegraph, ande agreed to not get involved in his business. The Bell Company, in turn, stopped work on the telegraph. In 1899, with the sale of the Bell Company to a group of investors. He would now be finacially secure and he could now devote all of his time to inventing.

Bell 's later interests
The magazine //Science// (later the official organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) was founded in 1880 on Bell's efforts.He was the National Geographic Society president from 1896 to 1904, Bell furthered its success of the group and its publications. In 1898, he became a regent of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. He was also started sheep breeding, hydrodynamics (the dynamics of fluids in motion), and aviation projects.

In 1922 Alexander Graham Bell died in Nova Scotia, Canada