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Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922)
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He was President of the National Geographic Society (1898-1903), as was his father-in-law before him and his son-in-law, grandson, and great-grandson after him. He is best known throughout the world as the inventor of the telephone. But Alexander Graham Bell was first, and foremost, a teacher of the deaf.

“Of one thing I become more sure every day—that my interest in the deaf is to be a life-long thing with me.” Alexander Graham Bell

His mother, Eliza Bell, was a good pianist. Aleck shared this talent and a special closeness with her. She began to lose her hearing when he was 12, but Aleck could still talk to her in a low voice close to her forehead, whereas others shouted into her rubber ear tube.

His father, Alexander Melville Bell, was a successful elocutionist and speech teacher in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1864 he attained a long-held goal of phoneticians by developing a complete and universally applicable system of phonetic notation that he called Visible Speech. At 17, Aleck mastered the system and helped his father present it to appreciative linguists in London and Edinburgh.

The young Bell had been enthralled by science and the natural world throughout his childhood. When he was 16, his father challenged him and his older brother, Melville, to build a machine to produce vocal sounds like one they had recently seen in London. After much anatomical study and mechanical experimentation, they succeeded and kindled Aleck’s life-long fascination with mechanisms of speech.

He became a teacher in boys schools in Elgin, Scotland, and then Bath, England, but joined his parents in London after the death of his younger brother, Edward, to tuberculosis. He was now 20 and a teacher of phonetics and elocution, like his father. The next year, however, he took on the challenge of teaching speech to four deaf girls at a private school. With his enthusiasm and expressive face and his mastery of Visible Speech, Bell was a talented teacher. The girls quickly and joyously learned to speak.

A true inventor “can no more help inventing than he can help thinking or breathing.” Alexander Graham Bell

  Alexander Graham Bell led a double life. During the day, he taught deaf children and trained teachers of the deaf. At night, often until 4 a.m., he worked on scientific and technological problems. In these early days the problems usually involved the production and transmission of sound and, more specifically, a method of sending more than one message over a single telegraph line.

In 1870 his elder brother also died of tuberculosis, and the family followed friends to Brantford, Ontario, Canada, in the hope of avoiding the disease. A lecture series by the senior Alexander Bell earned him an invitation to bring the Visible Speech method to a new school for the deaf in Boston. He declined, but Aleck went.

Boston was America’s leading city for scientific and technological research, and Alexander Graham Bell took full advantage of his opportunities. MIT invited him to use its laboratories and equipment. One apparatus, a “phonautograph,” drew an undulating curve on a strip of smoked glass in response to vocal sound, thereby making speech “visible.” Bell’s thinking shifted from the telegraph to the problem of sending sound by electrical wire. At his parents’ home on the Grand River in Brantford during the summer of 1874, all of his past experiences and experiments finally congealed into the concept of the telephone.

Mabel Hubbard Bell

His work with the deaf had allowed Bell to conceive the principle of the telephone. Now his work with the deaf helped him to raise capital to make the idea a practical reality. Two wealthy businessmen, fathers of two of Bell’s deaf students, financed the project. One of them, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, became his father-in-law.

Mabel Hubbard was 17 in 1875 when Bell won her heart and the promise of her hand. Her parents thought she was too young to make such a decision, but Mabel and Bell married in 1877 and were devoted and affectionate throughout their 45 years together. Although two sons died in infancy, the Bells raised two daughters: Elsie, who grew up to become Mrs. Gilbert H. Grosvenor, and Marion (called Daisy), who married botanist David Fairchild. Summers were spent at an estate Bell built near Baddeck, Nova Scotia, on Cape Breton Island, an area reminiscent of his native Scotland. He named it Beinn Bhreagh (pronounced Ben VREE-ah), Gaelic for “beautiful mountain.” Elderly parents, children, later ten grandchildren, and fellow inventors sometimes filled the house to bursting.

After the Phone

Bell’s curiosity and energy for experimentation and innovation never waned. He worked with a team that improved on Thomas Edison’s phonograph, making it a marketable machine and making himself another fortune. Beinn Bhreagh became a center for the design and testing of kites and airplanes and hydrofoils and towers built from tetrahedral cells. His interests ranged from medicine to measurement of degrees of deafness to heredity. And, he gave his wisdom and vision to the upstart National Geographic Society, declaring that “the world and all that is in it is our theme.”