Inventor and educator, born in Edinburgh, EC Scotland, UK. The son of an elocution teacher and an authority on vocal physiology, he worked as his father's assistant at University College London, where he pursued research in the techniques of teaching speech to the deaf. His family emigrated to Canada (1870) and he went to Boston, MA (1871), obtaining a professorship at Boston University two years later. His interest in the applications of electricity to sound led him to invent a new telegraph system, patented in 1875, and to experiment with methods of transmitting voice sounds. On 10 March 1876, he sent the famous first telephone message to his assistant, Thomas A Watson: Mr Watson, come here, I want you. He established the Bell Telephone Company the following year. The telephone assured his fortune, the US Supreme Court upholding his patent rights against various claimants. He pursued other interests after 1880, including research into methods of teaching the deaf to speak, and also made improvements to Thomas A Edison's phonograph. With Gardiner C Hubbard, his father-in-law and business associate, he founded the journal Science and was president of the National Geographic Society (18971904). Towards the end of his long life he became interested in aviation, invented the tetrahedral kite, and helped support some of the aircraft development schemes of Samuel P Langley and Glenn A Curtiss.
Alexander Graham Bell (March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922) was a Scottish scientist and inventor who emigrated to Canada. Today, Bell is widely considered as one of the foremost developers of the telephone, together with Antonio Meucci, inventor of the first telephone prototype, and Philipp Reis. Six years after having obtained his telephone patent he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In addition to Bell's work in telecommunications technology, he was responsible for important advances in aviation and hydrofoil technology.
Biography
Alexander Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847. Many called Bell "the father of the Deaf."
His family was associated with the teaching of elocution: his grandfather in London, his uncle in Dublin, and his father, Alexander Melville Bell, in Edinburgh, were all professed elocutionists.
Alexander Graham Bell was educated at the Royal High School of Edinburgh, from which he graduated at the age of 13.
From 1867 to 1868, he was an instructor at Somerset College at Bath, Somerset, England.
While still in Scotland he is said to have turned his attention to the science of acoustics, with a view to ameliorate the deafness of his mother.
In 1870, at the age of 23, he emigrated with his family to Canada where they settled at Brantford. Before he left Scotland, Bell had turned his attention to telephony, and in Canada he continued an interest in communication machines. The elder Bell was invited to introduce the system into a large day-school for mutes at Boston, but he declined the post in favor of his son, who became Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at Boston University's School of Oratory.
At Boston University he continued his research in the same field, and endeavored to produce a telephone which would not only send musical notes, but articulate speech. With financing from his American father-in-law, on March 7, 1876, the U.S. Patent Office granted him Patent Number 174,465 covering "the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically … by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound", the telephone.
However, it has been recognized (such as by the U.S. Congress in 2002) that Antonio Meucci was the first to invent the telephone in 1871. Bell invented his own telephone in 1875 after discovering that a receiver could also be a transmitter. In any case Bell then secured his own patent in 1876, just hours before Elisha Gray visited the patent office for his own work on the telephone. Meucci was understandably furious, and took Bell to court. To Bell's credit, he successfully fought off several lawsuits, refined the telephone, and developed it into one of the most successful products. The Bell Telephone Company was created in 1877, and by 1886 over 150,000 people in the U.S. owned telephones and Bell became a millionaire.
After obtaining the patent for the telephone, Bell continued his many experiments in communication, which culminated in the invention of the photophone-transmission of sound on a beam of light — a precursor of today's optical fiber systems. The range of Bell's inventive genius is represented only in part by the eighteen patents granted in his name alone and the twelve he shared with his collaborators.
Bell had many ideas that were later realized in inventions. During his Volta Laboratory period, Bell and his associates considered impressing a magnetic field on a record, as a means of reproducing sound.
Bell's own home used a primitive form of air conditioning, in which fans blew currents of air across great blocks of ice.
In 1882, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
Bell married Mabel Hubbard, who was one of his pupils at Boston University and also a deaf-mute, on July 11, 1877. His invention of the telephone resulted from his attempts to create a device that would allow him to communicate with his wife and his deaf mother.
The photophone
Another of Bell's inventions was the photophone, a device enabling the transmission of sound over a beam of light, which he developed together with Charles Sumner Tainter.
This idea was by no means new. In his paper on the photophone, Bell credited one A. Browne of London with the independent discovery in 1878—the same year Bell became aware of the idea. Bell and Tainter, however, were apparently the first to perform a successful experiment, by no means any easy task, as they even had to produce the selenium cells with the desired resistance characteristics themselves.
In one experiment in Washington, D.C. The sender consisted of a mirror directing sunlight onto the mouthpiece, where the light beam was modulated by a vibrating mirror, focused by a lens and directed at the receiver, which was simply a parabolic reflector with the selenium cells in the focus and the telephone attached. With this setup, Bell and Tainter succeeded to communicate clearly.
The photophone was patented on December 18, 1880, but the quality of communication remained poor and the research was not pursued by Bell.
Metal detector
Bell is also credited with the invention of the metal detector in 1881. Bell gave a full account of his experiments in a paper read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in August 1882.
The hydrofoil
The March 1906 Scientific American article by American hydrofoil pioneer William E. Bell considered the invention of the hydroplane as a very significant achievement.
Bell and Casey Baldwin began hydrofoil experimentation in the summer of 1908 as a possible aid to airplane takeoff from water. This led him and Bell to the development of practical hydrofoil watercraft.
During his world tour of 1910–1911 Bell and Baldwin met with Forlanini in France. A top speed of 54 miles per hour was achieved, with rapid acceleration, good stability and steering, and the ability to take waves without difficulty.In 1913, Dr. Bell hired Walter Pinaud, a Sydney yacht designer and builder as well as the proprietor of Pinaud's Yacht Yard in Westmount, Nova Scotia to work on the pontoons of the HD-4. Pinaud soon took over the boatyard at Bell Laboratories on Beinn Bhreagh, Bell's estate near Baddeck, Nova Scotia. Bell's report to the navy permitted him to obtain two 350 horsepower (260 kW) engines in July 1919.
Aeronautics
Bell was a supporter of aerospace engineering research through the Aerial Experiment Association, officially formed at Baddeck, Nova Scotia in October 1907 at the suggestion of Mrs. Mabel Bell and with her financial support. (The aileron was also invented independently by Robert Esnault-Pelterie.)
Bell experimented with box kites and wings constructed of multiple compound tetrahedral kites covered in silk. Some of Bell's kites are on display at the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site.
Other Inventions
Bell had made many other inventions in his life.
Eugenics
Along with many very prominent thinkers and scientists of the time, Bell was connected with the eugenics movement in the United States. Organizations such as these advocated passing laws (with success in some states) that established the compulsory sterilization of people deemed to be, as Bell called them, a "defective variety of the human race."
His ideas about people he considered defective centered on the deaf. In addition to advocating sterilization of the deaf, Bell wished to prohibit deaf teachers from being allowed to teach in schools for the deaf, he worked to outlaw the marriage of deaf individuals to one another, and he was an ardent supporter of oralism over sign language.
Although he supported what many would consider harsh and inhumane policies today, he was not unkind to deaf individuals who supported his theories of oralism. Bell was known as a kindly father and loving family man who took great pleasure in playing with his many grandchildren.
Tributes
In the early 1970s, UK rock group The Sweet recorded a tribute to Bell and the telephone, suitably titled "Alexander Graham Bell". The song gives a fictional account of the invention, in which Bell devises the telephone so he can talk to his girlfriend who lives on the other side of the United States.
Another musical tribute to Bell was written by the British songwriter and guitarist Richard Thompson. The chorus of Thompson's songreminds the listener that "of course there was the telephone, he'd be famous for that alone, but there's fifty other things as well from Alexander Graham Bell". The song mentions Bell's work with discs rather than cylinders, the hydrofoil, Bell's work with the deaf, his invention of the respirator and several other of Bell's achievements.
Bell was honored on the television programs the 100 Greatest Britons (2002), the top-ten Greatest Canadians (2004), and the 100 Greatest Americans (2005). Bell was the only person to be on more than one of the programs.
There is also a school located in Ajax, Ontario, Canada called Alexander Graham Bell Public School. One of the residence halls at Rochester Institute of Technology adjacent to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf building is Alexander Graham Bell Hall.
Patents
Complete list of Bell patentsUS patent images in TIFF format
U.S. Patent 0161,739 Improvement in Transmitters and Receivers for Electric Telegraphs, filed March 1875, issued April 1875 (multiplexing signals on a single wire) U.S. Patent 0174,465 Improvement in Telegraphy, filed February 14, 1876, issued March 7, 1876 (Bell's first telephone patent) U.S. Patent 0178,399 Improvement in Telephonic Telegraph Receivers, filed April 1876, issued June 1876 U.S. Patent 0181,553 Improvement in Generating Electric Currents (using rotating permanent magnets), filed August 1876, issued August 1876 U.S. Patent 0235,199 Apparatus for Signalling and Communicating, called Photophone, filed August 1880, issued December 1880 U.S. Patent 0757,012 Aerial Vehicle, filed June 1903, issued April 1904
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