Alexander Melville Bell

Educationist, born in Edinburgh, EC Scotland, UK, the father of Alexander Graham Bell. A teacher of elocution at Edinburgh University and University College London, he moved to Canada in 1870, then settled in Washington, DC. In 1867 he published Visible Speech, a system showing the position of the vocal organs for each sound.

He studied under and became the principal assistant of his father, Alexander Bell, an authority on phonetics and defective speech. Some have speculated that Alexander Melville Bell was the model for Professor Higgins, the elocutionist who taught Eliza in George Bernard Shaw's play "Pygmalion", which subsequently was used as the basis for the musical and later film: "My Fair Lady". Evidence supporting this includes the fact Eliza is not a common name, and Eliza Grace Bell was Alexander Melville Bell's wife.

Bell was a reknowned authority on physiological phonetics and was the author of numerous works on orthoepy, elocution and education, including:

Steno-Phonography (1852) Letters and Sounds (1858) The Standard Elocutionist (1860) Principles of Speech and Dictionary of Sounds (1863) Visible Speech: The Science of Universal Alphabetics (1867) Sounds and their Relations (1881) Lectures on Phonetics (1885) A Popular Manual of Visible Speech and Vocal Physiology (1889) World English: the Universal Language (1888) The Science of Speech (1897) The Fundamentals of Elocution (1899)

See John Hitz, Alexander Melville Bell (Washington, 1906).

Melville Bell and Eliza were the parents of the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell.