The Life of Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell was born in 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was educated at the university of Edinburgh and University College in London. His father Melville created a system of speech to communicate with the deaf people in London and Alexander helped out his father in the communications industry. In 1870 Alexander Graham Bell went to Canada and in 1871 he went to the United States where he gave lectures in Boston and communicating with the deaf and how to speak.

In 1865 Alexander Graham Bell spoke to numerous colleges and students whom he lectured at Boston University on communication ideas to regular people on a normal day to day basis. It is at this time when Bell came up with the idea of speech transmitted by electric waves. In 1875 he used harmonic telegraph in his communication inventions which Bell used in his transmission and reproduction of communication ideas. On March 10, 1876 he developed an apparatus in which he communicated with one of his friends Watson and on the apparatus he spoke the first words, “Watson, come here; I want you.”

These were the first spoken words over the modern day telephone. This event occurred in Boston at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Alexander Graham Bell also gave several seminars and speeches in Philadelphia at teh Contennial Exposition where he introduced his invention of the telephone to the American public and his intentions of mass producing it so that every American would have his invention in his or her home. In 1877 Bell furthered his invention of the telephone with the start of his own company called the Bell Telephone Company in July of that year. There his invention of the telephone was mass produced and was able to be sold cheaply to the public.

For the next couple of years however, Alexander Graham Bell tried to improve his invetion of the telephone but at the same time other inventions at the time sued him and his invetion and Bell was involved in patent litigation in court wqhich prevented him from making improvements on his invention. Thus, fellow inventor Thomas Edison made improvements on the telephone invention.

During that year Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the Volta Prize award by an estimated 50,000 people who voted for the award. Bell also created the Volta Laboratory in Washington D.C. where he invented the sound recorded called the Graphophone which was also one of Alexander Graham Bell’s prototypes. Other of his inventions included the audiometer, an induction balance, and a cylindrical wax used for phonographs. For most of the rest of Bell’s life, he continued the work of his father and helped invented better communication devices with the deaf and how people were effected because of heredity.

In 1898 Bell served as president of the National Geogrpahic Society from 1898 to 1903 and held the position of regent at the Smithsonian institution in 1898 as well. In 1895 his interests were dominated by aviation and his invention of the tetrahedral kite and in 1907 he founded the Aerial Experiment Association.

In 1922 Alexander Graham Bell, one of the greatest inventors of American history past away.