Great Scientists of the World : Alexander Graham Bell

By Savneet kaur

This Biography Series narrates the life stories of the great scientists and about their inventions. These books inspire & motivate children and enhance their knowledge and vocabulary skills as well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Diamond Books
• Release date: Jun 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9789355994141

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Alexander Graham Bell

{1847–1922}

Alexander Graham Bell - teacher, scientist, inventor, gentleman - was one whose life was devoted to the benefit of mankind with remarkable success. Known throughout the world as the inventor of the telephone, he also made other inventions and scientific discoveries of first importance, greatly advanced the methods and practices for teaching the deaf and came to be admired and loved throughout the world for his accuracy of thought and expression, his rigid code of honor, punctilious courtesy, and unfailing generosity in helping others.

The invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell was not an accident. It came as a logical result of years of intense application to the problem, guided by an intimate knowledge of speech obtained through his devotion to the problem of teaching the deaf to talk and backed by two generations of distinguished activity in the field of speech.

At the age of 13, Young Alexander Graham Bell spent a year in London with his grandfather. He was already interested in speech through his father’s prominence in this field, and this visit stimulated him to serious studies. Bell afterward spoke of this year as the turning point of his life.

Bell’s father, Alexander Melville Bell (born in Edinburgh, Scotland, 1819, died in Washington, 1905), was a professional assistant to Alexander Bell for a time. He became a lecturer on elocution at the University of Edinburgh. He developed Visible Speech, a series of symbols indicating the speaking organs’ anatomical positions in uttering different sounds. This won him great distinction and, with improvements made by Alexander Graham Bell, is still a basis for teaching the deaf to talk. On his father’s death in 1865, Melville Bell moved to London to take over his professional practice. He also became a lecturer on elocution at University College and achieved distinction as a scientist, author and lecturer on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 1844 he married Miss Eliza Grace Symonds, daughter of a surgeon of the Royal Navy, a talented musician. Alexander Graham Bell, the second of three sons of Melville Bell, was born March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh. From his mother, he inherited musical talent and a keen musical ear. He took lessons on the piano at an early age and, for some time, intended to become a professional musician.

His father’s devotion to the scientific study of speech had an early impact on the boy. From my earliest childhood, said Alexander Graham Bell, my attention was specially directed to the subject of acoustics, and especially to the subject of speech, and I was urged by my father to study everything relating to these subjects, as they would have an important bearing upon what was to be my professional work. He also encouraged me to experiment and offered a prize to his sons for the successful construction of a speaking machine. I made a machine of this kind as a boy and was able to make it articulate a few words. This early experiment illustrates his energy, his ambition, and his inventive ingenuity. Born as just Alexander Bell, at age 10, he made a plea to his father to have a middle name like his two brothers. On his 11th birthday, his father acquiesced and allowed him to adopt the name Graham, chosen out of respect for Alexander Graham, a Canadian being treated by his father who had become a family friend. To close relatives and friends, he remained Aleck.

Alexander Graham Bell as a young child

As a child, young Bell displayed curiosity about his world; he gathered botanical specimens and ran experiments early. His best friend was Ben Herdman, a neighbour whose family operated a flour mill. At the age of 12, Bell built a homemade device that combined rotating paddles with sets of nail brushes, creating a simple dehusking machine that was put into operation at the mill and used steadily for a number of years. Ben’s father, John Herdman, gave both boys the run of a small workshop in which to invent.

From his early years, Bell showed a sensitive nature and a talent for art, poetry, and music that was encouraged by his mother. With no formal training, he mastered the piano and became the family’s pianist. Despite being normally quiet and introspective, he revealed mimicry and voice tricks akin to ventriloquism that continually entertained family guests during their occasional visits. Bell was also deeply affected by his mother’s gradual deafness (she began to lose her hearing when he was 12) and learned a manual finger language so he could sit at her side and tap out silently the conversations swirling around the family parlour. He also developed a speaking technique in clear, modulated tones directly into his mother’s forehead wherein she would hear him with reasonable clarity. Bell’s preoccupation with his mother’s deafness led him to study acoustics.

His family was long associated with the teaching of elocution: his grandfather, Alexander Bell, in London, his uncle in Dublin, and his father, in Edinburgh, were all elocutionists. His father published a variety of works on the subject, several of which are still well known, especially his The Standard Elocutionist (1860),which appeared in Edinburgh in 1868. The Standard Elocutionist appeared in 168 British editions and sold over a quarter of a million copies in the United States alone. In this treatise, his father explains his methods of how instructing deaf mutes (as they were then known) to articulate words and read other people’s lip movements to decipher meaning. Bell’s father taught him and his brothers not only to write Visible Speech but to identify any symbol and its accompanying sound. Bell became so proficient that he became a part of his father’s