Inventor of the telephone: Alexander Graham Bell

Major events in the development of the telephone

How the telephone works

Inside of a telephone (Western Electric model)

Various phone inventions

Bibliography + Other links

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inventor of the Telephone: Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell was born in 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. His parents were educated people and they educated their children as well. His mother was nearly deaf, while his father and grandfather were speech experts. This may have contributed to Bell's early interest in the phenomenon of sound. He was also  interested in art, music, poetry and he had an understanding of science.

He attended University in Edinburgh  and London. In 1870, he moved to the United States with his father and became the professor of vocal physiology at Boston University and he specialized in the mechanics of speech.

Bell once said, "Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into
the woods. Every time you do so you will be certain to find something that you have never seen before. Follow it up, explore all around it, and before you know it, you will have something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the result of thought." Bell's own journey to invention illustrates this curiosity-driven approach.


Hoping his research would lead to an improved telegraph, Bell began studying the phonoautograph. This is device consisted of a human ear with an attached reed which translated sound waves into visual etchings on smoked glass.
Misunderstanding the work of another scientist, Bell assumed sound waves had
already been produced successfully using electricity. If he had known he was
pioneering something that was thought to be impossible, he may never have
succeeded. By June of 1875, Bell had constructed a "harp apparatus," which
created an electrical current using sound waves and a long magnet. With some
modification, this device became what we know as the telephone.

Alexander Graham Bell began by seeking to help the deaf, and he ended up with the telephone. Since then, there has been an incredible revolution in the telecommunications industry. Bell never could have imagined that video
images would be transported over phone lines, or that light would travel through fiber-optic cable carrying information to our fingertips. These words are brought to you by technology which resulted from Bell's "electrical speech machine" of 1876.