Alexander Graham Bell Biography
Alexander Graham Bell was born a scientist, inventor, engineer, and innovator who is credited with inventing and patenting the first practical telephone. He also founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1885.
Alexander Graham Bell Age
Bell was born on March 3, 1847, and died on August 2, 1922 at the age of 75 years
Alexander Graham Bell Wife
On July 11, 1877, a few days after the Bell Telephone Company was established, Bell married Mabel Hubbard (1857–1923) at the Hubbard estate in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His wedding present to his bride was to turn over 1,487 of his 1,497 shares in the newly formed Bell Telephone Company.
Alexander Graham Bell Children
He and Mabel had four children, Robert, Elsie, Marian and Edward.
Alexander Graham Bell’s Early Years
Bell was born on March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland, the second born son of Alexander Melville Bell, a teacher of elocution, and Eliza Grace Symonds, a hearing-impaired pianist.
While not the best student, Bell had an uncanny talent for problem solving. At 12 years old, he invented a farming device for his friend’s father that quickly and efficiently removed the husks from wheat grain.
Alexander Graham Bell Education
After being homeschooled and attending private school for a year, Bell went on to the Royal High School at Edinburgh but eventually dropped out because he didn’t enjoy the mandatory curriculum.
Although Bell had a tense relationship with his own father, he was heavily influenced by him and his grandfather, both of whom devoted their careers to voice mechanics and elocution. Bell followed in their footsteps and became a teacher for the deaf.
After the deaths of his older brother Melville James and younger brother Edward Charles from tuberculosis, Bell and his family moved to Ontario, Canada, in 1870, seeking a healthier climate. A year later, Bell found his way to the U.S. and began teaching at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes and similar facilities in the area.
While a teacher, Bell met 15-year-old Mabel Hubbard, one of his deaf students. Despite a 10-year age gap, the two fell in love and were married in 1877. The couple would go on to have four children: daughters Elsie and Marian, as well as two sons who died as infants.
Alexander Graham Bell Inventing the Telephone
While a teacher for the hearing impaired, Bell was asked by a group of investors — one of whom was his father-in-law Gardiner Hubbard — to help perfect the harmonic telegraph. The device was one of the most exciting innovations of the day, allowing for multiple messages to be sent over wire simultaneously.
But Bell was more keen on developing a voice transmitting device, which he would later call the telephone. After some negotiation, the investors allowed for Bell to work on both technologies, with more focus on the popular harmonic telegraph.
However, in the end, the telephone won out. As Bell would later explain, “If I could make a current of electricity vary in intensity precisely as the air varies in density during the production of sound, I should be able to transmit speech telegraphically.”
On March 7, 1876, Bell was awarded a patent on the device, and three days later, he made his first successful telephone call to his assistant, electrician Thomas Watson, who would hear Bell’s famous words transmitted through the wire: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.”
Alexander Graham Bell
Bell Telephone Company
Soon after establishing the Bell Telephone Company in 1877, Bell found himself in what would become an almost 20-year legal battle with other inventors who claimed they had invented the telephone before or around the same time as Bell, his most notable rival being Elisha Grey. However, in the end, none of the lawsuits proved successful.
The telephone proved wildly successful, and within 10 years, more than 100,000 people in the United States owned telephones. But a few years after founding Bell Telephone Company, Bell quickly lost interest in managing the business aspect of his enterprise and sold his shares.
In 1880 he invested his sizable fortune into building a new scientific experimental facility called the Volta Laboratory, aimed to improving the lives of the hearing impaired. The laboratory ran many experiments using light to transmit sound.
Graphophone
Outside of the telephone, one of Bell’s other famous inventions was the graphophone, patented in 1886, which was a device that could record and play back sound. The graphophone was an improved and more commercialized version of the phonograph invented by Thomas Edison.
Coincidentally, while Bell helped improve Edison’s phonograph, Edison improved Bell’s telephone by inventing the microphone, which allowed users to speak in a normal voice rather than shouting to be heard on a call.
Alexander Graham Bell Other Inventions
After the fatal shooting of President James A. Garfield in 1881, Bell got to work on a device that could detect metal in the body for surgical use. Calling it “an electrical bullet probe,” Bell developed what would become a precursor to the metal detector.
In the 1890s, Bell began focusing his studies on aviation. In 1907 he formed the Aerial Experiment Association and helped develop flying machines like the Silver Dart. At 75, he created the world’s fastest hydrofoil at the time.
Bell’s Later Years
In 1888, Bell became one of the founding members of the National Geographic Society and later served as its president between 1898 and 1903. Along with his son-in-law, Gilbert Grosvenor, Bell transformed the society’s journal, National Geographic, into a world-renowned publication. Bell also helped launch Science magazine, still one of the world’s premier science publications.
Controversially, Bell was named honorary president of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, held in New York in 1921, which advocated sterilization of people deemed “defective.” The eugenics movement, popular in the early 20th century, aimed to reduce or eliminate disease and disability from the human population through sterilization and other means.
Alexander Graham Bell Death
Bell died peacefully at his vacation home in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, on August 2, 1922. As a quiet but powerful tribute to Bell, people all over Canada and the United States refrained from using their telephones during his funeral.
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Alexander Graham Bell Facts
- Alexander Graham Bell was an influential scientist, engineer and inventor.
- He was born on March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He died on August 2, 1922 at the age of 75.
- He is widely credited with the invention of the first practical telephone.
- Bell’s mother and wife were both deaf, this had a major influence on his work.
- He didn’t have the middle name “Graham” until he turned 11 when his father gave it to him as a birthday present. He’d earlier asked to have a middle name like his two brothers.
- Bell became an excellent piano player at a young age.
- When he was 23, Bell and his parents moved to Canada.
- Bell studied the human voice and worked with various schools for the deaf.
- Bell experimented with sound, working with devices such as a ‘harmonic telegraph’ (used to send multiple messages over a single wire) and a ‘phonautograph’ (used to record sound).
- He worked on acoustic telegraphy with his assistant, an electrical designer named Thomas Watson.
- On February 14, 1876, Bell and an American electrical engineer named Elisha Gray both filed patents with the U.S. Patent Office covering the transmission of sounds telegraphically. There is debate about who got there first but the patent was awarded to Bell. A few days later he succeeded in getting his telephone to work using elements similar to those of Gray’s water transmitter.
- Bell’s first words with the working telephone were spoken to his assistant Watson and were along the lines of “Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you.”
- Bell improved on the design and by 1886 more than 150000 people owned telephones in the United States.
- Bell also had a strong interest in other scientific fields, conducting medical research, searching for alternative fuel sources, experimenting with metal detectors, developing hydrofoil watercraft and much more.
- Famous Alexander Graham Bell quotes include: “Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.”
- “A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with – a man is what he makes of himself.”
- “The day will come when the man at the telephone will be able to see the distant person to whom he is speaking.”
- “The inventor looks upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea. The spirit of invention possesses him, seeking materialization.