Alexander Graham Bell

                            

    Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was the second and only surviving son in a family of three boys.His two brothers died of tuberculosis. he was named Alexander after his grandfather. He himself adopted the name 'Graham' while at school. He was called Graham by his family and those who were close to him.

 Both his father and Grandfather were teachers of elocution. They gave speech therapy to cure problems such as stuttering. They also did research in speech. His father had developed a system of writing which he called'Visible Speech'.

It was designed to help phoneticians (people who teach how to pronounce a language) and deaf people who cannot hear speech. In Visible Speech, sound made by the movements of lips and tongue was shown by a symbol.

 Graham's mother had artistic talents. She painted landscapes. She also played the piano well.

 Little Graham liked to watch his mother's fingers move over the piano keys. When she played she seemed filled with music. He would be standing close, looking up adoringly at her face, and sometimes she would stop and cuddle her little son and let him run his fingers over the piano. His mother would guide his little fingers over the keys and produce lovely music, and Graham would shout with joy,"Mom, I can play too!" Soon he was able to play the piano. He had inherited the talent from his mother, and sometimes mother and son entertained guests with their music.

 But his mother spoke rarely. She would answer only with a smile. As a child Graham did not understand why, in their home which was usually noisy, his mother alone was so silent. Only when he was a little older did he come to know that she was deaf,and a deaf person becomes a silent person. The knowledge of his mother's condition made him very loving and tender towards her, and in the family he was the one able to communicate best with her.He discovered that by speaking in a low voice close to her forehead she could hear him without her ear-tube.

 Graham was fifteen when he joined school. It was a school near Edinburgh, called Weston House. He paid his school fees by working for the school; he taught speech and music at the school in exchange for being taught other subjects. On completing school in he studied at the Edinburgh University for a year. 

 When he was eighteen, the family moved to London.The damp climate of London did not agree with the young man; the doctor advised his father to move from London to a healthier climate. When Graham was twenty-three, the family migrated to Canada. His father had an additional reason for shifting to North America: he thought there would be more scope for him there for his speech training.

 But Graham didn't want to go. He was in love, and didn't want to leave the girl he loved and go away. In those days, once they migrated to America, people did not expect to return and see their friends again.Besides, he was studying for a course at the London University. But he couldn't let his parents go alone to a far country and settle down there. So he gave up his studies and wrote a sad farewell letter to his girlfriend and sailed with them to Canada. With a heavy heart, he stood on the deck of the ship and watched the coast of England receding till it disappeared.

 The Bell family set up their new home at Bradford in Canada.

 Mr. Bell, Graham's father, had already been to the United States and Canada two years earlier on a lecture tour. Inspired by his lecture, a teacher named Sarah Fuller had started a school for the deaf in Boston. She was happy to know that Mr. Bell was in Canada and she got in touch with him on receiving Sarah's letter, Graham went to Boston to teach at 'Sarah Fuller's Boston School for Deaf Mutes.'

 Graham liked the change. He liked to be of service to the deaf because his own mother was one of them and his tenderness for her now included everyone who suffered from deafness. "My feelings and sympathies are everyday more and more aroused," he wrote to his parents, "It makes my heart ache to see the difficulties the little children have to contend with."

 He felt he had found his vocation in life. He succeeded remarkably in making deaf children speak. The parents of some of these children had tried everything and had almost given up hope before they came to him. His reputation spread far beyond Boston and as a result, in 1873, when he was twenty-six, he was appointed professor of speech at Boston University's School of Oratory.

 Many young people who were deaf and had problem with speech came to him at the University. Among them was a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl called Mabel Hubbard. Graham agreed to take her as pupil and to try improve her speech.

 Mabel was the only daughter of Gardiner Greene Hubbard-a senator, a successful lawyer-politician, and one of the leading businessmen in America.

 The senator had only one sorrow-his daughter's deafness, which hindered her speech. She had become totally deaf when she was five, as a result of scarlet fever.

 Hubbard had everything that wealth and influence could do to give Mabel the best education possible. He hired a private lady tutor for her and also sent Mabel to a special school in Germany. He even started a school for the deaf near his home. Mabel was a very intelligent girl, too. Academically she did well in school. Only her speech was very poor.

 Meeting Mabel and being her tutor was decisive for Graham Bell in many ways. To begin with her, he fell in love with her. But to marry her was not easy because he was only an ordinary professor, while she came from an honourable and wealthy family. This situation spurred him on his research to find a method to telegraphing speech. Three scientists, Edison, Elisha Gray and Graham himself were working towards the same goal of inventing the telephone. Graham was striving to be the first to arrive at the secret so that he could obtain the patent. The patent would make him rich enough to ask for Mabel's hand in marriage.

 Finally his research bore fruit, and he submitted his application for the patent on March 3, 1876 and it was approved on the same date. On March 10, he sent the world's first telephonic message. The next year, on 11 July, 1877, he married Mabel. They went to Europe for their honeymoon. During this trip they visited London and demonstrated the telephone to Queen Victoria.

 As a boy, Bell had dreamt of becoming a great scientist. He was already one at the age of only thirty-one. What was he going to do with the rest of his life? Many people would have been happy to tour around the world or settle down to a life of leisure and enjoyment. He couldn't be happy with that. "I must," he told Mabel,"accomplish something." But Bell was bored with the telephone, and many of the improvement that developed the telephone were the work of Edison. Edison had been Bell's rival but now he was happy to leave Edison to it.

 The Bell Telephone Company had been founded in July 1877, under the initiative of Mr Hubbard, to look after the business and marketing of the telephone, just two days before the wedding of Bell and Mabel Hubbard. But Graham had no enthusiasm for the telephone business; he had never had an urge to make money, anyway. So he bowed out of the business, resigning from the board of Directors, moved to a new house in Washington and wondered how he would spend the rest of his life.

 He never lost his concern for the deaf. At his own expense he started a school for deaf children in Scotland, and one in Washington. He remained active in the education of the deaf children for the rest of his life. Prizes and medals came to him from all over the world. He was made a member of the French Legion of Honour and also President of America's National Geographic Society.

 Bell had invented the telephone in a room above a restaurant. He didn't have a scientifically equipped laboratory. Now he thought of providing researchers and would-be inventors with well-equipped laboratories. He had one built and equipped in Washington and another in Nova Scotia. Many young researchers made use of these laboratories and in the years to follow, many useful ideas were to come from them. The lab idea, however, wasn't originally Bell's. It was Edison who had first started a laboratory to help inventions.

 Bell lived long enough to see the radio, which was the next invention in the communication line that changed human life. Alexander Graham Bell passed away on August 2, 1922.

 The funeral took place two days later at Baddeck Bay, a seaside house, where he had gone with Mabel to spend the summer. By then the telephone he had invented was being used for communication throughout the world.

 As the funeral service began, the entire telephone network of Canada and the United States closed down, for one minute, as a tribute to the man who had started the communication revolution.