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Scientists A-Z
B Is for Alexander Graham Bell

Facts:

Alexander Graham Bell is known as the inventor of the telephone. He was born in Scotland on March 3, 1847. Bell’s mother was almost completely deaf, and his father taught deaf students how to speak clearly and in a way that could be understood. In 1870, his family moved to Canada. In 1871, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts, and started working on a device for transmitting speech.

Bell’s work was funded primarily by Gardiner Hubbard, one of the founders of the Clarke School for the Deaf, where Bell taught for a period of time. Bell worked to help Hubbard’s daughter who was also deaf, and they eventually married. Bell’s initial work was on the telegraph, and this led to his work on the telephone.

Bell started by working on harmonic transmission, which centered on sending signals at different frequencies through a telegraph wire. The idea was to send multiple telegraph signals at once, each one on a different frequency. From that point on, it was a simple leap to try to send the human voice over wires.

Bell was aided in his work by his lab assistant, Thomas A. Watson. Together, they worked on transmitting speech through a device.

Finally, on March 10, 1876, they produced speech. The first signal was from Bell to Watson. The message is remembered as something similar to, “Mr. Watson, come here—I want to see you.”