Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone and considered his work with the deaf more important. Born in Edinburgh in 1847, he was the son and grandson of speech teachers; his father devised Visible Speech, a notation for the positions of the vocal organs, and his mother was almost entirely deaf, communicating through an ear tube and by feeling vibrations. Both his brothers died of tuberculosis, and the family emigrated to Canada in 1870. He taught at a school for the deaf in Boston, became professor of vocal physiology at Boston University, and worked privately with deaf pupils, among them Mabel Hubbard, whom he married, and later Helen Keller. His experiments arose from that work — attempts to make sound visible, and a harmonic telegraph intended to send several messages down one wire by pitch. Thomas Watson, a machinist, built the apparatus. The patent was filed on 14 February 1876, hours before Elisha Gray filed a caveat on a similar device, and the timing has been disputed ever since. Days later, on 10 March, Bell spoke the first intelligible sentence transmitted electrically, asking Watson to come. He demonstrated it at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where Dom Pedro of Brazil put the receiver to his ear and exclaimed. He used the Volta Prize money to found a laboratory that developed the photophone, transmitting speech on a beam of light, and a metal detector used in an attempt to locate the bullet in President Garfield. He advocated eugenic positions on deaf marriage that deaf communities still hold against him. He died in 1922.

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