Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Bell, Alexander Melville

BELL, Alexander Melville, educator, b. in Edinburgh, Scotland, 1 March, 1819. He was educated under the care of his father, Alexander Bell, the inventor of a method for removing impediments of speech. From 1843 till 1865 he lectured in Edinburgh at the university and at New college, and in the latter year was appointed lecturer at university college, London. He removed to Canada in 1870, and became instructor at Queen's college, Kingston. He is the inventor of “Visible Speech,” a method of instruction in orthoëpy, which has also been successfully used in teaching deaf-mutes to speak. He has published “Principles of Speech and Elocution” (Edinburgh, 1849); “Popular Stenography,” and other books on shorthand; “Visible Speech and Universal Alphabetics”; “Line Writing on the Basis of Visible Speech”; “Faults of Speakers” (Salem, Mass.); “The Standard Elocutionist”; and other works. In 1881 he removed to Washington, D. C. He now (1886) has in press, to be published in New York, “Essays and Postscripts on Elocution”; “Lectures on Phonetics”; and “English Line Writing.”