ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL
ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL, physicist, inventor, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, March 3, 1847. His father was the distinguished Scotch educator, Alexander Melville Bell, especially noted for the invention of a new method for removing impediments in speech, called "Bell's Visible Speech." His mother was the daughter of Samuel Symonds, a surgeon in the British navy. He was chiefly educated at the Edinburgh high school and the University of Edinburgh, but when he was twenty years of age he went to London and continued his education for a time at London university.
In 1872, with his father, he went to Canada, and at the age of twenty-five took up his residence in the United States, becoming professor of vocal physiology in Boston university. Following the art of his father he carried to a high degree of perfection in this country the method of enabling the deaf and dumb to enunciate intelligently words and sounds which they themselves had never heard. In connection with this work he made many experiments in acoustics, and particularly touching the transmission of sound by electricity; but, down to 1875, nothing of practical value was achieved. Within that year he experimented much with multiple telegraphy, and began to transmit vibrations between two armatures. In November he made the discover^' that the vibrations created in a reed by the voice could be transmitted so as to reproduce sounds and words; and with an old cigar box, two hundred feet of wire, and a couple of toy magnets, the first Bell telephone was ushered into existence. This apparatus was improved in form, patented February 14, 1876, and exhibited at the Centennial exposition, at Philadelphia, in the same year, and even at that time was declared by Sir William Thompson to be "perhaps the greatest marvel hitherto achieved by the electric telegraph."
In 1877 Mr. Bell brought the telephone to a condition of actual practical value. The public was at first slow to appreciate its great importance. Its commercial value was soon demonstrated, how-
