The Life And Times Of The Man
Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) Alexander Graham Bell is remembered today as the inventor of the telephone, but he was also an outstanding teacher of the deaf and a prolific inventor of other devices. Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a family of speech educators. His father, Melville Bell, had invented Visible Speech, a code of symbols for all spoken sounds that was used in teaching deaf people to speak. Aleck Bell studied at Edinburgh University in 1864 and assisted his father at University College, London, from 1868-70. During these years he became deeply interested in the study of sound and the mechanics of speech, inspired in part by the acoustic experiments of German ...
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and he also tutored private pupils. Bell's interest in speech and communication led him to investigate the transmission of sound over wires. In particular, he experimented with development of the harmonic telegraph --a device that could send multiple messages at the same time over a single wire. Bell also worked with the possibility of transmitting the human voice, experimenting with vibrating membranes and an actual human ear. Gardiner Hubbard (1822-1897) and Thomas Sanders, fathers of two of his deaf pupils backed Bell financially in his investigations. Early in 1874, Bell met Thomas A. Watson (1854-1934), a young machinist at a Boston electrical shop. Watson became Bell's indispensable assistant, bringing to Bell's experiments the crucial ingredient that had been lacking--his technical expertise in electrical engineering. Together the two men spent endless hours experimenting. Although Bell formed the basic concept of the telephone--using a varying but unbroken electric ...
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their workshop: "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!" After a year of refining the new device, Watson and Bell, along with Hubbard and Sanders, formed the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. Bell immediately married Mabel Hubbard, daughter of his new partner, and sailed to England to promote his telephone. The phone company grew rapidly, and Bell became a wealthy man. He turned to other interests on his return to the United States in 1879, while also defending his patents (which were upheld in 1888) against numerous lawsuits. With money from the Volta Prize, awarded to him in 1880 by the French government, Bell established the Volta Laboratory. Among the new devices he invented there were the ...
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"The Life And Times Of The Man." Essayworld.com. September 14, 2008. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Life-And-Times-Of-Man/89889.
"The Life And Times Of The Man." Essayworld.com. September 14, 2008. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Life-And-Times-Of-Man/89889.
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