Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Melville Bell lectured at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), at the University of London, and in Boston. He developed a system of visible speech for the deaf, with symbols for every sound of human voice.

Alexander Graham Bell, the son of Alexander Melville Bell and the husband of a deaf woman, had his own school of vocal physiology in Boston and was very active in issues related to education of the deaf. In 1875, he conceived of the idea of the telephone. On March 10, 1876, he used his experimental apparatus to transmit the now famous "Watson, come here, I want you" to his assistant. Later that same year, the telephone was introduced to the world at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. The Bell Telephone Company was organized a year later.


Bell also established the Volta Laboratory in Washington, DC, where the first successful phonograph record was produced. He invented both the flat and the cylindrical wax recorders for phonographs, as well as photophone, which transmits speech by light rays, and the audiometer, which measures a person's hearing ability. He investigated the nature and causes of deafness and studied its heredity. He helped found the magazine Science, was president of the National Geographic Society, and was a regent of the Smithsonian Institution.