Alexander Graham Bell biography

Alexander Graham Bell, was the inventor of the telephone. Bell was born in Edinburgh on 3 March 1847. He was the son of Melville, a speech and elocution teacher who developed the first International Phonetic Alphabet and Eliza, who was deaf from the age of five. Bell was the only child to survive into adulthood, with his younger and elder brothers, Ted and Melly, dying of tuberculosis. These biographical facts foretell the strong values, personality and determination of the man destined to radically change the preferred mode of long distance communications to voice, and thus transform virtually all aspects of modern life. Bell developed a passion for communication from a young age. He was to become an extraordinary man with a visionary understanding of its power and potential. Educated at the universities of Edinburgh and London, Bell immigrated to the US in 1870. In his twenties, he set about developing a multiple telegraph that could send several Morse code messages.

In 1872, Bell started attending MIT’s public lectures on experimental mechanics, including one in October by Professor Charles R. Cross that began a long, fruitful collaboration. At the talk,
Cross demonstrated a device invented by his colleague Edward C. Pickering, who then chaired MIT’s physics department. At the time of Cross’s lecture, MIT (which had been incorporated in 1861 on the Boston side of the Charles River) had recently opened the Rogers Laboratory of Physics in a new building on Boylston Street. The facility was the first of its kind in the United
States, a well-outfitted working laboratory that allowed students to conduct experiments illustrating the physical laws they learned about in class. Of particular interest to Bell, the new laboratory had an impressive set of equipment identical to that used in the path breaking work of Hermann von Helmholtz, one of the world’s leading acoustical researchers. In 1873, Bell accepted a position as a professor of vocal physiology and