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biography
| name: |
Bell, Alexander Graham
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1847–1922)
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| biography:
| Inventor and educator, born in Edinburgh, EC Scotland, UK. The son of an elocution teacher and an authority on vocal physiology, he worked as his father's assistant at University College London, where he pursued research in the techniques of teaching speech to the deaf. His family emigrated to Canada (1870) and he went to Boston, MA (1871), obtaining a professorship at Boston University two years later. His interest in the applications of electricity to sound led him to invent a new telegraph system, patented in 1875, and to experiment with methods of transmitting voice sounds. On 10 March 1876, he sent the famous first telephone message to his assistant, Thomas A Watson: ‘Mr Watson, come here, I want you’. He established the Bell Telephone Company the following year. The telephone assured his fortune, the US Supreme Court upholding his patent rights against various claimants. He pursued other interests after 1880, including research into methods of teaching the deaf to speak, and also made improvements to Thomas A Edison's phonograph. With Gardiner C Hubbard, his father-in-law and business associate, he founded the journal Science and was president of the National Geographic Society (1897–1904). Towards the end of his long life he became interested in aviation, invented the tetrahedral kite, and helped support some of the aircraft development schemes of Samuel P Langley and Glenn A Curtiss. |
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