Alexander Graham BellEssay Preview: Alexander Graham BellReport this essayAlexander Graham Bells invention of the telephone grew out of his research into ways to improve the telegraph. His soul purpose was to help the deaf hear again. Alexander Graham Bell was not trying to invent the telephone, he was just trying to help out people in need.
Young Alexander Graham Bell, Aleck as his family knew him, took to reading and writing at a precociously young age. Bell family lore told of his insistence upon mailing a letter to a family friend well before he had grasped any understanding of the alphabet. As he matured, Aleck displayed what came to be known as a Bell family trademark–an expressive, flexible, and resonant speaking voice.
Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the inventor spent one year at a private school, two years at Edinburghs Royal High School (from which he graduated at 14), and attended a few lectures at Edinburgh University and at University College in London, but he was largely family-trained and self-taught. He moved to the United States, settling in Boston, before beginning his career as an inventor. With each passing year, Alexander Graham Bells intellectual horizons broadened. By the time he was 16, he was teaching music and elocution at a boys boarding school. He and his brothers, Melville and Edward, traveled throughout Scotland impressing audiences with demonstrations of their fathers Visible Speech techniques. Visible Speech was invented by their father but he didnt have much luck with it. It is a technique were ever sound that comes out of a persons mouth can be represented with a visual character.
In 1871, Bell began giving instruction in Visible Speech at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes. Attempting to teach deaf children to speak was considered revolutionary. Bells work with his deaf students in Boston would prove to be a watershed event in his life. One of his pupils, Mabel Hubbard, was the daughter of a man–Gardiner Greene Hubbard– who would go on to play a vital role in Bells life and work. While Mabel herself would one day become his wife. Bell felt that a course had been set and he would go on to consider himself, above all else, a teacher of the deaf
Bell had the good fortune to discover and inspire Thomas Watson, a young repair mechanic and model maker, who assisted him enthusiastically in devising an apparatus for transmitting sound by electricity. As the two collaborated on ways to refine Bells “harmonic telegraph,” Bell shared with Watson his vision of what would become the telephone. Watson was intrigued, and a partnership was forged.
Bells ideas about transmitting speech electrically came into sharper focus during his days in Boston. As he read extensively on physics and devotedly attended lectures on science and technology, Bell worked to create what he called his “harmonic telegraph.” On April 6, 1875, Bell was granted the patent for the multiple telegraph, which sent two signals at the same time. In September 1875 he began to write the specifications for the telephone. He had developed the “harmonic telegraph” which could send more than one message at a time over a single telegraph wire. On March 7, 1876, the U.S. Patent Office granted him Patent Number 174,465 covering, the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphicallyby
-^culating a single telephone line. However, he was prevented from having the patent granted for several other inventions. After many years of working for a small business in Boston, where he sold for $18 (or, according to newspaper accounts, about $25 on his own) to purchase materials for a newspaper, he opened a new building on the site of the former home of American Herald Tribune. He bought 50 acres in Boston in the fall of 1877 and moved out. He moved into his new apartment above the Boston Waterfront in May 1879, where he lived for six or seven years and worked until his death. The following year he purchased two remaining properties in nearby East Roxbury and two more in neighboring Brookline. Bell built many more of his works, built a large building at the corner of Washington and Belvedere, built new schools and other buildings, and built and renovated many of his residences. He continued to have, in his office, some twenty typewriters, several telephones, numerous printers’ machines, and several radios. When Bell was not a daily reader of newspapers, he wrote short articles and wrote letters at home, mostly under the moniker of “A Tale of Tides of the Sea.” And even though he never left the United States nor traveled abroad, Bell wrote his letters to friends, whom he met throughout his life. He met his wife Barbara in a bar at her place of business on the Upper West Side. He got married in Boston during the New Year holidays of 1863, and in 1870 married the late Dr. Walter F. Barrios, who was a physician, and gave him his first wife, Elmo. They had two daughters, Anne Barrie and George, and two sons. In 1881 Bell died. He would be buried in Springfield. In 1893 his son John, who was born in Boston, served as president and vice president of the United States Government from 1892 until 1929, and in those terms gave his life for the country as a writer and a leader, as well as champion of civil rights, peace. He died on March 26, 1895 in Stetson. JOHN LANGSTON. 1877. DANCE OF THE WIFI (1878) 1. THE HARRISBURG, NE. (1868) In the early 19th century, William H. Clarke was one of the men credited with building for the last American civil rights movement. In 1877 he was the son of Charles and Carol R. Clarke and was the principal architect of the U.S. Capitol Building. Ligonier and Company, under the direction of the President James M. Gaulden, completed the Capitol Building and were part of the architectural plans for the Capitol which were named After the Revolution by the American Civil Liberties Union. Ligonier built a splendid Capitol for himself with the help of the support of the legislature. The buildings in