Alexander Graham Bell

Posted by Tel Asiado Mar 3, 2008

Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), Scottish-born American inventor of the telephone, is born March 3.

Educated in Scotland and London, he first worked as the assistant of his father, Alexander Melville Bell, in teaching elocution. In 1872, he opened a school in Boston for training teachers of the deaf. Later, when he was appointed professor of vocal physiology , he devoted his time to the teachaing of deaf-mutes and spreading his father's 'visible speech' system.

Bell produced the first intelligible telephonic transmission with a message to his assistant, Mt. Watson, on 1875 and patented it a year later.

Alexander Graham Bell's telephone made a sensation at the 1878 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

There were other claimants to the telephone invention. Allegedly, Johann Philip Reis, of Friedrichesdorf, Germany, used a violin case, from a beer barrel and a sausage skin and transmitted speech over a 91.4 meter (300ft) line earlier, in 1861. Elisha Gray has the his own claim which he submitted to the Patent Office about three months after Bell. To make the long story short, Bell got the patent, and it's his name we remember today.