ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

ELSIE ORREGO

Alexander Graham Bell was born March 3rd, 1847 in Edinburg

Scotland. He was known as Aleck. He is most famous for his invention
of the telephone.

His mother was deaf and was a painter and musician. His father
taught people who were deaf how to speak. He invented a program
called “visible speech” which showed how the lips, tongue and throat
were supposed to move in order to make sounds that help talk. Aleck
was interested in helping and working with the deaf all throughout his
life. He was only in school for 5 years, from about age 10, to 14, but he
never stopped learning. He studied books in his grandfather’s library.
When he was in his early twenties, two of his brothers died of
tuberculosis. He also had the sickness, so his father decided to
immigrate to Canada, in search of a better climate, where he
recovered. About two years later he went to Boston and there opened
a school for people like him who were interested in aiding and teaching
the deaf. Afterwards he became a professor at Boston University.
There he met Mabel Hubbard, a student who was ten years younger
than Aleck. Due to scarlet fever Mabel had become deaf at the age of
four. Five years after they met, they were married. They had two
daughters and two sons. Both sons died at an early age.

The story of the invention of the telephone is one that I find

fascinating. On 2nd of June, 1875, Aleck was experimenting with the
idea of sending several telegraph messages over the same wire at the
exact same time. In this experiment he was using a set of spring-steel
reeds and working with the receiving set in one room. Thomas Watson,
his assistant, operated the sending set in the other room. Suddenly
Watson plucked a reed of steel to make it vibrate and it produced a
twanging sound. Aleck came in and asked Watson to do the same thing
without changing anything. He found that the steel rod had been
vibrating over the magnet and had caused a current of diverse
strength to run through the wire. This made the reed in Aleck’s room
vibrate and produce the twanging sound. On March 10th 1876
(Alexander was 26 at the time) the first sentence was sent and heard
successfully over the telephone.

Other inventions of his were metal detector, hydrofoils, aeronautics

and the telegraph. The difference between the telephone and the
telegraph is that a telegraph can only send messages through and
on/off method (Morse code). But a telephone can communicate
through most complex wave shapes. A wave shape is the shape of a
sound wave illustrated graphically by plotting the values of the period
quantity against time. The physics of it is a movement of sound up and
down or back and forth.

In 1897 Alexander became one of the founding members of the

National Geographic Society. One of his quotes was “When one door
closes, another one opens, but we often gaze so long and so regretfully
upon the closed door, that we see too late the one that is open.” It is
obvious that as an inventor, it is hard. They face many challenges and
have to know that when something does not work out, to try again. It
is also important to know that when something is not going to work
out, they need to try a different route and not linger on what could
have been. It is better to live an optimistic life full of a future of
“probably’s” and “hopefully’s” than to live a past of sad, “what if’s”, at
least it is in my opinion. I think he was an amazing man who invented
wonderful things that are very useful nowadays. I also liked his outlook
on life.

Despite the many tragedies he faced in his life, he knew that if he

really tried hard enough, it would all work out. He believed that
preparation is the key to success. He also said “The most successful
men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady
accretion. It is the man who carefully advances step by step, with his
mind becoming wider and wider - and progressively better able to
grasp any theme or situation.” I think that there are many wonderful
lessons to be learned from Alexander Graham Bell. He died August 2nd
1922 at the age of 75 having accomplished his life goal of aiding the
deaf, and forever left an impression on mankind that I hope will never
be forgotten.