Alexander_G_Bell

U.S. History I Honors December 14, 2010 Great inventors of history… Alexander Graham Bell Alexander Graham Bell was born in Scotland on March 3rd, 1847. His mother, who was deaf, was a musician and an artist. His father, who taught deaf people how to speak, invented "Visible Speech". Graham, or "Aleck", as his family called him, was interested in working with the deaf throughout his life. Being raised with his father, he was around deaf people a lot and learned to love it. Also, having a mother that was deaf gave him motivation towards this certain topic. He only attended school for five years. It started from the time he was ten until he was fourteen, but he never stopped learning. He read the books in his grandfather's library and studied tutorials. When he was a teenager, he and his brother, Melly, used the voice box of a dead sheep to make a speaking machine. This created even more interest in human speech and how it worked. His interest grew even more and him making more discoveries in this area made it an ever bigger challenge for him. When he was in his early 20's, his two brothers died of tuberculosis. Bell himself had the disease and his father moved the family to Canada looking for a better climate in which to live. Bell recovered from the disease later on and he was doing far better than his brothers. Two years later, he went to Boston to open a school for teachers of the deaf and then became a professor at Boston University. It was at this time that he met Mabel Hubbard, one of his students who were 10 years younger than him. Mabel had become deaf at the age of four due to scarlet fever. Five years later, they were married and had three sons. Thomas Watson became an associate of Bell. He made parts and built models of Bell's inventions. A few months later on February 14th, 1876, he applied for a patent on his telephone. He knew he would have to work quickly to get the patent because other people were also trying to make an invention to transmit the human voice. Because Bell had the patent, he had the right to be the only one to produce telephones in the U.S. for the next 19 years. He showed the invention to Queen Victoria of England and she wanted lines to connect her castles. By 1917, nearly all of the United States had telephone service. He continued to invent other things. He developed a method of making phonograph records on a wax disc. His methods led to technologies that we have available today. He made an iron breathing lung, and a device for locating icebergs at sea. He experimented with sheep. He was interested in kites that could lift a man, and he invented a hydrofoil, which set a world speed record of over 70 miles per hour. He was one of the many minds that thought of the idea of airplanes. He tried several times to make them work. He along with others started the National Geographic Society and he served as its president for several years. He became a U.S. citizen, but he died in Canada at the age of 75 on August 2nd, 1922. This invention is probably one of the most important. Communication and interaction became so much easier with it. You can call anybody and get reached by anybody in seconds, you don’t have to walk to the person you want to talk to. It is much easier and faster. If you have an emergency, you can just use the phone. Every Business has a telephone; you can order almost anything by phone. People could communicate from distances, and spread news faster and easier. Messages that time would have taken days to arrive now it takes minutes or seconds. In the past, it took almost weeks for a single message to be delivered. In a war, a decision would take over hours to be delivered across the battle field. Things were so much harder to accomplish with such limited resources. But with many inventions, Bell helps set the track of which humans began to develop. They made so many progress in so many fields that we are nothing like the past. I picked this inventor, because my phone is really important to me. I don’t know how I would communicate with all my friends from all around the world without it. Most people use their cell phones for almost all aspects of their life. Personally, I use my cell phone all the time. I send messages, phone calls, and use it in case of an emergency. The idea of making a phone call to anywhere around the world is so amazing once you think about it. Who knew that humans would make it this far'