Alexander Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847 in a family
interested in the problems of speech. Both his father and his
grandfather had studied the mechanics of a sound. Bell’s father had been
one of the pioneer teachers of speech to the deaf. He was a
world-famous inventor of "Visible Speech”, which helped deaf people to
pronounce words they could not hear. Between 1868 and 1870 Alexander
worked with his father and studied speech and taught deaf children in
Edinburgh. In 1870 he moved to Canada and the next year he went to the
USA. In 1866 the nineteen-year-old Bell started thinking about sending
tones by telegraph, and it was then that there came to his mind the idea
of the "harmonic telegraph”, which would send musical tones
electrically from one place to another. In 1873 he was appointed a
professor at Boston University. He became interested in the mechanical
production of a sound, basing his work on the theories of Helmholtz. It
seemed to Bell that it was possible to convert the sound wave vibrations
into a fluctuating electric current. Then the current, in its turn, can
be converted into sound waves identical with the original at the end of
the circuit. In this way, sound could be carried across wires at the
speed of light. It was through his famous experiments that in 1876 he
was able to develop the telephone, which enables people to talk to each
other over long distances. One day, while working with an instrument
designed to carry sound, Bell automatically cried to his assistant,
"Watson, please, come here.” Watson, at the other end of the circuit on
the other floor, heard the instrument speak and ran downstairs with joy.
It was the first telephone communication. In 1915 the first
transcontinental telephone was opened. Bell died on August 2, 1922.
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