The Telephone
Alexander Graham Bell was a distinguished scientist, inventor and innovator who is credited with the invention of the telephone. He was born in Edinburgh in Scotland. From his early years, Bell showed a sensitive and kind character with a talent for art, poetry and music that was encouraged by his mother. With no formal training, he mastered the piano and became the family’s pianist. Both his mother and wife were deaf, completely influencing Bell’s life’s work. Bell was deeply affected by his mother’s gradual deafness, (she began to lose her hearing when he was 12) and learned a manual finger language so he could sit at her side and tap out silently the conversations that were happening around her. Almost like an early sign language. His research on hearing and speech then led him to experiment with hearing inventions that eventually led to Bell being awarded the first U.S. patent for the invention of the telephone in 1876. In 1888, Alexander Graham Bell was one of the first members of the National Geographic Society. In reflection, Bell considered his most famous invention an intrusion on his real work as a scientist and refused to have a telephone in his study. Upon Bell’s death, all telephones throughout the United States “stilled their ringing for a silent minute in tribute to the man whose yearning to communicate made them possible.