Alexander Graham Bell
Born , March 3, 1847, Edinburgh
Died Aug. 2, 1922, Beinn Bhreagh, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia

Scottish-born Canadian audiologist best known as the inventor of the telephone (1876). For two generations his family had been recognized as leading authorities in elocution and speech correction, with Alexander Melville Bell's Standard Elocutionist passing through nearly 200 editions in English. Young Bell and his two brothers were trained to continue the family profession.

Alexander (“Graham” was not added until he was 11) was the second son of Alexander Melville Bell and Eliza Grace Symonds Bell. Is education consisted of part from one year at a private school, two years at Edinburgh's Royal High School, and attendance at a few lectures at Edinburgh University, Bell was largely family trained and self-taught.

The shock of the sudden death of his older brother from tuberculosis, which had also struck down his younger brother, and the strain of his professional duties soon took their toll on young Bell. The family's move to Canada, in hope of better health for their remaining son, in August 1870,where, after settling near Brantford, Ont., Bell's health rapidly improved.

Bell had the good fortune to discover and inspire Thomas Watson, a young mechanic and model maker, who helped him in devising a device for transmitting sound by electricity. On April 6, 1875, he was granted the patent for his multiple telegraph; but after another exhausting six months, while maintaining his daily professional schedule, Bell had to return to his parents' home in Canada to recuperate. On March 7, 1876, the United States Patent Office granted to Bell Patent Number 174,465 covering "The method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically . . . by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sounds."

In 1885 Bell acquired land on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. There, in surroundings reminiscent of his early years in Scotland, he established a summer home, Beinn Bhreagh, complete with research laboratories. As interest in the possibility of flight increased after the turn of the century, he experimented with giant man-carrying kites. At Beinn Bhreagh, Bell entered new subjects of investigation, such as sonar detection, solar distillation, the tetrahedron as a structural unit, and hydrofoil craft, one of which weighed more than 10,000 pounds and attained a speed record of 70 miles per hour in 1919. The range of his inventive genius is represented only in part by the 18 patents granted in his name alone and the 12 he shared with his collaborators. These included 14 for the telephone and telegraph, 4 for the photophone, 1 for the phonograph, 5 for aerial vehicles, 4 for hydro aeroplanes, and 2 for a selenium cell.