Alexander Graham Bell's telephone began with a book he misread
As a teenager, Alexander Bell struggled through a French edition of Helmholtz's work on sound and wrongly concluded the German scientist had sent vowels electrically. If vowels could travel by wire, he reasoned, so could whole speech. He later called it a valuable blunder, admitting that reading German properly might have stopped him from ever starting.
Sound and speech ran through the family. Bell was born in Edinburgh on 3 March 1847 to Alexander Melville Bell, a phonetician; his grandfather in London and an uncle in Dublin also taught elocution. His father's Visible Speech system wrote down the sounds of any language, and young Aleck could read it well enough to recite Sanskrit or Scottish Gaelic aloud at public demonstrations without knowing the words. He was born plain Alexander Bell and pleaded for a middle name like his brothers; at 11 he was allowed to take Graham, after a family friend.
His mother began losing her hearing when he was 12. He learned finger spelling to tap out the parlour's conversations for her, and found she could follow him if he spoke in low, clear tones close to her forehead. That preoccupation pulled him toward acoustics. He was a tinkerer too: at 12 he built a dehusking machine of paddles and nail brushes that ran for years at a friend's family flour mill.
With his brother Melville he built a speaking head after seeing a Charles Wheatstone automaton in 1863; when bellows pushed air through its windpipe, it said a recognisable Mama. He then coaxed the family Skye terrier, Trouve, into growling while he shaped its mouth, until visitors swore it asked how grandmama was. School bored him, and he left the Royal High School at 15, yet by 16 he was teaching elocution and music at a Scottish academy.
Tuberculosis reshaped everything. His brother Edward died in 1867 and Melville in May 1870, so his parents, fearing for their last son, emigrated to Ontario that year. Six years later, on 7 March 1876, Bell received the first US patent for the telephone, and in 1885 he co-founded AT&T. Oddly, he saw the device as a distraction from real science and kept it out of his study. He later worked on hydrofoils and flight and served as National Geographic's second president.
Source: Alexander Graham Bell
