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Alexander Graham Bell (March 3,
1847 – August 2, 1922) was a Scottish-born scientist and
inventor. Today, Bell is still widely considered to be the
foremost inventor of the telephone, although this matter has
become controversial, with a number of people claiming that
Antonio Meucci was the "real" inventor (in June 2002, the United
States House of Representatives passed a symbolic bill
officially recognizing Meucci for his contributions to the
invention of the telephone). Others advance Elisha Gray, the
founder of the Western Electric Manufacturing Company. (It is
reasonably clear that each of these men independently invented a
telephone.) In addition to Bell's work in telecommunications
technology, he was responsible for important advances in
aviation and hydrofoil technology.
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Biography
Born Alexander Bell in Edinburgh on
March 3, 1847, he later adopted the middle name 'Graham' out of
admiration for Alexander Graham, a family friend. Many called
Bell "the father of the Deaf." This title may be regarded as
somewhat ironic due to his belief in the practice of eugenics.
While both his mother and his wife were deaf, he hoped to one
day eliminate hereditary deafness from the population.
His family was associated with the
teaching of elocution: his grandfather in London, his uncle in
Dublin, and his father, Alexander Melville Bell, in Edinburgh,
were all professed elocutionists. The latter has published a
variety of works on the subject, several of which are well
known, especially his treatise on Visible Speech, which appeared
in Edinburgh in 1868. In this he explains his method of
instructing deaf mutes, by means of their eyesight, how to
articulate words, and also how to read what other persons are
saying by the motions of their lips.
Alexander Graham Bell was educated
at the Royal High School of Edinburgh, from which he graduated
at the age of 13. At the age of 16 he secured a position as a
pupil-teacher of elocution and music in Weston House Academy, at
Elgin, Moray, Scotland. The next year he spent at the University
of Edinburgh. He was graduated from University College London.
From 1867 to 1868, he was an
instructor at Somersetshire College at Bath, Somerset, England.
While still in Scotland he is said
to have turned his attention to the science of acoustics, with a
view to ameliorate the deafness of his mother.
In 1870, at the age of 23, he
emigrated with his family to Canada where they settled at
Brantford. Before he left Scotland, Bell had turned his
attention to telephony, and in Canada he continued an interest
in communication machines. He designed a piano which could
transmit its music to a distance by means of electricity. In
1873, he accompanied his father to Montreal, Canada, where he
was employed in teaching the system of visible speech. The elder
Bell was invited to introduce the system into a large day-school
for mutes at Boston, but he declined the post in favor of his
son, who became Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at
Boston University's School of Oratory.
At Boston University he continued
his research in the same field, and endeavored to produce a
telephone which would not only send musical notes, but
articulate speech. With financing from his American
father-in-law, on March 7, 1876, the U.S. Patent Office granted
him 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
sound", the telephone.
After obtaining the patent for the
telephone, Bell continued his many experiments in communication,
which culminated in the invention of the photophone-transmission
of sound on a beam of light — a precursor of today's optical
fiber systems. He also worked in medical research and invented
techniques for teaching speech to the deaf. The range of Bell's
inventive genius is represented only in part by the eighteen
patents granted in his name alone and the twelve he shared with
his collaborators. These included fourteen for the telephone and
telegraph, four for the photophone, one for the phonograph, five
for aerial vehicles, four for hydroairplanes, and two for a
selenium cell.
Bell had many ideas that were later
realized in inventions. During his Volta Laboratory period, Bell
and his associates considered impressing a magnetic field on a
record, as a means of reproducing sound. Although the trio
briefly experimented with the concept, they were unable to
develop a workable prototype. They abandoned the idea, never
realizing they had glimpsed a basic principle which would one
day find its application in the tape recorder, the hard disc and
floppy disc drive, and other magnetic media.
Bell's own home used a primitive
form of air conditioning, in which fans blew currents of air
across great blocks of ice. He also anticipated modern concerns
with fuel shortages and industrial pollution. Methane gas, he
reasoned, could be produced from the waste of farms and
factories. At his Canadian estate in Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia,
he experimented with composting toilets and devices to capture
water from the atmosphere. In a magazine interview published
shortly before his death, he reflected on the possibility of
using solar panels to heat houses.
In 1882, he became a naturalized
citizen of the United States. In 1888, he was one of the
founding members of the National Geographic Society and became
its second president. He was the recipient of many honors. The
French Government conferred on him the decoration of the Légion
d'honneur (Legion of Honor), the Académie française bestowed on
him the Volta Prize of 50,000 francs, the Royal Society of Arts
in London awarded him the Albert Medal in 1902, and the
University of Würzburg, Bavaria, granted him a Ph.D. He was
awarded the AIEE's Edison Medal in 1914 for "For meritorious
achievement in the invention of the telephone."
Bell married Mabel Hubbard, who was
one of his pupils at Boston University and also a deaf-mute, on
July 11, 1877. His invention of the telephone resulted from his
attempts to create a device that would allow him to communicate
with his wife and his deaf mother. He died at Beinn Bhreagh,
located on Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Island near the village of
Baddeck, in 1922 was buried atop Beinn Bhreagh mountain
overlooking Bras d'Or Lake. He was survived by his wife and two
of their four children.
The photophone
Another of Bell's inventions was
the photophone, a device enabling the transmission of sound over
a beam of light, which he developed together with Charles Sumner
Tainter. The device employed light-sensitive cells of
crystalline selenium, which has the property that its electrical
resistance varies inversely with the illumination (i.e., the
resistance is higher when the material is in the dark, and lower
when it is lighted). The basic principle was to modulate a beam
of light directed at a receiver made of crystalline selenium, to
which a telephone was attached. The modulation was done either
by means of a vibrating mirror, or a rotating disk periodically
obscuring the light beam.
This idea was by no means new.
Selenium had been discovered by Jöns Jakob Berzelius in 1817,
and the peculiar properties of crystalline or granulate selenium
were discovered by Willoughby Smith in 1873. In 1878, one writer
with the initials J.F.W. from Kew described such an arrangement
in Nature in a column appearing on June 13, asking the readers
whether any experiments in that direction had already been done.
In his paper on the photophone, Bell credited one A. C. Browne
of London with the independent discovery in 1878—the same year
Bell became aware of the idea. Bell and Tainter, however, were
apparently the first to perform a successful experiment, by no
means any easy task, as they even had to produce the selenium
cells with the desired resistance characteristics themselves.
In one experiment in Washington,
D.C. the sender and the receiver were placed on different
buildings some 700 feet (213 metres) apart. The sender consisted
of a mirror directing sunlight onto the mouthpiece, where the
light beam was modulated by a vibrating mirror, focused by a
lens and directed at the receiver, which was simply a parabolic
reflector with the selenium cells in the focus and the telephone
attached. With this setup, Bell and Tainter succeeded to
communicate clearly.
The photophone was patented on
December 18, 1880, but the quality of communication remained
poor and the research was not pursued by Bell. Later on this
helped in the discovery of fiber optics and laser communication
systems.
Metal detector
Bell is also credited with the
invention of the metal detector in 1881. The device was
hurriedly put together in an attempt to find the bullet in the
body of U.S. President James Garfield. The metal detector
worked, but didn't find the bullet because the metal bedframe
the President was lying on confused the instrument. Bell gave a
full account of his experiments in a paper read before the
American Association for the Advancement of Science in August
1882. Though unsuccessful in its first incarnation, this
achievement would eventually change the nature of physical
security.
The hydrofoil
The March 1906 Scientific American
article by American hydrofoil pioneer William E. Meacham
explained the basic principle of hydrofoils. Bell considered the
invention of the hydroplane as a very significant achievement.
Based on information gained from that article he began to sketch
concepts of what is now called a hydrofoil boat.
Bell and Casey Baldwin began
hydrofoil experimentation in the summer of 1908 as a possible
aid to airplane takeoff from water. Baldwin studied the work of
the Italian inventor Enrico Forlanini and began testing models.
This led him and Bell to the development of practical hydrofoil
watercraft.
During his world tour of 1910–1911
Bell and Baldwin met with Forlanini in Italy. They had rides in
the Forlanini hydrofoil boat over Lake Maggiore. Baldwin
described it as being as smooth as flying. On returning to
Baddeck a number of designs were tried culminating in the HD-4,
using Renault engines. A top speed of 54 miles per hour was
achieved, with rapid acceleration, good stability and steering,
and the ability to take waves without difficulty.In 1913, Dr.
Bell hired Walter Pinaud, a Sydney yacht designer and builder as
well as the proprietor of Pinaud's Yacht Yard in Westmount, Nova
Scotia to work on the pontoons of the HD-4. Pinaud soon took
over the boatyard at Bell Laboratories on Beinn Bhreagh, Bell's
estate near Baddeck, Nova Scotia. Pinaud's experience in
boatbuilding enabled him to make useful design changes to the
HD-4 however soon WWI intervened. After WWI work began again on
the HD-4. Bell's report to the navy permitted him to obtain two
350 horsepower (260 kW) engines in July 1919. On September 9,
1919 the HD-4 set a world's marine speed record of 70.86 miles
per hour. This record stood for ten years.
Aeronautics
Bell was a supporter of aerospace
engineering research through the Aerial Experiment Association,
officially formed at Baddeck, Nova Scotia in October 1907 at the
suggestion of Mrs. Mabel Bell and with her financial support. It
was headed by the inventor himself. The founding members were
four young men, American Glenn H. Curtiss, a motorcycle
manufacturer who would later be awarded the Scientific American
Trophy for the first official one-kilometre flight in the
Western hemisphere and later be world-renowned as an airplane
manufacturer; Frederick W. "Casey" Baldwin, the first Canadian
and first British subject to pilot a public flight in
Hammondsport, New York; J.A.D. McCurdy; and Lieutenant Thomas
Selfridge, an official observer from the U.S. government. One of
the project's inventions, the aileron, is a standard component
of aircraft today. (The aileron was also invented independently
by Robert Esnault-Pelterie.)
Bell experimented with box kites
and wings constructed of multiple compound tetrahedral kites
covered in silk. The tetrahedral wings were named Cygnet I, II
and III, and were flown both unmanned and manned (Cygnet I
crashed during a flight carrying Selfridge) in the period from
1907-1912. Some of Bell's kites are on display at the Alexander
Graham Bell National Historic Site.
Other Inventions
Bell had made many other inventions
in his life. They include the Metal vacuum jacket that assists
in breathing, the Audiometer to detect minor hearing problems, a
device that locates icebergs, investigated on how to separate
salt from seawater, and also worked on finding alternative
fuels.
Eugenics
Along with many very prominent
thinkers and scientists of the time, Bell was connected with the
eugenics movement in the United States. From 1912 until 1918 he
was the chairman of the board of scientific advisors to the
Eugenics Record Office associated with Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory in New York, and regularly attended meetings. In 1921
he was the honorary president of the Second International
Congress of Eugenics held under the auspices of the American
Museum of Natural History in New York. Organizations such as
these advocated passing laws (with success in some states) that
established the compulsory sterilization of people deemed to be,
as Bell called them, a "defective variety of the human race." By
the late 1930s about half the states in the US had eugenics
laws, the California laws being used as a model for eugenics
laws in Nazi Germany.
His ideas about people he
considered defective centered on the deaf because of his long
contact with them in his work with deaf education. In addition
to advocating sterilization of the deaf, Bell wished to prohibit
deaf teachers from being allowed to teach in schools for the
deaf, he worked to outlaw the marriage of deaf individuals to
one another, and he was an ardent supporter of oralism over
manualism. His avowed goal was to eradicate the language and
culture of the deaf so as to force them to integrate into the
hearing culture for their own long-term benefit and for the
benefit of society at large. Although this attitude is widely
seen as paternalistic and arrogant today, it was mainstream in
that era. See also: audism.
Although he supported what many
would consider harsh and inhumane policies today, he was not
unkind to deaf individuals who proved his theories of oralism.
He was a personal and longtime friend of Helen Keller (although
she hated being deaf), and his wife Mabel was deaf, though none
of their children were. Bell was known as a kindly father and
loving family man who took great pleasure in playing with his
many grandchildren.
His son-in-law was National
Geographic Editor Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor.
Tributes
In the early 1970s, UK Rock Group
The Sweet recorded a tribute to Bell and the telephone, suitably
titled "Alexander Graham Bell". The song gives a fictional
account of the invention, in which Bell devises the telephone so
he can talk to his girlfriend who lives on the other side of the
United States. The song reached the top 40 in the UK and went on
to sell over one million recordings world-wide.
Another musical tribute to Bell was
written by the British songwriter and guitarist Richard
Thompson. The chorus of Thompson's songreminds the listener that
"of course there was the telephone, he'd be famous for that
alone, but there's fifty other things as well from Alexander
Graham Bell". The song mentions Bell's work with discs rather
than cylinders, the hydrofoil, Bell's work with the deaf, his
invention of the respirator and several other of Bell's
achievements.
Bell was honored on the television
programmes the 100 Greatest Britons (2002), the 100 Greatest
Americans (2005), and in the top ten Greatest Canadians (2004).
The nominees and rankings for these programs were determined by
popular vote. Bell was the only person to be on more than one of
the programs.
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Date Article Copied:
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