Alexander Graham Bell

        Alexander Graham Bell

        By: Sydney Greenlee

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        Who was Alexander Graham Bell? Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone inventor was born on March 3rd, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. His parents were Alexander Melville Bell and Eliza Grace Symonds Bell. His father was a professor of speech elocutionist and his mother was a talented painter, a piano player, and she was nearly deaf. He was home school until age 11. In 1858, Alexander went to Royal High School in Edinburgh. Then he went to Weston House Academy in Elgin, Scotland in 1863. He went to college at University of Edinburgh in 1864. He then later went to London to live with his grandfather and went to another college called University College London in 1868. He was never good academically but always been a creative mind.  Alexander and his brother, Melville, built a speaking machine when Alexander was 17 years old. He had two brothers both died from tuberculosis at an early age. In mid-1870, Alexander was in poor health. His parents decided to move from Scotland to Canada with the hope to improve Alexander’s health. Since then, he traveled between Canada and US for his teaching and invention projects. On July 11, 1877, Alexander Graham Bell married a wonderful woman name Mabel Gardiner Hubbard. When Alexander married Mabel Hubbard, they moved to Massachusetts. In 1878, Alexander’s daughter, Elsie May, was born and Daisy was born in 1880.

       When Alexander was 25 years old, he opens a School of Vocal Physiology of Speech in Boston, Massachusetts to teach the deaf people how to speak. While working during the day, he worked on his experiments during the night at a workshop that he builds.

The invention of the telephone began

        Alexander Graham Bell hired Thomas Watson as an assistant to help him invent the telephone in January of 1875. On June 25,1876, Alexander demonstrated the telephone at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On September of 1880, France awards Alexander Graham Bell a Volta Prize and $10,000 for the invention of the telephone. That was a lot of money! Then, he used the money to set up the Volta Laboratory.