Inventor of the telephone and founder of the telephone industry: Who is Alexander Graham Bell?

(1847-1922) Scottish-born American inventor and industrialist. He was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh. He is the middle son of Alexander Melville Bell, one of the well-established and wealthy families of Scotland, who is famous for the art of speech and correction of speech disorders, and Eliza Grace Bell, who is deaf from birth. Because of his wife's deafness, his father, who was very concerned about hearing and speech disorders, had developed a "physiological" alphabet that would give sounds in all languages. Since each symbol in this alphabet determines the functional movements of elements such as lips, tongue, and palate that play a role in sound production, it has been widely used to teach speech to the deaf and to indicate pronunciation in dictionaries.

Bell started his education at the McLaren Academy in Edinburgh at the age of 10, later transferred to the Royal High School in the same city, and received his diploma from this school at the age of 14. He stayed with his grandfather for a while in London. He went to Elgin in 1863 and enrolled at the Woron House Academy; He covered his education expenses by giving lessons in music and eloquence. After attending Edinburgh University for about a year, he returned to Elgin. After his family moved to London in 1865, he became a lecturer at Somersetshire College in Bath. In 1867, he began working with his father to teach voice and speech to the deaf. He was also studying anatomy and physiology at University College. In 1868, when his father went to the USA for an educational trip, he took over the entire management of the business, and after his father returned, he assumed most of the responsibility in the partnership they established. However, after a while, his health deteriorated due to both the death of his brothers and the heavy workload on him. The Bell family settled in Canada in 1870.

Bell, who recovered in a short time, went to Boston in 1871 and organized conferences on his father's book, Visible Speech, published in 1866, and introduced this new system aimed at teaching speech to the deaf. In the same year, he started teaching at Sarah Fuller School, the first of the schools to train language teachers for the deaf. He founded his own school in 1872. He received a call for a course from Oxford University after his physiology and speech lectures at Boston University attracted great attention. Around that time, he met Thomas Watson (1854-1934), a master mechanic and designer. Between 1873 and 1876, Watson was his only assistant in his intensive research on the phonograph, a telegraph device capable of sending several messages at the same time, and the telephone. He had received the money for his research from the fathers of two deaf students. He married one of these students, Mabel Hubbard, in 1877.

Having patented a total of thirty inventions, eighteen of which are registered in his own name and twelve of which are registered to the group of companies, ranging from the telephone, the telegraph, and the gramophone, which are his main fields of activity, to air and sea vehicles, Bell started to carry out the works that brought him great fame and fortune in the USA and in 1874. Despite becoming a US citizen, he never broke ties with Canada, where he settled with his family. He bought a large estate in Canada on Cape Breton Island, east of Nova Scotia, where he spent his summers and died there on August 2, 1922. All phones in North America went silent as his body was being cremated.

Bell's most important inventions, which led to success, are the product of three years of work from 1873 to 1876. He first built a telegraph device that could transmit several messages at once, like Baudot's device, and patented it on April 6, 1875. On May 2, 1875, he succeeded in transmitting a musical note with a primitive telephone setup. However, after continuing his day and night work for another six months, he had to go to Canada with his family because his health deteriorated. At the end of 1875, he returned to Boston and started patent preparations for the telephone. On February 14, 1876, Bell and Elisha Gray (1835-1901), working independently on the same subject, applied to the U.S. Patent Office for a telephone patent on the same day. On March 7, a patent was granted for Bell's "electrically speaking telephone". On March 10, 1876, while calling his assistant Watson, he made the first telephone conversation by chance.

The patent number 174.465, which Bell received for the telephone, soon became the most valuable invention of the century. Bell received 6 gold medals from various countries, the award of many scientific institutions, and the Legion d'honneur grand cross in 1881 for his invention, which was the center of attention at the Century Exhibition held in Philadelphia in 1876.

The patent war between The Bell Telephone Company, which was founded in 1876, and various telegraph monopolies, was won by Bell, which constantly increased its capital with new partners. Bell company grew like an avalanche with orders from all corners of the world, especially the USA. The first commercial power plant went into service in New Haven, Connecticut State in 1878, leading to the founding of the New England Telephone Company, the first subsidiary of the Bell Telephone Company. Receiving the Volta Prize of fifty thousand francs given by France for his invention in 1880, the research at the Volta Laboratory, which Bell established with this money, led to the development of the gramophone and the construction of devices such as photophones and audiometers.

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company was founded by Bell and his associates in 1885. In 1889, a total of 17,500 km of underground lines were laid in New York alone. Bell, who was one of the founders of Science magazine, which was published in 1880 and wrote many articles for this magazine, was the director of the National Geographic Society from 1896 to 1904. The institution gained an effective international personality and the publication of The National Geographic Magazine took place during his management. Bell, who was closely interested in aviation in the last twenty-five years of his life and was appointed to the board of directors of the Smithsonian Institution by the US Congress in 1908, actively participated in the work of this institution and the Acral Experiment Association, which was formed under his presidency in 1907. The "hydrofoil" is also Bell's invention, which, with the help of carrier surfaces similar to airplane wings, with skids under its fuselage, set a speed record of 70 mph (112 km/h) in 1919. At that time, his companies, which were constantly developing, had reached the level of earnings that would enable him to make large investments in such studies.

Bell opened the first long-distance telephone line connecting New York to San Francisco in 1915. On the other end of the line was Watson, his assistant, as he had been 39 years ago, and Bell repeated the words he had used on that first try: "Watson, I want you, come here."

Bell's main interest, arising from his family environment and education, was the speech mechanism and teaching speech to the deaf. This interest led him to work on physiology, sound mechanics, and electrical sound transmission with the influence of the telegraph, which was in its golden age at that time. Speech education for the deaf never lost its feature of being a source of interest that spread throughout their lives. It was from this interest that he found the photophone that enables speech to be transmitted with light. The photophone uses the principle that the resistance of selenium changes with the light, and converts a beam of varying intensity into a current of varying intensity. The other elements of the circuit are an electric source (battery) and a magnetic telephone. Among its various applications, the photophone enabled the construction of the spectroscope in 1881, which was used to analyze the infrared spectrum. The "telephone probe" designed by Gene Bell at that time was used to locate metal objects in the human body and was first used in 1881 to locate the bullet in the body of US President Garfield, who was badly wounded in a gun attack. This device was used until the X-rays discovered by Röntgen were applied to medicine. The gramophone, an improved version of Edison's phonograph, is also one of Bell's important works. This device, which he patented in 1882, greatly improved the quality of Edison's recording on tin plates, with flat or cylindrical wax records and an advanced sound generator.

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10 Things You May Not Know About Alexander Graham Bell

10 surprising facts about the widely acknowledged inventor of the telephone.

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