Sound and the transmission of sound was the purpose of his life: Who is Graham Bell?

His mother was born deaf. Bell's grandfather and father also devoted years to the deaf. His father, in particular, sought to develop ways to teach deaf people to speak even if they could not hear.

By Jane Dickens Published on 9 Haziran 2023 : 00:09.
Sound and the transmission of sound was the purpose of his life: Who is Graham Bell?

Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland.

From an early age, Graham Bell learned a great deal about sound and the transmission of sound, which later became very useful to him. After his two brothers died of tuberculosis, his father moved to Canada for the health of his only remaining son. After his father's death, Graham Bell went to the United States, striving to promote and disseminate his work. He worked here for a while in a school that trains language teachers for the hearing impaired. Then he set up his own school.

Alexander Graham Bell (March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922) was a Scottish-born inventor, scientist and engineer who is credited with patenting the first practical telephone. He also co-founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1885.

Bell, whose fame spread in a short time, was called to Oxford University as a visiting teacher. He read the book on the physiology of hearing by the German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, which he received in England. He concentrated on the idea that the sound of music could be transmitted through a wire.

Meanwhile, other scientists were also working on these issues. Elisha Gray was one of them. Returning from England, Bell was made a professor in the Department of Voice Physiology at Boston University. He embarked on putting his theoretical knowledge into practice with technical support and making devices for the hearing impaired to enable them to hear. He began working with an electrical engineer named Thomas Watson. When financial support was needed to carry out his work, attorney Gardiner Greene Hubbard offered him a helping hand.

Bell and Watson discovered in 1875 that sound travels over a wire. However, the sound was incomprehensible. On February 14, 1876, Bell and Elisha Gray applied separately to obtain a telephone patent, but on March 7, Bell was granted the patent he wanted. While he was experimenting in the workshop, acid was poured into his pants from the battery he used to power the phone and he called Watson for help: "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you."

Unwittingly, Bell made the first phone call on March 10, 141 years ago, while calling his assistant. Watson heard Bell's voice over the phone. This invention, which coincided with the 100th anniversary of the USA, brought him many awards at the Hundred Years Exhibition. A year later, Bell married Mabel, the daughter of the Hubbard family, for whom he received financial and moral support to carry out his scientific studies.

His wife had been deaf since he was four years old. He fell in love with Mabel, whom he knew as a Bell student and whom he later married. Despite his growing reputation, he never ignored his wife or the deaf. In a letter he wrote to his wife, he wrote, "Your wife will always think about the deaf and their problems, no matter how rich she is."

In 1881, Bell's wife, Mabel, gave birth to a son. The baby was having trouble breathing and died a few hours after birth. Bell decided to do something for patients who might encounter the same respiratory problem. He designed a metal vacuum shirt that was the forerunner of the artificial respiration machine, allowing air to enter and exit the lungs. His well-fitting shirt was attached to hand-operated bellows. Pumping the bellows, it could change the air pressure inside the shirt. In this way, the patient's chest would first be compressed and then released, resulting in regular breathing of the patient.

Bell achieved one of the biggest advances in telephone development when he compared the movement of the eardrum over the bones of the ear to the movement of a heavy telephone diaphragm over a magnetized piece of steel. Bell adapted his knowledge of the human ear to the telephone. The telephone transmitter is like an electric ear that sends the words of two people speaking as short-term electrical stimuli. However, these electrical stimuli are sent over wires, not nerves, unlike the ear. The telephone receiver is also like an electric mouth. Current flowing through the receiver's electromagnet causes the diaphragm to vibrate. These vibrations hit the eardrum of the listener and make the eardrum vibrate. The listener's ear perceives these vibrations as sounds made by the person on the other end of the line.

In order to develop his first handheld phone, Bell tried to overcome technical problems while fighting a legal battle against Gray, who was suing him. Four years later, in 1880, he tried the device they called the radiophone with Tainer, who helped Bell. Climbing the top of a school, Tainer called Bell, whom he could see from afar, on the phone: "Mr. Bell. Mr. Bell. If you can hear me, please come to the window and shake your hat.” When Bell shook his hat, the phone began to crawl after his birth.

Helen Keller, who was born in 1880, had a febrile illness when she was nineteen months old and completely lost her sight, speech, and hearing. Helen's doctor tells the family that Alexander Graham Bell, after inventing the telephone, devoted himself to the rehabilitation of hearing-impaired children, and that meeting with him could create different hopes for the child's development. Bell introduces the family to trainer Anne Sullivan. Anne Sulivan teaches Helen to read and write and speak, albeit to a very limited extent. His development is so fast that he even gets a higher education. Helen and her teacher Anne Sullivan, who is a good chess player, learn five languages, and is interested in various sports, have implemented many important projects to facilitate the lives of the disabled and draw attention to their problems, as well as talk about women's rights, workers' rights, and socialism as activists.

An audio recording by Alexander Graham Bell was uploaded to a cardboard plate. The cardboard record, dated April 15, 1885, was transferred to digital media in 2011. The audio recording, finalized by the Smithsonian Institution, appears to have Graham Bell saying, "As a witness to this recording, hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell."

Bell not only patented the telephone, but he was also a versatile researcher and inventor. He received one patent for his own phonograph, five for aircraft, four for hydroplanes, and two for selenium batteries. Bell succeeded in transporting people using extremely large three-dimensional box kites and used these studies only to cross the river at his station, where he was testing, from coast to coast. Among his other inventions are the use of wax in gramophone records, a method for electrically detecting the location of metal objects entering the human body. He spent the money he earned from his inventions on the Foundation for the Deaf. He was awarded the Honorary Award and a cash prize by the French government for his services to humanity. He used the money to establish the Volta Institute for the Deaf in Washington.

Bell was a prolific man in every period of his life, saying, “Great discoveries and inventions always arise from the observation of the little things.” Alexander Graham Bell, who said, "I want to live for many more years in order to complete all of my thoughts," died on August 2, 1922. Due to their great respect for him when he died, pictures of red bells were used to symbolize the telephone, based on his surname, and the first unit used to determine the volume was called the waist.