For Famous Americans I  will study Alexander Graham Bell. Bell was born

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Listen to an Interview with Alexander Graham Bell.

   By Jacob Matteson

           Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland.  His parents did not give him a middle name so he chose Graham when he was 10.

His mother, Elisa Grace Symonds was a portrait painter and a musician.  His father, Alexander Melville Bell, was interested in speech and hearing and taught deaf people to speak. His father also wrote a textbook on speech.  Alexander Graham Bell was a talented musician.   He played by ear from infancy.  His early school years were taught at home.  When he was 13 years old, he spent a year with his grandfather in London.  In grandfather’s library, he read books about speech and hearing.  That year changed his life.

At 16 years old he taught music and speech at a boy’s school.  When studying about voice he  learned about electric vibrations to make vowel sounds.  He began studying electricity too.  In 1868, Bell’s family moved to London.  Bell later joined them.

Graham’s younger brother had died of tuberculosis and his older brother died from the same disease in 1870.  Also in 1870 Bell’s father sacrificed his career in London and moved the family to Brantford, Ontario. Canada had a healthy climate and Graham soon got better. In 1871 Bell went to Boston, Massachusetts.  He taught school for the deaf and hearing impaired, and continued his experiments.  He began thinking about inventing a harmonic telegraph but, Bell needed money to do his experiments so he got money from two men.  A couple of years later, he started to think about the telephone.  He hired a skilled assistant named Tom Watson.  On June 2, 1875 Bell and Watson experimented with the telegraph.  Bell heard a sound from the other room.  In 1876 the telephone was invented before he was thirty years old.  In 1877 Bell Telephone Company was started.

Bell married Mabel Hubbard and they had two daughters and he became a US citizen.  During the next forty- five years of his life he still was experimenting and continued to teach the deaf and hearing impaired students.  Alexander Bell won many honors during his lifetime.  He died August 2, 1922.