Alexander Graham Bell Facts
Alexander Graham Bell Facts
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Interesting Alexander Graham Bell Facts: |
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Bell had a unique interest in working in auditory innovations as both his mother and his wife were deaf. |
He also came from several generations of noted researchers on speech and pronunciation. |
His efforts that led to the invention of the telephone as it is known today were actually intended to be a device for the hearing impaired. |
Bell's first invention was a homemade wheat dehusking machine that he crafted out of paddles and nail brushes for his best friend's father, who owned a flour mill. |
The device was so useful that the mill owner gave Bell and his friend a small space in his mill to serve as his inventing lab. |
Bell's mother began to lose her hearing when he was 12, and combined with his relatives' pioneering work in elocution and speech techniques for the deaf, served to further Bell's interest in acoustics and communication. |
He taught himself that speaking directly against his mother's forehead helped her to "hear" through temporal conduction, a fact that fascinated him and played a role in his work. |
At the age of 16, Bell became an instructor at his own school in exchange for room and board; he taught elocution, having studied under his father and grandfather, and music, despite having had no formal musical training and being only self-taught. |
Bell and his older brother Melville eventually created an automaton of the human head which would "speak" when a bellows pumped air through the artificial larynx, throat, and mouth. Different words were produced by adjusting the shape of the mouth and inner workings. |
Bell became a teacher at a school for the deaf and worked to help deaf students develop vocal communication. |
After losing his two brothers to tuberculosis and contracting the disease himself, Bell's parents moved with their remaining son to Canada for his health. |
While living in Ontario, Bell frequently visited the Six Nations reserve where he not only learned the Mohawk language, but also translated it into his father's Visible Speech language that helped the deaf communicate. This earned Bell the title of honorary chief. |
Bell began work on what we know as the telephone in an effort to save costs of constructing telegraph lines that could not support multiple lines. |
With the help of Thomas A. Watson, Bell developed his telephone first using a liquid transmitter similar to the design of Elisha Gray, then furthering his model to the electromagnetic model. |
On March 10, 1876, Bell spoke the first words into a telephone: "Mr. Watson...Come here...I want to see you." |
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