Timeline Description: Alexander Graham Bell was a great American inventor and scientist. He is best known for his invention of the telephone. Without his genius we would not have come to where we are today. Bell was also the inventor of many other electronic devices.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| March 3, 1847 | Bell is born in Scotland. Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. Alexander Graham Bell is born to Professor Alexander Melville Bell and Eliza Grace Symonds. His father was a famous elocutionist or speech expert and teacher. |
| December, 1859 | Bell invents his first machine. His first invention ever at the age of 12 was a machine that could clean wheat grains and remove the husks. His mother began to lose her hearing this year. |
| February, 1863 | Bell is interested in speech machines. His father took him to see an "automation machine" that imitated the sound of the human voice. He became interested in speech and language and translated a German book by another famous scientist so that he could build a machine with the help of his brother that would produce speech electronically. |
| 1865 | Bell family moves to England. The Bell family moved to London but Aleck, as he was called, stayed in Scotland and became a teacher of elocution and music when he was 16. |
| 1866 | Bell starts college and becomes sick. He joined his older brother Melville as a student at the University of Edinburgh. He suffered illness from exhaustion and his health kept him bedridden most of the time. His younger brother Edward was also sick with tuberculosis. |
| 1867 | Bell comes back home and buckles down to study. After his brother Edward died, Bell returned home to Scotland. His older brother Melville married and moved away to open his own school of elocution. Aleck spent much of his spare time during these days, studying |
| May, 1870 | Bell's other brother dies and family moves to Canada. Bell's brother Melville died from tuberculosis. His father also became sick but traveled to Newfoundland to recuperate. Bell's parents decided to move to Canada. Aleck also became sick but a journey to the "New World" with a different climate saved his health. |
| April, 1871 | Bell moves to the U.S. Bell moves to Boston to teach others his method of Visible Speech System, to help the deaf and speech-impaired people. |
| October, 1872 | Bell opens his own school for the deaf. He opened a school in Boston called the "Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech for deaf students. Helen Keller was one of his famous students. |
| May, 1874 | Bell invents the telephone. He starts experimenting on the phonoautograph, a machine that helps plot sound waves. In the summer of this year he came up with the idea of a telephone. He hired an assistant named Thomas Watson. |
| June 2, 1875 | Bell proves that telephones work. Watson happens to pluck one of the metal reeds that formed Bell's phonoautograph machine. This accidental move showed that a telephone could transmit sounds. |
| March 7, 1876 | Bell patents his ideas. Bell receives The U.S. Patent Office patent number 174,465. It allowed him to have his machine transmit sound waves telegraphically without others copying his ideas. |
| August 3, 1876 | Bell gets first long-distance call. Bell received a long-distance voice message from a town called Brantford, about four miles away. After this major event, Bell began to demonstrate and speak about his new invention to the public. |
| July 11, 1877 | Bell forms first telephone company and marries. Bell Telephone Company was formed. Also this year, Bell married Mabel Hubbard of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He started signing his name as "Alec" and not "Aleck." His major source of money was still his teaching since the telephone was not profitable for him yet. |
| 1881 | Bell has many other inventions. Bell invents the phonograph, the metal detector, a metal jacket that helped people breathe, and an audiometer that helped detect hearing problems among 18 patents given in his name. He received many honors and many awards are still given today in his name. |
| 1897 | Bell becomes famous and is involved in other organizations. Alexander Graham Bell became the President of the National Geographic Society. Bell's family members have played an important part in this organization to this day. |
| January 25, 1915 | Bell places first trans-Atlantic phone call. For the first time ever, Bell called up Watson from across the continent. 38 years before this call, Bell and Watson had talked on the phone. This one was much better and the quality was clear and crisp to hear. |
| August 2, 1922 | Bell passed away. Alexander Graham Bell died but his legacy is still with us today. |