the young professor was working in his workshop on a
narrow street in boston, not far from scollay square.it was a
very hot afternoon in june, but the man did not notice. he was
totally absorbed in his strange machine which he had been
working on for about three years. suddenly he heard an almost
inaudible sound, the first sound ever transmitted through a
wire. the machine was the very first telephone and the youung
man was alexander graham bell.
Although he was only 28 years old at the time, Alexander had
been working in the fields of speech, anatomy, electricity and
telegraphy for over 11 years. His grandfather had invented a speech problems.
In fact, his whole family had been involved in the study of speech and sounds.
Alexander’s father had also written several books on how to speak correctly
as well as creating a form of sign language called ‘visible speech’.
At the age of 16 Alexander started to help teach young deaf mutes;
children who could not hear or speak. He used his father’s system
of ‘visible speech’and achieved amazing results.a few years later,
while working in london, alexander met two men who would play an important role
in his life.
Unfortunately, it was around this time that the fatal disease called the white plague, spread through Britain and both Alexander’s brother died. 3f Alexander was teaching to a tribe of Mohawk Indians in a small Canadian town called Brantford, when the Boston board of education asked him to come and work in the USA at a new school for deaf mutes
Alexander was very happy to move to Boston and continue the work he has started in Britain. 4d however, he was so busy there that he did not have the time to work on his inventions.
Then, two years later, he agreed to give private lessons to a young boy whose family allowed him to use their basement as a workshop. This gave Alexander the opportunity to resume his experiments with sound transmitters. He used to spend all his free time, and most of his money, on his inventions. 5b
She was a young girl who had lost her hearing and the ability to speak because of a childhood illness. Her name was Mabel Hubbard, and four years later they got married. Although many people though that the plan to invent a human voice transmitter was a waste of time, Alexander refused to give up his dream. He continues his experiments with sound vibrations. He ever copied the design of the human ear using iron rods and electrical wires to produce the same effect.
Alexander was spending so much time and energy on his inventions he did less and less work with his students and soon ran out of money. He was about to give up when he met professor john Henry, an expert on the telegraph and electricity. 6a
In order to survive financially bell had to work on the musical telegraph, but he also continued working on his mechanical voice transmitter 7g almost a year later, in march 1876, the first words were heard coming through the phone
On his 29th birthday Alexander graham bell registered his invention with the patent office and, because they had never seen anything like it before, they registered his invention as ‘an improvement in telegraphy’. The name ‘telephone’ came later.