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Alexander Graham Bell (Edinburgh, Scotland, March 3, 1847 - Cape Breton Island, Canada, August 2, 1922) was a scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator born in Scotland who is credited with inventing the first telephone practical It was on March 10, 1876 that he definitively successfully tested the experiments he was conducting and patented the telephone.
Bell's father, grandfather and brother had studied pronunciation and speech, and both his mother and wife were deaf, which had a profound influence on his work. His research into hearing and speech led him to experiment with hearing aids, culminating in the first telephone patent in the United States. In retrospect, Bell considered his most famous invention a nuisance to his work as a scientist and never wanted a telephone in his study.
In his maturity, Bell devoted himself to many other inventions, making pioneering contributions on optical telecommunications, hydrofoils and aeronautics. In 1888, Alexander Graham Bell was one of the founding members of the National Geographic Society.
Although he is popularly credited with the invention of the telephone, it should be noted that Antonio Meucci was the true inventor.
He studied at the Universities of Edinburgh and University College London. He immigrated to Canada in 1870 and came to the United States in 1872.
In the United States, he began teaching classes for deaf-mutes, disseminating the system called visible language. This system had been developed by his father, the Scottish educator Alexander Melville Bell. In 1872, AGBell founded a school for deaf-mutes in Boston (Massachusetts), which was later integrated into Boston University where Bell was appointed professor of Vocal Physiology. In 1882 he obtained American citizenship.
From the age of 18, Bell had worked on the idea of speech transmission. In 1874, while working on a multiplex telegraph, he developed the basic ideas of what would become the telephone. His experiments with his assistant Thomas Watson were successfully tested on March 10, 1876.
A demonstration in 1876 during the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), launched his invention worldwide and led him to organize the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. In 1880, France awarded Bell the Volta Prize, endowed with 50,000 francs, for his invention. The implementation of the telephone was lightning fast and in 1882 there were already more than one hundred thousand subscribers in the United States. By city, the list was headed by New York, with more than 4,000 users, while in Europe Paris stood out with 2,400.
On June 16, 2002, the United States Congress recognized Antonio Meucci as the inventor of the telephone, instead of Bell.
He made other inventions such as: the photophone, the audiometer and the induction balance and established the foundations of the modern gramophone.
He was one of the co-founders of the National Geographic that he presided over between 1896 and 1904. He also founded the magazine Science.
He died on August 2, 1922 in Cape Breton Island (Canada), where he spent the summers. The Canadian government maintains a museum containing many of his original inventions.
