Alexander Graham Bell

Born in Scotland, Bell spent his youth in England. His grandfather and father were elocution teachers. While the family lived in England, the parents moved in scientific circles, where experiments were being carried out on the human voice. Alexander and his brother became interested in the subject. They made a puppet with throat organs based on those of the human being and experimented with reproducing the human voice. Alexander became interested, too, in experimenting with a multiple telegraph that could send more than one message at a time. It was through his interest in this field that he invented the telephone years later.

After graduating from the University of London, Alexander was a teacher of the deaf. The family moved to America where Alexander's fa­ther had been asked to read lectures.

In the course of his efforts to perfect a multiple telegraph, Bell had invented a little machine, that he had used in teaching the deaf. It was a cylinder with a membrane. When someone spoke into a cylinder, the membrane vibrated and the stylus traced a zigzag line on smoked glass. This little machine that he called the phonautograph, gave him a key to the invention of the telephone.

In 1876 when Bell showed his first model of the telephone, it was still a rather simple instrument.

Alexander Graham Bell received the Centennial prize awards for both the multiple telegraph and the telephone. In his memoirs Bell wrote: "I went to bed, the night before, an unknown man, and awoke to find myself famous.”

It happened at the time when the telephone, the radio, and television had not yet been invented. And when Edison gave the world the electric light, his invention paved the way to the immense use of electricity in the 20th century. The 20th century also gave us the automobile, the airplane, the helicopter, the cinema and the computer. Owing to their inventions millions people now use the Internet.