ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL
Science
Born: March 3, 1847
Edinburgh, Scotland
Died: August 2, 1922

"Man is a wealth grubber, man is a pleasure seeker; man is a power wielder; man is a thinker; and man is a creative lover."

A pioneer in the field of telecommunications, Alexander Graham Bell was born in 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He moved to Ontario, and then to the United States, settling in Boston, before beginning his career as an inventor. Throughout his life, Bell had been interested in the education of deaf people. This interest lead him to invent the microphone and, in 1876, his "electrical speech machine," which we now call a telephone. News of his invention quickly spread throughout the country, even throughout Europe. By 1878, Bell had set up the first telephone exchange in New Haven, Connecticut. By 1884, long distance connections were made between Boston, Massachusetts and New York City.

This Scottish-born scientist is known best for inventing the telephone. In 1865 Bell conceived of the idea to transmit speech by electric waves. It took another 10 years for the principle to be developed and one hot June day in 1876 the first sentence was successfully transmitted by wire. By 1877 the Bell Telephone Company came into being. But Bell didn't stop there. In 1880 he established the Volta Laboratory in Washington D.C., where Bell and his colleagues refined the phonograph invented by Thomas Edison. He also improved education for deaf by carrying forward the work of his father, Alexander Melville Bell, who created an alphabet with symbols representing every vocal sound.

Bell imagined great uses for his telephone, but would he ever have imagined telephone lines being used to transmit video images? Since his death in 1922, the telecommunication industry has undergone an amazing revolution. Today, non-hearing people are able to use a special display telephone to communicate. Fiber optics are improving the quality and speed of data transmission. Actually, your ability to access this information relies upon telecommunications technology. Bell's "electrical speech machine" paved the way for the Internet.