© 2012 The Weekly Plan. All rights reserved.
3 MARCH 1847
st
Bell’s 1 telephone
ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL
Alexander Graham Bell is best known for an invention
that changed the world…the telephone. But what is less
well known is the way this invention came about and the
dozens of other inventions Bell also be created.
Bell was born on 3rd March 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland.
At first, he was just Alexander Bell but when he turned
ten, he asked his parents to give him a middle name so
they added ‘Graham’. His mother was a pianist, despite
being deaf, and his father was a teacher who taught deaf
students how to communicate. As a young boy, Bell
learned how to communicate with his mother using a
form of sign language. Bell was curious about the world
around him and enjoyed conducting experiments. He
also taught himself ventriloquism and the piano.
When he was twelve years old, Bell made his first
invention. His best friend told him about the hard work
involved in removing husks from wheat at his parent’s
flour mill. Bell made a machine that combined rotating
paddles and nail brushes to separate wheat kernels from
their husks. It was used on his friend's mill for several
years and the mill owner gave Bell his own workshop to
try out his experiments and inventions.
In the 1800s, people communicated with each other
via telegraphs which were a way of sending and
receiving clicking signals over a wire. The signals
were a code that spelled out a message. When Bell’s
deaf school failed in 1872 he and another inventor,
Elisha Gray, were hired by a company to help find a
way to send multiple messages along the same line.
After this, the inventors focused on trying to find ways
to communicate speech over electrical wires. Bell
was able to get some funding and together with his
assistant ,Thomas Watson, worked on a device that
could take sounds and change them into signals that
were sent and received over a wire. This device
became known as the telephone and the first words
spoken over it were by Bell on March 10, 1876. He
said, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you".
Bell was initially homeschooled by his father and when
he entered formal schooling he became known for having
bad grades and missing a lot of school. He excelled at
science but eventually dropped out at 15 and moved to
London to live with his grandfather who was able to
finally get Bell interested in learning.
At the same time, Gray had also found a way to
transmit speech through the telegraph. Bell had to
race to the patent office in order to get his patent in
first. A patent is the rights allowing an inventor to be
the only person to make or sell the invention for a
period of time. Gray filed a design for an acoustic
telegraph that sent vocal transmissions through water
the same day that Bell’s lawyer filed a patent for his
telephone device. Even though Bell hadn’t actually
gotten his phone working he was still first to get the
valuable patent. Three days after he got the patent, he
used a liquid transmitter, just like the one Gray had
designed, to get the device to work. He has been
accused by many of stealing the phone from Gray.
Bell followed both his father's and grandfather’s career
path and became a teacher of deaf students. He started
his own school for the deaf and used his father’s
teaching system to educate the students, one of whom
was Helen Keller.
Bell eventually married and his wife was also deaf. This
provided Bell with even more motivation to come up with
effective means of communication for deaf people.
After Bell finished his work on the telephone, he
offered to sell the patent to Western Union for
$100,000. The president of the company refused,
claiming that the telephone was nothing more than a
toy! Two years later, he changed his mind, saying he
would consider it a bargain if he could buy the patent
for $25 million. By then Bell had formed his own
company and was not interested in selling his patent.
© 2012 The Weekly Plan. All rights reserved.
ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL
Bell demonstrates a model prototype
telephone in 1876.
Early Office Museum
3 MARCH 1847
While his most famous invention was the phone, Bell
continued to invent throughout his life. Interestingly, he
refused to have a telephone in his study as he feared it
would intrude on his work.
In 1877 Thomas Edison developed the phonograph, a
machine that could record and play back sound. Bell and
other scientists improved Edison's invention by changing
the design and some of its parts to make it stronger.
In 1880, Bell created the photophone, which allowed
sound to pass through a beam of light and was the first
wireless phone technology ever created.
Bell invented a metal detector in 1881 to help President
Garfield who had been shot. The device was to help find
the bullets but the president was laying on a metal-frame
bed which interfered with the device so the bullets were
not found.
Later, Bell began exploring innovations in flight, he also
designed and built a hydrofoil which broke a world speed
record.
In addition to these inventions he created a metal jacket
to help with breathing problems, a meter to detect
hearing problems and a device to locate icebergs.
Bell was also ahead of his time with his environmentallyfriendly inventions. He worried about the effects of
methane gas on the environment and experimented with
composting toilets, recycling water and making solar
panels to heat houses.
Alexander Graham Bell died in August of 1922. It is
claimed every phone in North America was silenced
during his funeral in his honour. At the time of his death
he had 30 patents.
Alexander Graham Bell asked questions and wondered
about the world around him. He was creative, innovative
and never gave up.
Discussion Questions
Factual
1.
What was Bell’s first invention?
2.
What was Bell’s first job?
3.
Who was the inventor that many claim
Bell stole his telephone invention from?
4.
What is a patent?
5.
List 3 other inventions Bell was
responsible for.
Challenge
Get creative and innovative just like Alexander
Graham Bell. Think of a device you could
invent that others would also find useful.
You need to draw a clear diagram of your
device and label the different parts.
You also need to write one paragraph
explaining what your device/invention does and
how it will be useful to others.