ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

WHAT QUESTIONS WAS HE SEEKING TO ANSWER

His father, Melville Bell "had invented Visible Speech, a code of symbols for all spoken sounds that was used in teaching deaf people to speak" ("Alexander Graham Bell" 2003 1). It was while his father was engaged in his work, that Alexander himself became interested in the study of sound and the mechanics of speech. Actually, the idea of telegraphing speech came to Bell from his studies of the German physicist, Hermann von Helmholtz.

In general, then, Bell was investigating various means of communicating. Even though his priorities seemed to be with the deaf and hard of hearing, the idea of transmitting sound was always in his thoughts. For that reason, he began to investigate the transmission of sound over wires. "In particular, he experimented with development of the harmonic telegraph- a device that could send multiple messages at the same time over a single wire" ("Alexander Graham Bell" 1999 1). As a teacher of the deaf, his work and ideas so impressed the fathers of two of his students, that they backed his experiments. What r

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he and his fellow scientists . . . invented were the graphophone, a device for recording sound on wax cylinders or disks (an advance that made Thomas Edison's phonograph commercially viable)" ("Alexander Graham Bell" 2003 2). In short, the invention of the telephone was the outcome of Bell's concern with finding communication apparatuses for the deaf. THE CONTRIBUTIUON TO THE SCIENTIFIC EFFORTS OF HIS TIMES Communication now had a new vehicle. Many of the inventions or ideas that the Volta and Bell laboratories worked on became more feasible in time. The social effects of the telephone were startling and immediate: it changed the way business was conducted, encouraging decentralization and allowing managers and sales people to carry out their function on a regional, and later national, scale . . . The telephone also changed the way doctors practiced medicine, linking patient to pharmacy almost immediately ("Alexander Graham Bell" 2003 2). Of course, Bell was one of those men with inventive, progressive minds and ideas that communication was not the only area into which he dabbled. "After 1895, Bell's primary interest was the possibility of flight. He built gliders capable of carrying human beings, supported pioneeri
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Approximate Word count = 1710
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)