"Alexander Graham Bell is remembered today as the inventor of the telephone, but he was also an outstanding teacher of the deaf and a prolific inventor of other devices" ("Alexander Graham Bell" 2003 1). Actually, the invention of the telephone was more or less a by-product of his search for a means of communicating with the deaf or hard of hearing, as he himself was.
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 really interested Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, the fathers, was Bell's determination to find the possibility of transmitting the human voice. He experimented both with vibrating membranes and an actual human ear. (It is interesting to note that one of Gardiner Hubbard's daughters, who was deaf, later married Bell.) Incidentally, one of his students was Helen Keller.
In the summer of 1874, Bell "experimented with a phonautograph, a multiple telegraph and an electric s...