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A Profile Of Alexander Graham Bell
The young Alexander took an increased interest in his father's work at the age of 12 when his mother became deaf, inventing his own sign language to help her communicate. This began a fixation with acoustics and sound that would lead him to become one of the most famous inventors of the 19th century. The Bell family emigrated to Canada in 1870 before moving to the United States in 1871 where Alexander continued his work with the deaf by teaching and publicising Visible Speech and founded a dedicated school at Boston that later became part of the university. The university subsequently gave him the position of Professor of Vocal Physiology. In 1874 Alexander Graham Bell began to focus his work on ways of transmitting speech and put together his ideas for the telephone with his assistant Thomas Watson. On March 10, 1876 Bell achieved his first success with the telephone transmitting the sentence, "Watson, come here, I want you." Elisha Gray independently developed a means of transmitting speech electronically at the same time as Alexander Graham Bell and the two inventors took their designs to be registered at the patent office within hours of each other. Bell was granted the patent first but Gray objected and an extensive legal battle ensued which Bell eventually won. Bell demonstrated his invention publicly for the first time at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. On November 26th, he sent a message between Cambridge and Salem, Massachusetts using the same design for the transmitter and receiver. This device was the base model for commercial telephones that were introduced in 1877. 1877 was also the year that Bell teamed up financially with Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders to form the Bell Telephone Company. In 1880 France presented Bell with the Volta Prize and 50,000 Francs for his invention. He used the money to establish the Volta Laboratory in Washington DC. The same year, Bell and his associates used the lab to develop the photophone, audiometer, the induction balance and the wax recording cylinder, which later evolved into the phonograph. Alexander Graham Bell began to study aeronautics in 1885 and tested his inventions at his summer home of Baddeck, Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada. It was here that he invented a kite capable of carrying a person and invented tricycle landing gear utilised for takeoff and landing. Bell and his associates worked on hydrofoil boats and their hydrodome was the fastest boat in the world in 1917 for several years with attainable speeds of 70mph. Bell died on August 22nd, 1922, in Baddeck. He can surely never have imagined the far-reaching implications of his invention: from conference calls to limitless ‘apps’ for every aspect of daily life, Bell’s invention has had a profound effect on how we live our lives. Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com |
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