Alexander Graham Bell’s Birth Anniversary: Facts you should know about him

Alexander Graham Bell is credited with the invention of the first working telephone in 1876. Bell was born on March 3, 1847 in Scotland’s Edinburgh and later moved to Canada with his family.

Bell died on August 2, 1922, aged 75. He did significant work for enabling the deaf communicate better and founded the Bell Telephone Company in 1877.(Wikimedia Commons)

Bell died on August 2, 1922, aged 75. He did significant work for the deaf community, ensuring that they communicate better and founded the Bell Telephone Company in 1877.

On the inventor’s birth anniversary, here is looking at some of the most interesting facts about him.

– Bell’s mother and wife were both deaf and influenced him to work with principles of acoustics and transmitting sound waves over wires.

– He became a voice teacher and worked with his father who developed ‘visible speech’, which was a written system of symbols that instructed the deaf to pronounce sounds.

– He was named Alexander Bell, the ‘Graham’ was added on his 11th birthday. Both his father and grandfather were named Alexander.

– The telephone saw him engage in one of the longest drawn patent battles in the history of America. After he filed for the patent of the invention, over 600 lawsuits were made against him.

– Bell considered the invention of a wireless telephone to be “greater than [that of] the telephone”. The wireless device knows a photophone transmitted conversations and sounds through beams of light.

– Helen Keller’s father brought her to Bell, owing to his work for the hearing impaired. Bell then directed them to Anne Sullivan who would teach Helen to write, speak and read Braille.

– When Bell was lowered into his grave in 1922, all telephone services in the US and Canada were suspended for a full minute.

– The standard unit for the intensity of sound waves was named ‘bel’ in the 1920s. The decibel, which is one-tenth of a bel, is the most commonly used metric for measuring the magnitude of noise.

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