Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922)

A Scottish, Canadian and American inventor and teacher of the deaf. Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland, and educated at the universities of Edinburgh and London. He immigrated to Canada in 1870 and to the United States in 1871. In the United States he began teaching deaf-mutes, publicizing the system called visible speech. The system, which was developed by his father, the Scottish educator Alexander Melville Bell, shows how the lips, tongue, and throat are used in the articulation of sound. In 1872 Bell founded a school to train teachers of the deaf in Boston, Massachusetts. The school subsequently became part of Boston University, where Bell was appointed professor of vocal physiology. He invented the telephone (1876), and obtained a U.S monopoly for the Bell system of telephone communication. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1882. He died on August 2, 1922, at Baddeck, Nova Scotia, where a museum containing many of his original inventions is maintained by the Canadian government.