Alexander Graham Bell

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Alexander Graham Bell, a man who best known for inventing the telephone. Most people don’t know he spent the majority of his life teaching and helping the deaf. Educating the hearing impaired is what he wished to be remembered for.
Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland. His mother was a painter of miniature portraits and also loved to play the piano even though she was nearly deaf. Aleck’s mother knew that he had a talent for music and always encouraged him to play (Matthews 12). Alexander Melville Bell, his father, was a “Professor of Elocution,” Art of public speaking (Bruce 16). Due to the fact that his father was a very knowledgeable man and a professor, Aleck obtained most of his education from his father and soon followed in his footsteps. Aleck had only two siblings, Melville James Bell, “Melly,” and Edward Charles Bell, “Ted” (Schuman 127).
Aleck’s father took a trip over seas in 1868 to see if Americans would take to his new ideas of speech. Alexander Melville Bell was so impressed that he decided to move the entire family. They did not purchase an estate in the United States. However they did buy an estate in Brantford, Ontario, Canada where there were an abundance of Scottish immigrants. Alexander Melville Bell still continued to make trips to Boston to lecture on “visible speech” (Schuman 39). Aleck’s father was offered a teaching position at the Boston School for the Deaf. He did not take the job but suggested that Aleck take the position instead. Alexander Graham Bell took the teaching position in April of 1871, and was on his way to the Boston School for the Deaf (Schuman 39).
Alexander Graham Bell’s, number one passion in life was helping the hearing impaired. Children learn to talk by hearing other people talk, and then they learn to speak by unconscious imitation. Deaf children do not have this option; they cannot imitate anything and therefore have to be taught by other means. Aleck thought that to teach a deaf child to speak consisted of having the child know how to make the sound by using different positions of their mouth. Slowly combining the sounds would make words and again would result in speech.
Aleck tried a numerous number of methods. The method of Visible Speech was one of the ways that Aleck was able to teach his stude...

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...lliant man and has changed the lives of many people around the world with or with out hearing impairment. His method of “Visual Speech” was great because it got the student to know how to use the organs in their mouths and be able to talk. To think that the telephone was originally going to be used as a device to help the hearing impaired is surprising because it ended up being used as a devise that people around the would use everyday to commutate. Alexander Graham Bell affected the world more directly by the invention of the telephone, but this could not compare to the gift of speech that he was able to offer to his students.

Bell, Alexander Graham. The Mechanism of Speech. New York: Funk & Wagnalls
Company, 1908.

Bruce, Robert V. Bell Alexander Graham Bell and the conquest of solitude.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973.

Matthews, Tom L. Always Inventing a Photo biography of Alexander Graham Bell.
Washington D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1999.

Mackenzie, Catherine. Alexander Graham Bell The Man Who Contracted Space.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1928.

Schuman, Michael A. Alexander Graham Bell Inventor and Teacher. New Jersey:
Enslow Publishers, 1999.

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