Alexander Graham Bell

Inventor

Name at birth: Alexander Bell

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Born and educated in Scotland, he was the son of Alexander Melville Bell, inventor of visible speech, an alphabet that used symbols to represent human sounds. The Bell family emigrated to Canada in 1870, and in 1871 young Alexander moved to Boston, Massachusetts as a teacher to the deaf. He worked on ways to translate the human voice into vibrations, and came up with the idea for the telephone. In 1875 Bell began working with Thomas Watson, a mechanically-inclined electrician; by 1876 Bell had uttered the first intelligible sentence over the phone: "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you." Later in his career Bell worked on a variety of inventions, including flying machines and hydrofoils.

Extra credit: Bell was one of the co-founders of the National Geographic Society... One of his associates in aeronautics was Lt. Thomas E. Selfridge, the first air crash fatality (1908).

Other inventors on Who2 include Nikola Tesla, Dean Kamen and Louis Lumiére.

Bell had a significant role in exhuming the remains of James Smithson. Read all about it in our loop Exhumation Celebration.