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July 6 - White History Month - 26th Most Iconic White AmericanAlexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) revolutionized communication as we know it. Best known for his invention of the telephone which made long-distance voice communication between individuals, industries, and governments possible for the first time; his interest in sound technology was deep-rooted and personal, as both his wife and mother were deaf. His once-unimaginable inventions became essential parts of everyday life.One of America's greatest inventors, he was a Scottish-born American inventor, scientist, and engineer, He invented the first working telephone in 1876, founded the Bell Telephone Company in 1877, co-founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1885, refined Thomas Edison’s phonograph in 1886. Greatly influenced by the deafness of both his mother and his wife, Bell dedicated much of his life’s work to researching hearing and speech and helping the hearing impaired communicate. In addition to the telephone, Bell worked on numerous other inventions, including a metal detector, airplanes, and hydrofoils—or “flying” boats; and was also a teacher, a speech therapist, and a special agent of the U.S Census Bureau.Bell was born a UK citizen in 1847 in Scotland, and moved to Ontario with his parents at the age of 13. He was a UK subject in Canada and considered a Canadian citizen before the official creation of Canadian citizenship in 1947. Bell later moved to Boston for a teaching job and officially became a naturalized American citizen after marrying his wife Mabel Hubbard. Though Bell split his time between both Canada and the US, the first patent related to the telephone was submitted in the US in 1876.Bell was so proud of his American citizenship, that in 1915 he specifically rejected the notion that he was a hyphenated American and always flew the American flag at his summer home in Nova Scotia. He said "I am not one of those hyphenated Americans who claim allegiance to two countries." At his instructions, the plaque marking his burial place at his Canadian summer home bears the inscription: “Died a Citizen of the United States.”His grandfather, uncle, and father were experts on the mechanics of voice and elocution; and taught speech therapy for the deaf. And Bell's mother, Eliza, became an accomplished pianist despite being deaf, inspiring him to undertake big challenges.Young Alexander was an intellectually curious child who studied piano and began inventing things at an early age.Having been born simply “Alexander Bell,” at age 10, he begged his father to give him a middle name like his two brothers. On his 11th birthday, his father granted his wish, allowing him to adopt the middle name “Graham,” chosen out of respect for Alexander Graham, a family friend.Eliza home-schooled her son and instilled an infinite curiosity of the world around him. He received one year of formal education in a private school and two years at Edinburgh’s acclaimed Royal High School. His school record was undistinguished, marked by absenteeism and lacklustre grades. His main interest remained in the sciences, especially biology, while he treated other school subjects with indifference, to the dismay of his father.Though a mediocre student, Bell displayed an uncommon ability to solve problems. At age 12, while playing with a friend in a grain mill, he noticed the slow process of husking the wheat grain. He went home and built a device with rotating paddles and nail brushes that easily removed the husks from the grain. In return, his friend's father gave both boys the run of a small workshop in which to invent.From his early years, Bell showed a sensitive nature and a talent for art, poetry, and music that was encouraged by his mother. With no formal training, he mastered the piano and became the family's pianist. Despite being normally quiet and introspective, he revelled in mimicry and "voice tricks" akin to ventriloquism that continually entertained family guests during their occasional visits. Bell was also deeply affected by his mother's gradual deafness (she began to lose her hearing when he was 12), and learned a manual finger language so he could sit at her side and tap out silently the conversations swirling around the family parlour. He also developed a technique of speaking in clear, modulated tones directly into his mother's forehead wherein she would hear him with reasonable clarity. Bell's preoccupation with his mother's deafness led him to study acoustics.His family was long associated with the teaching of elocution: his grandfather, Alexander Bell, in London, his uncle in Dublin, and his father, in Edinburgh, were all elocutionists. His father published a variety of works on the subject, several of which are still well known, especially his The Standard Elocutionist which appeared in Edinburgh in 1868. The Standard Elocutionist appeared in 168 British editions and sold over a quarter of a million copies in the United States alone. In this treatise, his father explains his methods of how to instruct deaf-mutes (as they were then known) to articulate words and read other people's lip movements to decipher meaning. Bell's father taught him and his brothers not only to write Visible Speech but to identify any symbol and its accompanying sound. Bell became so proficient that he became a part of his father's public demonstrations and astounded audiences with his abilities. He could decipher Visible Speech representing virtually every language, including Latin, Scottish Gaelic, and even Sanskrit, accurately reciting written tracts without any prior knowledge of their pronunciation.His father encouraged Bell's interest in speech and, in 1863, took his sons to see a unique automaton developed by Sir Charles Wheatstone based on the earlier work of Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen. The rudimentary "mechanical man" simulated a human voice. Bell was fascinated by the machine and after he obtained a copy of von Kempelen's book, published in German, and had laboriously translated it, he and his older brother Melville built their own automaton head. Their father, highly interested in their project, offered to pay for any supplies and spurred the boys on with the enticement of a "big prize" if they were successful. While his brother constructed the throat and larynx, Bell tackled the more difficult task of recreating a realistic skull. His efforts resulted in a remarkably lifelike head that could "speak", albeit only a few words. The boys would carefully adjust the "lips" and when a bellows forced air through the windpipe, a very recognizable "Mama" ensued, to the delight of neighbours who came to see the Bell invention.Intrigued by the results of the automaton, Bell continued to experiment with a live subject, the family's Skye Terrier, "Trouve". After he taught it to growl continuously, Bell would reach into its mouth and manipulate the dog's lips and vocal cords to produce a crude-sounding "Ow ah oo ga ma ma". With little convincing, visitors believed his dog could articulate "How are you, grandmama?" Indicative of his playful nature, his experiments convinced onlookers that they saw a "talking dog". These initial forays into experimentation with sound led Bell to undertake his first serious work on the transmission of sound, using tuning forks to explore resonance.To close relatives and friends he remained "Aleck".At 18, the Bell family moved to London, Bell returned to Scotland where he continued experiments on sound using a minimum of laboratory equipment. Bell concentrated on experimenting with electricity to convey sound and later installed a telegraph wire from his room to that of a friend.At 20, his health faltered mainly through exhaustion. His younger brother died from tuberculosis. Bell returned home in 1867.At 21, Bell used Visible Speech for the first time to teach the deaf to speak English.At 23, his older brother died from tuberculosis, causing a family crisis. His father had also suffered a debilitating illness earlier in life and had been restored to health by a convalescence in Newfoundland. Bell's parents embarked upon a long-planned move when they realized that their remaining son was also sickly. Acting decisively, his father asked Bell to arrange for the sale of all the family property, conclude all of his brother's affairs, and join his father and mother in setting out for the New World. Reluctantly, Bell also had to conclude a relationship with Marie Eccleston, who, as he had surmised, was not prepared to leave England with himBell travelled with his parents and his brother's widow, Caroline Margaret Ottaway, to Ontario to stay with a Baptist minister and family friend. The Bell family soon purchased a farm of 10.5 acres. At the homestead, Bell set up his own workshop. Despite his frail condition upon arriving in Canada, Bell found the climate and environs to his liking, and rapidly improved. He continued his interest in the study of the human voice and when he discovered the Six Nations Reserve across the river at Onondaga, he learned the Mohawk language and translated its unwritten vocabulary into Visible Speech symbols. For his work, Bell was awarded the title of Honorary Chief and participated in a ceremony where he donned a Mohawk headdress and danced traditional dances.After setting up his workshop, Bell continued experiments based on Helmholtz's work with electricity and sound. He also modified a melodeon (a type of pump organ) so that it could transmit its music electrically over a distance.At age 24, Bell immigrated to the United States, where he implemented the system his father developed to teach deaf children called “visible speech” — a set of symbols that represented speech sounds — at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes, the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts, and at the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut.At age 25, Bell opened his own School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech in Boston, where deaf people were taught to speak. One of his students was the young Helen Keller. Unable to hear, see, or speak, Keller would later praise Bell for dedicating his life to helping the deaf break through the “inhuman silence which separates and estranges.”At age 26, the budding inventor became Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at the Boston University School of Oratory, even though he didn’t have a university degree.Also at age 26, he began working with Hubbard’s 15-year-old daughter Mabel Hubbard, who had lost her hearing at age 5 after nearly dying of scarlet fever. Alexander and Mabel fell in love and were married on July 11, 1877, a matter of days after Alexander had founded the Bell Telephone Company. The courtship had begun years earlier; however, Bell waited until he was more financially secure before marrying. One unusual request exacted by his fiancée was that he use "Alec" rather than the family's earlier familiar name of "Aleck". From 1876, he would sign his name "Alec Bell".Both the telegraph and the telephone work by transmitting electrical signals over wires, and Bell's success with the telephone came as a direct result of his attempts to improve the telegraph. When he began experimenting with electrical signals, the telegraph had been an established means of communication for some 30 years. Although a highly successful system, the telegraph was basically limited to receiving and sending one message at a time.Bell's extensive knowledge of the nature of sound enabled him to imagine the possibility of transmitting multiple messages over the same wire at the same time. Although the idea of a "multiple telegraph" had been in existence for some time, and was a major focus of telegraph innovation, no one had been able to perfect one. This ultimately led to Bell’s invention of the telephone. In 1868 Joseph Stearns had invented the duplex, a system that transmitted two messages simultaneously over a single wire. Western Union Telegraph Company, the dominant firm in the industry, acquired the rights to Stearns’s duplex and hired the noted inventor Thomas Edison to devise as many multiple-transmission methods as possible in order to block competitors from using them. Edison’s work culminated in the quadruplex, a system for sending four simultaneous telegraph messages over a single wire. Inventors then sought methods that could send more than four; some, including Bell and his great rival Elisha Gray, developed designs capable of subdividing a telegraph line into 10 or more channels. These so-called harmonic telegraphs used reeds or tuning forks that responded to specific acoustic frequencies. They worked well in the laboratory but proved unreliable in service.At age 27, Bell's research had progressed to the extent that he could inform his future father-in-law about the possibility of a multiple telegraph. Hubbard, who had long resented the absolute control then exerted by the Western Union Telegraph Company, instantly saw the potential for breaking such a monopoly and along with Thomas Sanders, gave Bell the financial backing he needed.With financial backing, Bell worked on his “harmonic telegraph,” based on the principle that several different notes could be sent simultaneously along the same wire if the notes or signals differed in pitch. It was during his work on the harmonic telegraph that Bell’s interest drifted to an even more radical idea, the possibility that not just the telegraph’s dots-and-dashes, but the human voice itself could be transmitted over wires.Concerned that this diversion of interest would slow Bell’s work on the harmonic telegraph they were funding, Sanders and Hubbard hired Thomas A. Watson, a skilled electrician, to keep Bell on track. However, when Watson became a devoted believer in Bell’s ideas for voice transmission, the two men agreed to work together with Bell providing the ideas and Watson doing the electrical work necessary to bring Bell’s ideas to reality.Bell proceeded with his work on the multiple telegraph, but he did not tell Hubbard that he and Watson were also developing a device that would transmit speech electrically. While Watson worked on the harmonic telegraph at the insistent urging of Hubbard and other backers, Bell secretly met in March 1875 (age 28) with Joseph Henry, the respected director of the Smithsonian Institution, who listened to Bell's ideas for a telephone and offered encouraging words. Spurred on by Henry's positive opinion, Bell and Watson continued their work.On June 2, 1875 (age 28), while experimenting with his harmonic telegraph, Bell and Watson discovered that sound could be transmitted over a wire. It was a completely accidental discovery. Watson was trying to loosen a reed that had been wound around a transmitter when he plucked it by accident. The vibration produced by Watson’s act traveled along the wire into a second device in the other room where Bell was working.The "twang" Bell heard was all the inspiration that he and Watson needed to accelerate their work. On March 7, 1876 (age 29), the U.S. Patent Office issued Bell Patent No. 174,465, covering “the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically ... by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound.”On March 10, 1876, three days after he had been granted his patent, Bell famously succeeded in getting his telephone to work. Bell recounted the historic moment in his journal: "I then shouted into M [the mouthpiece] the following sentence: 'Mr. Watson, come here—I want to see you.' To my delight, he came and declared that he had heard and understood what I said."Bell and his partners, Hubbard and Sanders, offered to sell the patent outright to Western Union for $100,000. The president of Western Union balked, countering that the telephone was nothing but a toy. Two years later, he told colleagues that if he could get the patent for $25 million he would consider it a bargain. By then, the Bell company no longer wanted to sell the patent.Always the shrewd businessman, Bell took every opportunity to show the public what his telephone could do. After seeing the device in action at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II, exclaimed, “My God, it talks!” Several other demonstrations followed—each successful at a greater distance than the last. On July 9, 1877, the Bell Telephone Company was organized, with Emperor Dom Pedro II being the first person to buy shares. One of the first telephones in a private residence was installed in Dom Pedro’s Petrópolis palace.At age 30, Bell was awarded the French Volta Prize, and with the money, he founded a facility devoted to scientific discovery, the Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C.At age 33, he helped launch Science magazine.Bell and his assistant Charles Sumner Tainter jointly invented a wireless telephone, named a photophone, which allowed for the transmission of both sounds and normal human conversations on a beam of light. On June 21, 1880, Bell's assistant transmitted a wireless voice telephone message 700 feet, 19 years before the first voice radio transmissions. Bell believed the photophone's principles were his life's "greatest achievement", telling a reporter shortly before his death that the photophone was "the greatest invention I have ever made, greater than the telephone". The photophone was a precursor to the fiber-optic communication systems, and set the foundation upon which today's laser and fiber optic communication systems are rooted. Bell’s curiosity drove him to try to come up with novel solutions on the spot whenever problems arose. In 1881 (age 34), US President James A. Garfield was shot. A bullet lodged in the president’s back, and doctors were unable to locate it through physical probing. Bell decided that a promising approach was to use an induction balance, a by-product of his research on canceling out electrical interference on telephone wires. Bell determined that a properly configured induction balance would emit a tone when a metal object was brought into proximity with it. He hastily constructed an electrical bullet probe, an early version of the metal detector, as a way to try to locate the bullet. He would later improve this and produce a device called a telephone probe, which would make a telephone receiver click when it touched metal. Adapted for surgical use, surgeons adopted it, and it was credited with saving lives during the Boer War (1899–1902) and World War I (1914–18).The same year, when Bell's newborn son, Edward, died from respiratory problems. Bell responded by designing a metal vacuum jacket that would facilitate breathing. The apparatus was a forerunner of the iron lung used in the 1950s to aid polio victims.Bell dabbled in inventing the audiometer to detect minor hearing problems, conducting experiments with energy recycling and alternative fuels, and worked on methods of removing salt from seawater.He assembled a teams of bright young engineers to pursue new and exciting ideas heading into the future. Their experiments produced such major improvements in Thomas Edison's phonograph that it became commercially viable. Their design, patented as the Graphophone in 1886, featured a removable cardboard cylinder coated with mineral wax.He spent considerable time and effort he put into making advances in manned flight technology. By the 1890s, Bell had begun experimenting with propellers and kites, which led him in 1898 to apply the concept of the tetrahedron (a solid figure with four triangular faces) to kite design along with wings constructed of multiple compound tetrahedral kites covered in maroon silk as well as to create a new form of architecture.1898-1903, age 51, Bell succeeded his late father-in-law, Gardiner Hubbard, as president of the National Geographic Society. In 1903 his son-in-law, Gilbert H. Grosvenor, became editor in chief of the National Geographic Magazine, and Bell encouraged Grosvenor to make the magazine a more popular publication through more photographs and fewer scholarly articles which helped make their journal into one of the world's most-loved publications.As early as 1889 (age 42), Bell made recommendations to the Superintendent of the Census Office, Robert Percival Porter, for proper enumeration of the deaf and blind in the census. He emphasized the need for properly phrased questions in order to discern true levels of disability and the acquisition of these disabilities. In 1900 (age 53), Census Director William R. Merriam appointed Alexander Graham Bell "Expert Special Agent of the Census Office, for the preparation of the Report on the Deaf and the Blind." The 1900 Census data on the blind, deaf, and dumb was the most comprehensive in census history.In 1907, four years after the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk, Bell formed the Aerial Experiment Association with Glenn Curtiss, William "Casey" Baldwin, Thomas Selfridge, and J.A.D. McCurdy, four young engineers with the common goal of creating airborne vehicles. By 1909, the group had produced four powered aircraft, the best of which, the Silver Dart, made a successful powered flight in Canada on February 23, 1909.In 1908, began hydrofoil experimentation to improve the designs of hydrofoil boats. As they gain speed, hydrofoils lift the boat’s hull out of the water, decreasing drag and allowing greater speeds. In 1919, Bell and Casey Baldwin built a hydrofoil that set a world water-speed record that was not broken until 1963.In 1915 (age 68), Bell made the first transcontinental phone call to Watson from New York to San Francisco. Bell spoke into the telephone’s mouthpiece, repeating his famous request, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” From 3,400 miles away, Mr. Watson replied, “It will take me five days to get there now!”Even then, Alexander Graham Bell refused to have a telephone in his study, fearing it would distract him from his scientific work.Bell died on August 2, 1922, at the age of 75 from complications from diabetes. During Bell’s funeral, every phone in North America was silenced for one minute to pay tribute to the inventor.Notable Quotes: “I had made up my mind to find that for which I was searching even if it required the remainder of my life.”“When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.”“A man's own judgment should be the final appeal in all that relates to himself.”“Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.”“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to focus.”“Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.”“The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion.”“The only difference between success and failure is the ability to take action.”“You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth.”“The inventor looks upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea. The spirit of invention possesses him, seeking materialization.”I have to add words to the endWhy i don't knowSo i add words to the endHopefully this is the last