Alexander Graham Bell Who Invented Telephone

Alexander Graham Bell

In 1847 when Alexander Graham Bell was born, Washington, D.C. And Baltimore had just been connected by telegraph. The telegraph used Morse code, a system of dots and dashes to send messages. Bell was born in Scotland. His father was an inventor, too. Bell's father invented an alphabet and system of lip-reading for deaf people. Bell studied the science of acoustics because he wanted to help his deaf mother. He invented an electric piano that could be heard far away. Bell came to Canada first and then to the United States. When he first came to the U.S., he taught deaf students his father's lip reading system.

He married a former deaf student Mabel Hubbard in 1877, not long after he got a patent for the telephone. Her father had financed his experiments. He developed the telephone by improving the telegraph. First, he got a single telegraph wire to carry more than one message at a time. Then he made instruments to transmit sounds. Three days after he got the patent, he and his assistant Thomas Watson were getting ready to try out a new transmitter when Bell spilled battery acid on his clothes. Upset he said, "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you." Watson, in another part of the house, heard his voice come over the transmitter! Bell was so excited that his transmitter had worked, he forgot all about the acid that had ruined his clothes. The next year, in 1877, came the first Bell Telephone Company.