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Windows 8 UI > Desgined By. Renadel Dapize
Fitrah Izul Falaq
On Sunday 3 February 2013
Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh,
Scotland on 3rd March, 1847. His father was Alexander Melville Bell, a leading
authority in elocution and speech correction. The second of three sons, Bell
was mainly educated at home. However, he did spend two years in Edinburgh Royal
High School and attended a few lectures at Edinburgh University.
In 1864 Bell began work as a teacher at Elgin's
Western House Academy. Four years later he moved to London where he became his
father's assistant. Bell's health began to deteriorate and as both his brothers
both died of tuberculosis, and in 1870 the family decided to emigrate to
Canada. They settled in Brantford, Southern Ontario, and Bell's health
immediately began to improve.
Bell gave lectures on Visible Speech, a method of
teaching speech to the deaf that had been developed by his father. In 1871 he
was invited to give a series of speeches in the United States. He opened a
school for the teachers of the deaf in Boston and in 1873 became professor of
vocal physiology at the city's university.
After experimenting with various acoustical devices
Bell produced the first intelligible telephonic transmission with a message to
his assistant, Thomas Watson, on 5th June, 1875. When he heard that Elisha Gray
was working on a similar device, Bell patented his telephone on 3rd March,
1876. The following year formed the Bell Telephone Company. The telephone was
an instant success. Within three years there were 30,000 telephones in use
around the world. Gray later claimed the invention of the telephone but lost
the long legal battle in the Supreme Court. [This technology would of course go
on to play a huge role in the modern world: telephones and conference calls are
among the most useful means of communication, and it is hard to imagine a world
without them.
With the 50,000 francs that he obtained from the
French government for winning the Volta Prize in 1880, Bell established the
Volta Laboratory in Washington. Over the next few years he invented the
photophone, a machine which used selenium crystals to transmit words in a beam
of light. This was followed by a device that could identify metal in the human
body. This was used to locate bullets after someone had been shot.
In 1883 Bell invented the graphophone, the first
practical system of sound recording. The laboratory also experimented with flat
disc records, electroplating records, and impressing permanent magnetic fields
on records (an early type of tape recorder).
In 1898 Bell became president of the National
Geographic Society. With the help of Gilbert Grosvenor, his future son-in-law,
Bell established the illustrated National Geographic Magazine. Bell also built
a research laboratory in Nova Scotia where he invented an air-cooling system, a
way of desalinating sea-water and a sorting machine for punch-coded census
cards.
In his later years Bell took a keen interest in
aeronautics. His wife, Mabel Hubbard Bell, founded the Aerial Experiment
Association and Bell built giant man-carrying kites. In 1919 Bell produced a
hydrofoil craft that reached speeds of 70 miles per hour.
Alexander Graham Bell died in Nova Scotia, Canada,
on 2nd August, 1922.