PROFESSOR BELL’S LIFE STORY
Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, March 3, 1847. His father, Alexander Melville Bell, now in Washington, D.C., was a distinguished Scottish educator, and the inventor of a system of “visible speech,” which he has successfully taught to deaf-mutes. His grandfather, Alexander Bell, became well known by the invention of a method of removing impediments of speech.
The younger Bell received his education at the Edinburgh High School and University; and, in 1867, he entered the University of London. Then, in his twenty-third year, his health failing from over-study, he came with his father to Canada, as he expressed it, “to die.” Later, he settled in the United States, becoming first a teacher of deaf-mutes, and subsequently professor of vocal physiology in Boston University. In 1867, he first began to study the problem of conveying articulate sound by electric currents; which he pursued during his leisure time. After nine long years of research and experiment, he completed the first telephone, early in 1876, when it was exhibited at the Centennial Exposition, and pronounced the “wonder of wonders in electric telegraphy.” This was the judgment of scientific men who were in a position to judge, and not of the world at large. People regarded it only as a novelty, as a curious scientific toy; and most business men doubted that it would ever prove a useful factor in the daily life of the world, and the untold blessing to mankind it has since become. All this skepticism he had to overcome. “A new art was to be taught to the world, a new industry created, business and social methods revolutionized.”
“I WILL MAKE THE WORLD HEAR IT”
“It does speak,” cried Sir William Thompson, with fervid enthusiasm; and Bell’s father-in-law added: “I will make the world hear it.” In less than a quarter of a century, it is conveying thought in every civilized tongue; Japan being the first country outside of the United States to adopt it. In the first eight years of its existence, the Bell Telephone Company declared dividends to the extent of $4,000,000; and the great sums of money the company earns for its stockholders is a subject of current comment and wonder. Some fierce contests have been waged over the priority of his invention, but Mr. Bell has been triumphant in every case.
He has become very wealthy from his invention. He has a beautiful winter residence in Washington; fitted up with a laboratory, and all sorts of electrical conveniences mostly of his own invention. His summer residence is at Cambridge, Massachusetts.
His wife, Mabel, the daughter of the late Gardiner G. Hubbard, is a deaf-mute, of whose education he had charge when she was a child.
Mr. Bell, with one of his beautiful daughters, recently made a visit to Japan. The Order of the Rising Star, the highest order in the gift of the Japanese Emperor, was bestowed upon him. He is greatly impressed by the character of the people; believing them capable of much greater advancement.
Mr. Bell is the inventor of the photophone, aiming to transmit speech by a vibratory beam of light. He has given much time and study to problems of multiplex telegraphy, and to efforts to record speech by photographing the vibrations of a jet of water.
Few inventors have derived as much satisfaction and happiness from their achievements as Mr. Bell. In this respect, his success has been ideal, and in impressive contrast with the experience of Charles Goodyear, the man who made india-rubber useful, and of some other well-known inventors, whose services to mankind brought no substantial reward to themselves.