7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7

Alexander Graham Bell

(b. March 3, 1847, Edinburgh, Scot.—d. Aug. 2, 1922, Beinn Bhreagh,
Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Can.)

A

lexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born American
audiologist best known as the inventor of the tele-
phone (1876). For two generations his family had been
recognized as leading authorities in elocution and speech
correction, with Alexander Melville Bell’s Standard
Elocutionist passing through nearly 200 editions in English.
Young Bell and his two brothers were trained to continue
the family profession. His early achievements on behalf
of the deaf and his invention of the telephone before his
30th birthday bear testimony to the thoroughness of
his training.
Alexander (“Graham” was not added until he was 11)
was the second of the three sons of Alexander Melville
Bell and Eliza Grace Symonds Bell. Apart from one year at
a private school, two years at Edinburgh’s Royal High
School (from which he was graduated at 14), and atten-
dance at a few lectures at Edinburgh University and at
University College in London, Bell was largely family
trained and self-taught. His first professional post was at
Mr. Skinner’s school in Elgin, County Moray, where he
instructed the children in both music and elocution. In
1864 he became a resident master in Elgin’s Weston House
Academy, where he conducted his first studies in sound.
Appropriately, Bell had begun professionally as he would
continue through life—as a teacher-scientist.
In 1868 he became his father’s assistant in London and
assumed full charge while the senior Bell lectured in
America. The shock of the sudden death of his older
brother from tuberculosis, which had also struck down his
younger brother, and the strain of his professional duties
soon took their toll on young Bell. Concern for their only