7 Alexander Graham Bell 7surviving son prompted the family’s move to Canada in
August 1870, where, after settling near Brantford, Ont.,
Bell’s health rapidly improved.
In 1871 Bell spent several weeks in Boston, lecturing
and demonstrating the system of his father’s Visible Speech,
published in 1866, as a means of teaching speech to the
deaf. Each phonetic symbol indicated a definite position
of the organs of speech such as lips, tongue, and soft palate
and could be used by the deaf to imitate the sounds of
speech in the usual way. Young A. Graham Bell, as he now
preferred to be known, showed, using his father’s system,
that speech could be taught to the deaf. His astounding
results soon led to further invitations to lecture.
Even while vacationing at his parents’ home Bell
continued his experiments with sound. In 1872 he opened
his own school in Boston for training teachers of the deaf,
edited his pamphlet Visible Speech Pioneer, and continued
to study and tutor; in 1873 he became professor of vocal
physiology at Boston University.
Never adept with his hands, Bell had the good fortune
to discover and inspire Thomas Watson, a young repair
mechanic and model maker, who assisted him enthusiasti-
cally in devising an apparatus for transmitting sound by
electricity. Their long nightly sessions began to produce
tangible results. The fathers of George Sanders and
Mabel Hubbard, two deaf students whom he helped, were
sufficiently impressed with the young teacher to assist
him financially in his scientific pursuits. Nevertheless,
during normal working hours Bell and Watson were still
obliged to fulfill a busy schedule of professional demands.
It is scarcely surprising that Bell’s health again suffered.
On April 6, 1875, he was granted the patent for his multiple
telegraph; but after another exhausting six months of
long nightly sessions in the workshop, while maintaining
his daily professional schedule, Bell had to return to his