Bell

“Think about how often you use the telephone. What do you use it for? What do your parents use it for? What do you think the world would be like without telephones?” Encourage discussion among the students. “Well, lucky for us, a very intelligent man invented the telephone many, many years ago. This man, named Alexander Graham Bell, was born in Scotland 1847 – that was more than 150 years ago! His family called him Aleck. Even when he was very small, he was interested in sound and how we speak. On a trip to London once with his father, he saw a demonstration of a speaking machine. He decided that he wanted to make a speaking machine, too! He and his brother built a model of a mouth, throat, nose, tongue, and lungs. They pumped air from the model lungs through the vocal cords in the throat and moved the tongue and mouth so that the speaking machine could make humanlike sounds. From what he learned, Aleck was able to move the mouth and vocal cords of his pet dog so that the dog would growl words!”Say, “Aleck wanted to read everything he could about talking, hearing, and sound. He even tried to read books in other languages! One book was by a German scientist. Aleck misunderstood what he read; he thought the scientist had written that there might be a way to send voices through a wire. He thought this was an interesting idea, and he started experimenting to see if he could do it. When his two brothers died of an illness and Aleck also become sick, his parents moved with him to Canada. When he recovered from his illness, Aleck moved to Boston and began teaching at a school for the deaf. He also continued his work on sending a voice over a wire. By a lucky chance, Aleck met Thomas Watson who worked at an electrical machine shop. Thomas Watson was very good at making things, and Aleck was full of ideas. What a great team! Together, they figured out how to change sound vibrations from a voice into electrical signals.that could travel quickly through a wire. The wire could carry the signals into an earpiece or receiver where they could be changed back into sound waves that a person could hear.” “One day, when they were working on their invention, Thomas Watson was in one room and Aleck was working in another. Aleck spilled acid and called out, ‘Mr. Watson, please come here. I want you.” Watson heard Alexander Graham Bell’s voice coming through the receiver he was working on! This was the very first telephone call. Alexander Graham Bell went on to invent other things also, but the telephone was his most famous invention. He helped people in two ways: by inventing the telephone and educating people who were deaf. The telephone he invented looked very different from the kinds we use in our homes today, and that is because inventors have changed and improved his original invention over the years.”