Ch.18 Hello, Can You Hear Me_

• Chapter 18 focuses on Alexander Graham Bell and his invention of the telephone

Early Life and Education

• Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847
• Bell was born almost exactly one month after Thomas Edison
• He became friends and coworkers with Edison on several invention projects
• Like Edison, Alexander was homeschooled
• Bell finished school at age 15
• He became interested in helping people who were deaf because his mother, Eliza, had become deaf when he was 10
• His father and grandfather, both speech therapists, were important teachers during his homeschooling
• Bell was motivated to help his mother and invented special signs and motions to communicate with her

Teaching Career and Inventions

• Alexander got a job at Weston House Academy as a teacher after finishing school
• At 16 years old, he was younger than some of his students, he taught music and speech
• He was respected by his fellow teachers, many were unaware of his age due to his maturity
• Bell worked on inventions to aid deaf people
• Tragedy struck when Alexander was 20, his brother Edward died of tuberculosis
• Three years later, his other brother Melville died
• The family moved away from Scotland to Ontario, Canada, then to Boston, Massachusetts
• He continued to work with the deaf and worked on speech and elocution inventions
• In 1873, Alexander met 16-year-old Mabel Hubbard,
• He spent time with the Hubbard family playing piano and singing
• Mabel's father, Gardiner G. Hubbard, was interested in Bell's inventive ideas
• Bell shared his ideas for inventing a better telegraph machine with him
• He wanted to send tones of sound over the telegraph wire, which would allow for multiple messages at a time
• Each message would have its own sound using the harmonic telegraph invention
• Mr. Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, the father of another student, became Bell's partners
• They provided financial backing for Bell's experiments and inventions
• Bell and his assistant, Thomas Watson, worked together on the harmonic telegraph

Invention of the Telephone and Patent

• In 1875, the pair started working on what they called the "electric speech machine", the telephone
• Another inventor, Elisha Gray, was also working on a telephone
• Both inventors were in a race to gain the patent
• Bell's patent request arrived at the patent office just hours before Gray's
• On March 3, 1876, Bell received the letter stating that patent number 175565 would be granted to his invention

Founding of Bell Telephone and Legal Battles

• Gardiner Hubbard was now Bell's father-in-law, due to Bell marrying Mabel
• The three partners, Bell, Gardiner Hubbard, and Thomas Sanders, formed the Bell Telephone Company in July 1877
• Western Union Telegraph Company worked with Bell's rival, Elisha Gray, and Thomas Edison
• Western Union had an edge because they were working with existing telegraph wires
• Bell Telephone sued Western Union in the fall of 1878
• They stated that Bell should be the only one to sell telephones since he invented and patented the telephone
• This was a big court case which garnered national attention
• In 1879, the US Supreme Court ruled in Bell Telephone's favor, ensuring that only Bell's company could sell telephones until 1893

Later Life

• Alexander and Mabel had two girls, and they lost two little boys as infants
• The Bell family had a home in Nova Scotia, which reminded him of Scotland
• At his new place, Alexander raised sheep and studied nature
• He was one of the first members of the National Geographic Society
• Bell always considered himself a teacher of the deaf
• Alexander Graham Bell lived for 75 years, he died at Beinn Bhreagh on August 2, 1922