Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell, a man who best known for inventing the telephone. Most people don’t know he spent the majority of his life teaching and helping the deaf. Educating the hearing impaired is what he wished to be remembered for.

Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland. His mother was a painter of miniature portraits and also loved to play the piano even though she was nearly deaf. Aleck’s mother knew that he had a talent for music and always encouraged him to play (Matthews 12). Alexander Melville Bell, his father, was a “Professor of Elocution,” Art of public speaking (Bruce 16). Due to the fact that his father was a very knowledgeable man and a professor, Aleck obtained most of his education from his father and soon followed in his footsteps. Aleck had only two siblings, Melville James Bell, “Melly,” and Edward Charles Bell, “Ted” (Schuman 127).

Aleck’s father took a trip over seas in 1868 to see if Americans would take to his new ideas of speech. Alexander Melville Bell was so impressed that he decided to move the entire family. They did not purchase an estate in the United States. However they did buy an estate in Brantford, Ontario, Canada where there were an abundance of Scottish immigrants. Alexander Melville Bell still continued to make trips to Boston to lecture on “visible speech” (Schuman 39). Aleck’s father was offered a teaching position at the Boston School for the Deaf. He did not take the job but suggested that Aleck take the position instead. Alexander Graham Bell took the teaching position in April of 1871, and was on his way to the Boston School for the Deaf (Schuman 39).

Alexander Graham Bell’s, number one passion in life was helping the hearing impaired. Children learn to talk by hearing other people talk, and then they learn to speak by unconscious imitation. Deaf children do not have this option; they cannot imitate anything and therefore have to be taught by other means. Aleck thought that to teach a deaf child to speak consisted of having the child know how to make the sound by using different positions of their mouth. Slowly combining the sounds would make words and again would result in speech.

Aleck tried a numerous number of methods. The method of Visible Speech was one of the ways that Aleck was able to teach his students. The way that Visible Speech worked was that the teacher would pick a student out of the classroom and begin to draw a bisecting side view of that student’s head. To make sure that the student knew what part of the head the teacher was talking about, the teacher would point to a particular part of the diagram and have the student touch that part of themselves.

When the diagram was up on the black board there were also darkened symbols on certain parts such as the tip of nose, upper and lower lip etc. The next step was to erase all other lines and have the student do the same procedure as before but this time they had to know where all the symbols were. The purpose for learning all of these symbols was so that the teacher would be able to get into more detailed diagrams and actually show the deaf student what part of the throat and mouth to move to pronounce a particular sound (Bell 51-54).

Another way that he was able to teach his students was using the manometric, pressurized, capsule, which enclosed a gas flame. The capsule worked when the vibrations of a voice acted on a membrane that would expand the gas flame and result in a flickering “like the teeth of a saw” (Mackenzie 66). The flickering would resemble the characteristics of a particular sound. The reason that Bell wanted to use this device was to see if he could discover the “shape or form of a vibration that was a characteristic of the elements of English speech” (Mackenzie 67). Then he could represent this information on paper for the use of his deaf pupils. With this device he could have a pupil put his mouth on the mouthpiece of the capsule and observe the pattern of the gas flame to tell if the pupil was pronouncing the sound clearly. Leon Scott made an improvement in the manometric capsule; he added a device that recorded the pattern onto a thin sheet of glass. Bell could now make a copy of the pattern and keep one for himself and give one to his student so that they could practice with it until they were able to resemble the same type of pattern (Mackenzie 68).

Aleck taught by day and invented by night. He had some rough sketches on how the telegraph could actually be improved. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was able to lend him a laboratory for him to experiment in. The main reason why he was doing this was he thought that this machine would be able to help him better teach the deaf (Matthews.)

The main man that Aleck worked with was Thomas Watson. The two tried dozens upon dozens of electric current configurations