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Alexander Graham Bell sits at a desk speaking on a telephone

Here we see Alexander Graham Bell seated at a desk talking on the telephone. As the telephone came into wide usage there was created a maze of telephone wires over the cities. Bell began to think, "Is there a way to transmit speech using beams of light instead of all these overhead wires?" His next invention was the photophone, the first phone powered by light. He was so proud of his invention he wanted to name their second daughter Photophone, but Mabel thought Marian would be more appropriate. They called her Daisy.

The photophone never was very successful, but it paved the way for fiber optics and wireless mobile phones which would come 100 years later. Bell was a man ahead of his time.

Alexander Graham Bell made many inventions. One of his inventions was a metal detector. When President James Garfield was wounded by a gunshot Bell took his latest invention, the metal detector, and tried to find the bullet in the President's body. He was unsuccessful and Garfield did not survive the shooting.

The Bells had two baby boys born two years apart. Both were premature and neither child survived, but these tragic events inspired him to invent a respirator, a vacuum jacket which would help a person breathe when he could not breathe on his own. Later on the iron lung would be developed to aid polio victims.

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, but it was Alexander Graham Bell who improved on the phonograph and made it more useful. Edison had been using a tinfoil cylinder, but Bell developed a wax covered cylinder on which the needle cut permanent grooves for the recordings. It worked much better.



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 . .






Biography of Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site of Canada

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