Timeline for Alexander Graham Bell

Born in 1847, Alexander Graham Bell was a scientist and a great inventor. The year 1922 marked the end of his tenure on earth. Here is his timeline.

• On March 3, 1847, Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. His grandfather and father were working in the field of elocution and speech.
• In 1858, from his eleventh birthday, he acquired the middle name Graham. But his close friends and relatives continued calling him ‘Aleck’.
• At the age of twelve, Bell came to know that the process of removal of husks of wheat grains was arduous. He combined rotating paddles with sets of nailbrushes, thus creating a simple ‘dehusking machine’. This was his first invention! He was a student of Royal High School in Edinburgh, Scotland. When Bell was sixteen, he became a ‘pupil-teacher’ of elocution and music in Western House Academy. Bell graduated from the University of Toronto.
• In 1863, on seeing Aleck’s interest in speech, his father took him to see an automaton, which was developed by Sir Charles Wheatstone. It was based on the work of Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen and simulated human voice. Aleck obtained a copy of von Kempelen's book, published in German, translated it and worked on building an automaton head. The combined efforts of Aleck and his brother, boosted by their father, bore fruit. From his translation, Aleck inferred, that if sounds of vowels could be produced electrically, consonant sounds and speech could also be produced by electrical means.
• In 1865, Bell family migrated to London but Aleck returned to Weston House and continued with his experiments in sound and electricity. In his efforts to transmit sound by means of electricity, he deployed a telegraph wire from his room to his friend’s house. During the following year, Aleck worked at the position of an instructor in Somerset College in England. On the sad demise of his brother, Aleck returned home in 1867.
• Bell’s time line shows that he moved to Canada with his brother’s widow and his parents in 1870. He set up a workshop near his residence and continued experimenting on sound and electricity. He designed a piano, which could transmit music by means of electricity.
• In April 1871, Aleck’s time line marked his move to Boston to provide training in Visible Speech System to school instructors. He repeated his training program in American Asylum for Deaf-mutes in Hartford and then in the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton.
• In October 1872, Alexander Bell opened a school in Boston named the "Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech" for deaf students. He also worked as a private tutor. Helen Keller was one of his well-known students.
• In 1873, he became the professor of Vocal Psychology and Elocution at the Boston University School of Oratory.
• In the spring of 1874, Alexander Graham Bell experimented on the phonautograph, a device that helps plotting sound waves. In the summer of the same year, he conceived the idea of a telephone. Thomas Watson started assisting Bell.
• On June 2, 1875, Watson happened to pluck one of the multiple metal reeds that formed Bell’s apparatus. This accident demonstrated a telephone, which could transmit sound.
• U.S. Patent Office issued the patent numbered 174,465 to Bell, on 7th March 1876. It covered the method of and apparatus for transmitting sound waves telegraphically.
• On the night following 3rd August 1876, Bell received a long-distance voice message from Brantford, which lied 4 miles away. Then Bell began to publicly demonstrate and lecture about his new invention.
• In 1877, Bell Telephone Company was formed. On 11th July, during the same year, Bell married Mabel Hubbard in Cambridge. By then he had started signing by the name ‘Alec’ and not ‘Aleck’.
• Until 1897, his teaching profession remained his main source of income. The invention of telephone was not profitable on economic terms.
• On 25th January 1915, Bell called up Watson, across the continent. Thirty-eight years before this transcontinental call, the same two people had conversed on phone. The one in 1915 was of a much better voice quality!
• Through his journey of life, Bell had to face competition and had to struggle for obtaining the patents for his inventions. Apart from a telephone, the invention of a metal detector in 1881 is attributed to Alexander Graham Bell. A metal jacket that helps in breathing, an audiometer that detects hearing problems also find a place in the list of Bell’s inventions. He received many honors and many were given his name!
• On 2nd August 1922, Alexander Graham Bell expired, leaving behind a legacy of the wonderful invention of a telephone for us.