- Scottish-born
US scientist and inventor, the first person ever to transmit speech
from one point to another by electrical means. This invention - the
telephone - was made 1876. Later Bell experimented with a type of
phonograph and, in aeronautics, invented the tricycle undercarriage.
Bell also invented a photophone, which used selenium crystals to apply
the telephone principle to transmitting words in a beam of light.
He thus achieved the first wireless transmission of speech.
Bell was born in Edinburgh, where his grandfather was a speech tutor.
As a boy he constructed an automaton simulating the human organs of
speech, using rubber, cotton, and a bellows. He was educated at the
universities of Edinburgh and London, and in 1870 went first to Canada
and then to the USA, where he opened a school for teachers of the
deaf in Boston and in 1873 became professor of vocal physiology at
the university. With the money he had made from his telephone system,
Bell set up a laboratory in Nova Scotia, Canada; in 1880 he established,
in addition, the Volta Laboratory in Washington DC.
There, Bell patented the gramophone and wax recording cylinder, which
were commercially successful improvements on Thomas Edison's first
phonograph and cylinders of metal foil. The laboratory also experimented
with flat disc records, electroplating records, and impressing permanent
magnetic fields on records - the embryonic tape recorder.
In 1881, Bell developed two telephonic devices for locating metallic
masses (usually bullets) in the human body. One, an induction balance
method, was first tried out on President Garfield, who was assassinated
that year, while the other, a probe, was widely used until the advent
of X-rays. Bell also built hydrofoil speedboats and tetrahedral kites
capable of carrying a person. He invented an air-cooling system, a
way of desalinating sea water, the forerunner of the iron lung, and
a sorting machine for punch-coded census cards.
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