Tring, Tring
Alexander Graham Bell. All I knew of him was that he was the guy who invented the telephone. Which is why pretty much everything I read about him in Edwin S. Grosvenor’s book was new to me. And fascinating. As a boy, Bell’s father introduced him to Sir Charles Wheatstone who had built a machine that could pronounce human words. It “made a great impression upon my mind”, wrote Bell later, “although the articulation was disappointingly crude”. Bell and his brother tried to make a similar machine themselves. It was a good learning experience to “learn how the sounds of a voice are reproduced”. They also learned persistence. These were Bell’s first steps to the telephone… His father meanwhile catalogued every sound the mouth could make and invented a system of symbols that indicated the “position and action of the tongue and lips as they made sounds”. He called it Visible Sound. This system was deemed useful to teach the deaf. When Bell went to teach at the Clark School for the...