The Telephone

A childhood of sound

Alexander Graham Bell grew up at 16 South Charlotte Street, Edinburgh, in a family devoted to the study of speech. His father pioneered 'Visible Speech', a notation for the sounds of language; his mother was deaf, and he spent his life teaching the deaf to speak.

It was this lifelong attention to the mechanics of sound — to the membrane of the ear, the column of air in the throat — that primed Bell to imagine an instrument that could carry the voice itself along a wire.

Mr Watson, come here

On 10 March 1876, in a Boston laboratory, Bell spoke into his apparatus the first sentence ever transmitted by telephone: 'Mr Watson — come here — I want to see you.' His assistant, in the next room, heard him clearly. The world had been irrevocably wired.

Beinn Bhreagh

Bell spent his final decades at Beinn Bhreagh — Gaelic for 'beautiful mountain' — on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, where he experimented with hydrofoils, kites, and aircraft. He is buried there, looking out at a landscape that reminded him of home.