Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone

IT is unsurprising that the Edinburgh-born scientist and inventor Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) was motivated to improve communication: his mother was deaf, his grandfather and father taught elocution to the deaf and he was a teacher at schools for the deaf in North America, where the family had emigrated, subsequently marrying a former pupil, Mabel Hubbard.

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Bell combined his teaching career with research into the then fastest form of communication, the telegraph. What he really wanted to do, however, was to find a way to transmit the voice, work that was made possible by his investor father-in-law Gardiner Hubbard.