Alexander Graham Bell’s life was surrounded by sounds, or a lack thereof. His mother was almost completely deaf, and he dedicated most of his life to the well being of the deaf. He was working as a professor in speech while he was experimenting with the idea that is now the telephone.

Bell and his Family

Bell was living in a time that was known as the, “Age of Industry” and in this time, a lot of new inventions and innovations were being made. Thomas Edison was working on the light bulb, Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor were trying to make cars an affordable thing, and John D Rockefeller was revolutionizing the oil industry. But one invention was what inspired Alexander: The telegraph.

Innovation: A new method or idea

Revolutionizing: To change something radically

Samuel Morse had invented the telegraph, a way to send messages through wires by electrical impulses. You then had to decode them, as they were in Morse code. This invention paved the way for modern day text messages, and was an inspiration for Bell’s telephone.

A telegraph, shown to the right

Alexander Graham Bell, like many inventors, needed capital, or money, to be able to keep testing their ideas. For Bell, that meant Gardiner Hubbard. Hubbard was an investor, and he saw promise in the harmonic telegraph, another invention Bell was working on. But he still let Bell work on what he was passionate about, the telephone.

Capital: Wealth for a particular purpose, such as investing

Investor: A person or organization that puts money into something with the expectation of making more