Alexander graham bell video biography mark

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:I'm going to tell you something about my life.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:My name is Alexander Graham Bell.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:I was born in the year 1847, in Edinburgh.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:To understand where I ended up, you'll need to understand where I started from. So the story I will tell you begins when I was just a boy.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'By the time I was 10 years old, my mother was almost deaf.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'She liked to listen to me playing the piano, although I'm not sure exactly what she heard.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'She would sit beside me, with her hearing tube pressed to the piano, and seemed to like it, even though I didn't really play that well.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'Because of my mother, I was interested from an early age in how sound works.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'I spent ages peering inside the piano watching how, when I pressed a key, a little hammer hit some strings, making them vibrate.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'And I saw it was the vibration that made the sound.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'I think it was the vibrations too that Mother could pick up through her hearing tube.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'Sometimes, in the next room, my father would be teaching one of his pupils. It was his job to try and help deaf people to learn to speak.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'He'd invented a system that helped them learn how to move their throat, tongue and lips to produce the vibrations to make the different kinds of sounds that went into speech.'

CHATTER

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'When there were people round for tea, and the chatter was whirling around the room, I didn't like the thought of my mother missing out.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'So I tried to help her follow the conversation, by tapping a code out on her arm.'

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'Perhaps because of my mother, I was so glad that I could hear. I was so aware that the world was full of sound.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'I would go out and walk sometimes, just to listen.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'And it was like the whole world was vibrating all at once.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'I thought if I listened hard enough, I could even hear the sound of moss growing and creeping its way along a fallen tree.'

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'I was always tuned in to the sounds things made, and even when I grew up I was still listening.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'But now I had my own ideas too. About how sound worked, and about all the things that might be possible to do with it.'

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:I was itching to try some things out. So my father set my brother, Melly, and I a challenge. To invent a machine that could replicate the human voice.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:A talking machine.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:The idea got me really excited.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'We tried to figure out what it was that made the human voice come out at all.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'We tried to think of the body as a machine, with all the mechanisms needed to cause a vibration to make a sound. But not just any sound, all the different kinds of sounds that make up speech.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'We made something, and it worked!'

MACHINE:Ma ma.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'Well, kind of worked.'

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'When I wasn't thinking about machines, or working on my ideas, I taught deaf children, just like my father did.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'I never forgot that some people, like my mother, could hear very little or nothing at all.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'And teaching them how to make sounds spurred me on. And I had so many ideas about how to make machines that could manipulate sound.'

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:Then a chance came along for me to try out some of my ideas.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:I was asked to find ways to improve the telegraph machine.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:The telegraph machine was a relatively new invention, used to send messages from one place to another.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:Before the telegraph, messages had to be hand-written and sent by horse and cart. Well, this was so much quicker.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:It sent messages from one place to another by taking the words of the message and turning them into a code, like Morse code, which could be sent down an electrical wire.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:At the other end,

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:the code was received and translated back into words again.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'But the big drawback was you could only send one message at a time. And it had to be sent from the telegraph office, which often meant there was a very long queue.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'And when the messages were received at a telegraph office somewhere else, they had to be printed off, one at a time, and delivered to the right address.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'It was a clever system, but sending one message at a time was simply too slow.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'I was working on how to make the telegraph machine better, but I kept coming back to a different idea.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'What if, rather than turning a message into a code, and then sending that code along an electrical wire, then turning it back into words again,

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'what if you could send the sound of a human voice so that one person could simply speak to another, even if they were far away?

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'I had an idea that you could use electricity to send sound itself along a copper wire.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'But I wasn't quite sure how to build it.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'I got a man called Watson, who was good with electricity, to help me out.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'We rented two rooms, one next to the other.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'And together, we came up with a contraption that might just work.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'It had a mouthpiece, or transmitter, to speak into, then using a dangerous liquid called acid, the sound would be urned into electricity, travel along a copper wire, and be turned back into sound again at the other end, at the receiver.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'We had something that we thought might work, and we got ready to try it out.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'But just then, at the crucial moment,'

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:Come in here, Watson. I need you!

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'I spilt acid on my trousers. It was burning my leg.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'Come in here, Watson. I need you!'

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'To my utter amazement, Watson had heard me, the machine had worked!

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:'I was so excited, I almost forgot the burning sensation on my leg.'

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:In that moment, the telephone was born.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:It needed more work, but soon I was ready to show people what I had invented.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:It caught on, and it was a great success.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:Amazing to think that the device that we rigged up between those two rooms was the first ever telephone.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:And now, in your world, there are more than five billion of them.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:What had started with me playing piano for my mother and peering inside to see how it worked,

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:led me down a road that ended in an invention that, quite frankly, the world now simply couldn't do without.