Family Background
Eliza Grace Symonds Bell
There was not much information given about her but as far we know, Symmonds was born in 1809 at Forton, England and was deaf and she died on 1905 in Washington D.C.
Alexander Melville Bell
Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1819. He was interested in phonetics and defective speech because his father studied those areas as well. When in Edinburgh, he invented a graphic representation of the speech sound called " Visible speech" and used it as a method for teaching people with problems of articulation and stammering to speak more clearly. Bell and his son Alexander Graham Bell authored a number of articles and books on visible speech and phonetics.
Mabel Gardiner
Mabel Gardiner was born on November 25, 1857 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Gardiner and Bell had two sons who died in infancy but they had two daughters. She was born in a rich well-connected Massachusetts family. She had scarlet fever at the age of five and that affected her life. It was a teacher of speech and deaf that Bell and Gardiner met. " I both did and did not like him" Mabel wrote in her journal as soon as she met him. Years passed and her mind quickly changed about him. They married two years later after the telephone was invented. On occasion Mabel complained of "that work of yours of which I am so proud and yet so jealous. " but she still supported his solitary habits.
Alexander Graham Bell
Born on March 3,1847 in Edinburgh,Scotland but raised in Nova Scotia, Canada. During his youth, he experienced an influence that had profound effect on his later life. His grandfather and father were experts on the mechanics of voice and elocution. Bell was home schooled most of his life but he received a year in private school and two years in Edinburgh's Royal High School. At age 12, while playing a grand of mill, he noticed the slow process so he went home and built a devise with rotating paddles and nail brushes that could easily remove husk for the grain. From then on, he decided to follow the family business.His father instilled an appreciation for learning and intellectual purists. By age 16, he joined his father in work with the deaf and soon assumed full charge in his company in London.
First voice recording of Bell
|
There has been no actual video of Alexander Bell. We did not know what he sounded like until June 20, 2012. The National History Museum found a disk that provided an actual voice of Bell. In this video, he is saying "In witness proof- here my voice, Alexander Graham Bell"
|
|
