Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1847. He was the son of a man who was consumed with the workings of the human voice, how it is produced and used, and especially, in teaching the deaf how to use it. Perhaps this obsession of the elder Bell was one of the reasons he married whom he did. For the woman who would give birth to the inventor of the telephone... was deaf!
Young Alexander Graham Bell grew up with his father's passions. In 1870, because of poor health, he migrated to Canada. It was not long before his success in teaching the deaf to speak brought him to the attention of a wealthy merchant in Boston who had a deaf daughter, Mabel. Would Mr. Bell please teach Mabel how to speak? Yes, he would. And did. And they fell in love. It was she who inspired him through a lot of the exhausting experiments, who pulled him through the depressions that often inflict those whose drive to succeed is so intense, while he developed the then remarkable instrument that transformed speech into electrical impulses that could then be converted back into human speech at the end of a wire He had pierced yet another solitude, the one that up until then had denied human speech between people distant from one another. A year later, in 1877, he and Mabel were married. He later became an American citizen.
Alexander Graham Bell died in 1922: Mabel five months later. She loved him that much. His name is likely to live as long as man really history. After all, there is this constant reminder of how he brought the human family into closer touch.