Alexander Graham Bell was born at Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847. He was educated at the Royal High School of Edinburgh, and also attended the University of Edinburgh and the University of London. From boyhood, he was taught at home by his father, about sound and oral speech, and he also received training in music. When he was more than sixty years old, he wrote the following account of his early experiences.

"As I look back and see what points in my early life had an influence on this result, I think that one important element was my love of music. I could play the piano before I could read or write. I could play anything by ear . . . In fact as a little chap I was considered quite a musical prodigy, by a distinguished Italian teacher . . . who, when I was about nine or ten years of age, took me under his charge to make a musician of me, but he did not succeed. Anyway, I had this love of music. I could play all sorts of musical instruments in a sort of a way. I also knew how the different musical instruments were made. I was just as familiar with beating reeds and free reeds, and the way in which the sounds were produced, as a person could be who had really studied the subject.

"A second element was of even greater importance. I came of a family that had made a . . . study of oral speech for two generations before me. My grandfather, Alexander Bell, a distinguished teacher of elocution in London, was the first. Both of his sons,—my father, Alexander Melville Bell, and my uncle, David Charles Bell,—took up the same work. They also . . . devoted their attention to the correction of defects of speech. People who lisped, or stammered, or did anything of that sort, came to my father, to be taught, for example, how to place the organs of speech in forming sounds.

"In my early boyish days, I had the destructive faculty very fully developed. My toys never remained whole in my hands. I would always pull them to pieces to see how they were made, and one of my earliest studies in that respect was plants. I had a delight in puffing plants to pieces to see how they were made. When I was quite a little fellow, I actually took up the study of botany, and I had my collection of plants. My father encouraged me in it. He always encouraged me in making collections of all sorts, and that is a most important thing in the case of a boy. He taught me to observe, compare, and classify. I passed through the stamp-collecting age, the egg age, and the coin age, but the things I took most interest in were the flowers.

"There was another thing which now, as I look back upon it, was of the greatest consequence in its bearing upon the telephone. My father encouraged his boys to study everything relating to the mechanism of speech. We were very much interested in reading of the construction of an automaton speaking machine . . .

"My father proposed to his boys that they should try to make a speaking machine . . . The work was parceled out between my brother Melville and myself. He was to make the lungs and the throat, and the vocal chords, and I was to undertake the mouth . . . I made a mouth modeled from a skull . . . My brother had finished his larynx about the same time that I had made the mouth, and it was a great day when we put the two together. We did not wait for the wind chest that was to represent the lungs . . . but we stuck the thing together. My brother blew through the tube that was to lead from the wind chest, and I took the lips of my machine and moved them. Out came a sound like a Punch and Judy show, and we were delighted when we moved the lips up and down to hear 'Ma-ma! Ma-ma!' distinctly . . .

"My father used the machine to impress upon us the mechanism of speech, but we cared more for the effects produced. I remember very well, one time, when my brother and I took this machine out to the common at Edinburgh . . . My brother blew, and there came a sound like a regular squalling baby, 'Ma-ma! Ma-ma!' in a most distressing tone of voice. Then we were perfectly delighted to hear a door open upstairs and some person come out. When we made it cry for all it was worth, we heard someone say, 'My goodness! What is the matter with the baby?' That was just what we wanted. We crept into our own house softly and shut the door and left our neighbors to look for the baby.

"There came another period in which I took up what might be termed scientific research . . . Now a controversy arose . . . between my father and myself . . . He had shown that when you whisper vowel sounds you hear musical effects; and when you whisper the vowels in the order in which he had them in his system of Visible Speech, he would . . . hear an ascending scale of musical tones, whereas I as distinctly heard a descending scale . . . To my ear 'E' gave the highest sound and 'Ah' the lowest; to my father's ear 'E' gave the lowest sound and 'Ah' gave the highest. We really had a heated argument over it, until I made the discovery . . . that there were two series of musical tones, one going down and the other going up. My father was convinced that we were both right . . . advised me—I was only sixteen then—to communicate my discovery to a most distinguished man on the subject of phonetics and sound in Great Britain, Alexander Ellis.

"I wrote to him and sent him my analysis of sounds . . . I received a note from Mr. Ellis telling me that I had made a great discovery, but that someone had made it before me. The man who did it was a man by the name of Helmholtz, a great German physicist.

"I went to see Mr. Ellis, and he showed me Helmholtz's book. It was in German and I could not read German, but Mr. Ellis tried to tell me about Helmholtz. He said that . . . Helmholtz had not only analyzed vowel sounds, but had reproduced them by tuning forks . . . set in vibration by an electric current, . . . and I knew nothing of electricity. How I wished I knew how those tuning forks were set in vibration! . . .

"In my ignorance of electricity, I had a curious delusion, and that again had something to do with the telephone. I had the idea, in my ignorance of what Helmholtz had really done, that he had transmitted vowel sounds by electricity; that he had reproduced at the other end of a telegraph line, with those tuning forks, the various vowel sounds. That was my idea. It was all wrong. He never had any such idea, he never did any such thing, but that was my idea, and it occurred to me: 'If Helmholtz could transmit and reproduce vowel sounds, you could reproduce consonant sounds as well; you could reproduce speech.'

"About this time my two brothers died of consumption. As I had overtaxed my own health by overwork—I was teaching by day and studying by night—my father insisted on my stopping all work and going with him to Canada. He bought a farm near Brantford, Ontario, and for some months I lived out of doors."

"My father had suggested a use of his system of pictorial symbols representing the position of the vocal organ in forming sounds . . . which caught my fancy . . . He said: 'Here are symbols which have again and again enabled people to pronounce . . . the sounds of a language they have never heard . . . Why, then, might it not be possible through this means to teach the deaf and dumb, who have never heard English, to use their mouths?' I became infatuated with this idea and formed a plan for teaching the deaf and dumb." It was not long before Bell had an opportunity to put his idea into practice. The Board of Education of Boston employed him to teach in the public school for the deaf, and he began his work in April, 1871.

"The teachers in the school for the deaf had been trying to teach the children to speak, and had met with good success. But the teachers made a claim that seemed to me to be ridiculous. They claimed not only that deaf children could be taught to speak . . . but that after they had been taught to speak, they could come to understand speech by looking at the mouth of the speaker . . . I did not dare to say no, but I did not believe it, and out of my skepticism about lip reading grew the telephone."

Bell worked to develop a series of sound pictures, so that deaf children might learn to speak by sight. One of the instruments with which he worked was the phonautograph. The phonautograph used by Bell was a large cone, closed at the small end by a membrane of gold-beater's skin. Hung at one edge of the membrane and attached to the center was a light wooden lever. The other end of the lever extended forward beyond the membrane, and on the end of it was fastened a pig's bristle. Speak into the phonautograph, and the membrane and lever will vibrate, or move back and forth. The vibration of the bristle at the end of the lever traces a zigzag line on a smoked glass drawn underneath. Each sound, "A," "E," etc., has its own vibration or sound picture. Bell's idea was to photograph these sound pictures; then give the deaf child the sound picture of, for example, "A," and put him to work to produce on the phonautograph a sound that would make a similar zigzag line. In this way the child would learn to sound the different letters.

"It struck me," says Bell, "that in the phonautograph, there was a remarkable resemblance to the human ear.

"I went to a distinguished aurist of Boston, and told him I wanted to make a phonautograph, modeling it after the ear. He replied, 'Why don't you use a human ear itself, taken from a dead man, as a phonautograph?' That was quite a new idea, and I said, 'I shall be very glad to do that, but where can I get a dead man's ear?' 'Oh,' he said, 'I will get it for you,' and he did. This was in 1874.

"When my summer vacation came, I ran up to Brantford, Ontario, to spend the time with my parents. I took the human ear with me in order to get tracings. I the membrane with glycerine and water, attached a piece of hay to one of the little bones, and rigged up an apparatus for dragging a piece of smoked glass underneath. Through a speaking trumpet I spoke into that dead man's ear, and obtained beautiful tracings of the vibrations upon smoked glass."