Alexander Graham

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Alexander Graham was was a Scottish-born American scientist, inventor, and teacher of the deaf, whose development of the telephone and contributions to other inventions in aeronautics had profound effects on the shaping of modern society. Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh and educated at the universities of Edinburgh and London. He immigrated to Canada in 1870 and to the U.S. in 1871. In the U.S. he began teaching deaf-mutes, publicizing the system called visible speech. The system, which was developed by his father, the Scottish educator Alexander Melville Bell (1819-1905), shows how the lips, tongue, and throat are used in the articulation of sound. In 1872 Bell founded a school for deaf-mutes in Boston. The school subsequently became ...

... of his subsequent inventions were first tested near his summer home at Baddeck on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. His study of flight began with the construction of large kites, and he eventually devised (1907) a kite capable of carrying a person. The Aerial Experiment Association (1907-1909), a group that Bell founded and that included among its five members the American inventor and aviator Glenn Hammond Curtiss, explored the principles of aileron, a movable section of an airplane wing controlling roll, and the tricycle landing gear, which first permitted takeoff from and landing on a flying field. Curtiss flew alone (May 1908) in an airplane designed and built by Bell's group. Applying the principles

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