He was “troubled all his life by the timeless and universal human need to communicate,”
says a biographer of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. And it was
not alone through his invention but even more, perhaps, as a teacher of speech, that
Alexander Graham Bell pursued that goal. He would rather be remembered as a teacher
of the deaf, he told his family, than as the inventor of the telephone. And what a teacher he
was! — enthusiastic, innovative, sympathetic, creative.
Alexander Graham Bell’s family were no strangers to the communicative arts. His
grandfather, for whom he was named, was a well-known elocutionist and actor in
Edinburgh Scotland, where the younger Alexander was born on March 3, 1847. In addition
to giving public lectures and dramatic readings, the elder Bell developed a considerable
practice in the treatment of speech defects, such as stammering, lisping, and other
impediments. He wrote two books, Stammering and other Impediments of Speech and The
Practical Elocutionist, which used comma-like symbols to indicate word grouping and
emphasis.
In his middle teens, young Alec, as he was called, spent a year with his grandfather, who
was at that time living in London. This experience had a lasting influence on his life, and it
gave him a maturity and seriousness of purpose that made him seem in some ways
considerably older than his years.
Bell’s father, Alexander Melville Bell, gained a worldwide reputation as a teacher of
correct speech and lecturer on elocution. When only a young man he began investigating
the working of the vocal organs. Melville Bell, like his father, studied the anatomy of
speech and approached his subject with scientific thoroughness. In 1864, 
he completed a universally applicable phonetic alphabet by which he could describe the
manner of production of the sounds of nearly all known languages. He called this alphabet
“Visible Speech” and its various symbols (thirty-four in all) showed how the vocal organs
would be positioned to make a sound.
4. Alec and his brothers became quite adept at using the “Visible Speech’ alphabet,
reading the symbols and producing the sounds they represented. In demonstrations,
linguists from various parts of the world dictated words to Melville Bell from a number of
different “exotic” languages, dialects and accents (including American Indian languages
Arabic, Hindi, Persian, Urdu, and many more), and his sons produced the sounds from the
symbols their father had written down . Their performance was impressive, and a
commentary in the London Illustrated Times proclaimed: “We cannot pretend even to
guess at the horizons opened up by such an alphabet in the training of the deaf, the
dumb, and the blind.”
5. Alec’s mother was a musician as well as an accomplished portrait painter, and her
son was born with such a talent for music that from infancy he could play by ear and
improvise at the piano. He was therefore given an extensive musical education and for a
short while planned a musical career. He in fact did teach music for two years at a boys’
school. When he was about twelve years old, his mother lost her hearing; and there is little
doubt that this misfortune intensified his sympathy for the deaf and his lifelong interest in
helping to alleviate their difficulties in communicating.
6. In the summer of 1868, Melville Bell went on a lecture tour in the United States and
Canada, leaving his son in full charge of his practice in London, where Alec also continued
his studies at the university. When his father returned, Alec became a full partner in the
work, continuing to teach while he studied the anatomy of the vocal apparatus at London
University. His work met with great success, and his reputation flourished. The work he did
revealed his outstanding talent for teaching.