{"id":915,"date":"2010-03-03T07:00:26","date_gmt":"2010-03-03T12:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/?p=915"},"modified":"2021-05-30T23:08:16","modified_gmt":"2021-05-31T03:08:16","slug":"saved-by-the-bell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/?p=915","title":{"rendered":"Saved by the Bell"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AGBellApps\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Today is the birthday of Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), whom many may think of as American but who was actually born in Edinburgh, Scotland (he later became an American citizen). Bell was practically destined for his future work, given his background\u2014grandfather a speech teacher\/researcher\/writer, and father an elocution specialist who developed something called \u201cVisible Speech,\u201d a sort of alphabet of lip, throat, and tongue positions used in talking, in order to train deaf people to speak. Those were the days when use of the hands while speaking\u2014even if you weren\u2019t deaf\u2014was considered unseemly in Anglo-Saxon culture. Humph.<\/p>\n

A bright, curious, inventive boy anyway, interested in mechanics, botany, and music, he took up the family passion: the study of speech. Even his own mother\u2019s growing deafness was an encouragement. He was homeschooled for a while, then sent for a few years of formal education, culminating in a combined learning\/teaching career, but he always pursued his own experiments on the side. After Bell\u2019s two brothers died of tuberculosis, his alarmed parents decided to take their sole remaining son, always delicate, for a cure. Where? To the Swiss Alps, you ask? No… to Canada! where they bought a farm on a river and converted a carriage house into a workshop for Alexander\u2019s tinkering. It did the trick. Parents, take note.<\/p>\n

Bell went on to a career of teaching deaf pupils in Boston, but carried on his experiments, and eventually succeeded in producing, with assistant Thomas Watson, a \u201charmonic telegraph\u201d\u2014the telephone; founding Bell Telephone Company; and going on to create the metal detector, the wax recording cylinder (later used in the phonograph), and the first, and very successful, hydrofoil boat.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to imagine a world without Bell\u2019s telephone. Perhaps it was inevitable\u2014others were exploring along the same lines\u2014but it doesn\u2019t diminish the wonder of his accomplishments and of his lively inventive being.<\/p>\n

So go call your Mom, and wish her a Happy Alexander Graham Bell\u2019s Birthday.<\/p>\n


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Today is the birthday of Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), whom many may think of as American but who was actually born in Edinburgh, Scotland (he later became an American citizen). Bell was practically destined for his future work, given his background\u2014grandfather a speech teacher\/researcher\/writer, and father an elocution specialist who developed something called \u201cVisible Speech,\u201d aRead more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[55,66,30,17,3],"class_list":["post-915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-illustration","tag-birthday","tag-history","tag-invention","tag-penink","tag-watercolor"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=915"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9164,"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915\/revisions\/9164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}