Extracts for English Reading 11+/12+ Test 12

Alexander Graham Bell: Giving Voice To The World

by Mary Kay Carson

Alexander was born on March 3^rd 1847, and studied speech with his grandfather, learning how to precisely pronounce each word he spoke. He also sat in on many of his grandfather's sessions with his students, learning how to help those with speech problems. His grandfather firmly believed that education could raise people out of a life of poverty and crime. This was a fairly radical idea in the nineteenth-century England, where a person's social class was often set at birth.

In the mid-nineteenth century, many believed it was impossible to teach the deaf to speak. Alexander Graham Bell disagreed. He believed that if the deaf could learn how to make sounds of the alphabet, they could string those sounds together and speak words.

A tall, thin, serious-looking twenty-one-year-old man with black whiskers stood at the classroom blackboard. He wore a dark suit with a stiff collar and short necktie-the standard outfit of a London professional in 1868. Four young students sat in absolute silence, intently watching their new teacher. But when Alexander Graham Bell walked over to the children, they smiled and immediately stretched out their open palms toward him. One by one, instructor Bell took a small hand in his and began spelling words into it. None of the four deaf students could hear a sound. In the little classroom, the children learnt fast. But Bell would teach them to speak.

As an old man, Bell would write about these early lessons, saying he "was thus introduced to what proved to be my life work-the teaching of speech to the deaf." But this young teacher became famous for a very different kind of communication. In his late twenties, he invented a device that instantly sent voices across thousands of miles-the telephone. As fate would have it, Alexander Graham Bell spent the better part of his life improving the ways people communicated with one another. And in the process, he became one of the most famous inventors of all time.

With the help of his friend, Thomas Watson, Alexander invented the telephone. His first telephone looked nothing like what you answer today. A person talked into an odd speaking tube over a tub of liquid that transmitted the voice vibrations into an electrical current.

Alexander was becoming famous and everyone wanted to see a demonstration of his amazing telephone-even the queen herself. On January 14th 1878, Queen Victoria slowly entered the Council Room at Osborne House. The fifty-eight year old monarch wore a black silk gown and widow's cap. After receiving Her Majesty's invitation, Alexander Graham Bell had travelled to the royal residence in the Isle of Wight to set up the demonstration. The queen sat and listened to telephone conversations from nearby buildings and the neighbouring town, which was Cowes. At one point during the demonstration, Bell touched the queen's hand to offer her the telephone so she could listen in on a song. Onlookers were shocked by Bell's violation of royal rules. No one touches the queen! The error in etiquette didn't seem to dull Queen Victoria's excitement over the telephone. She wrote in her diary that night that it was "most extraordinary."

Bell became seriously ill in 1922 and died at seventy-five. In one of his earlier speeches, he stated: "The inventor is a man who looks around upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world..." Inventing technology and educating the deaf were the two things that he wanted to keep doing.