[12] His work in this area has been called "the soundest, and most useful study of human heredity proposed in nineteenth-century America... Bell's most notable contribution to basic science, as distinct from invention.

At the age of 12, Bell built a homemade device that combined rotating paddles with sets of nail brushes, creating a simple dehusking machine that was put into operation at the mill and used steadily for a number of years.

[22] Bell was also deeply affected by his mother's gradual deafness (she began to lose her hearing when he was 12), and learned a manual finger language so he could sit at her side and tap out silently the conversations swirling around the family parlor.

He could decipher Visible Speech representing virtually every language, including Latin, Scottish Gaelic, and even Sanskrit, accurately reciting written tracts without any prior knowledge of their pronunciation.

[30][failed verification] Bell's father encouraged his interest in speech and, in 1863, took his sons to see a unique automaton developed by Sir Charles Wheatstone based on the earlier work of Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen.

Bell was fascinated by the machine, and after he obtained a copy of von Kempelen's book, published in German, and had laboriously translated it, he and Melville built their own automaton head.

[36] Dismayed to find that groundbreaking work had already been undertaken by Helmholtz, who had conveyed vowel sounds by means of a similar tuning fork "contraption", Bell pored over the book.

While Melville seemed to achieve success on many fronts, including opening his own elocution school, applying for a patent on an invention, and starting a family, Bell continued as a teacher.

[45] In 1870, 23-year-old Bell traveled with his parents and his brother's widow, Caroline Margaret Ottaway,[46] to Paris, Ontario,[47] to stay with Thomas Henderson, a Baptist minister and family friend.

[49][N 7] At the homestead, Bell set up a workshop in the converted carriage house near what he called his "dreaming place",[51] a large hollow nestled in trees at the back of the property above the river.

[53][N 8] He continued his interest in the study of the human voice, and when he discovered the Six Nations Reserve across the river at Onondaga, learned the Mohawk language and translated its unwritten vocabulary into Visible Speech symbols.

Although the offer was made by Georgie's mother and followed the year-long arrangement in 1872 where her son and his nurse had moved to quarters next to Bell's boarding house, it was clear that Mr. Sanders backed the proposal.

Having lost her hearing after a near-fatal bout of scarlet fever close to her fifth birthday,[76][77][N 11] she had learned to read lips but her father, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, Bell's benefactor and personal friend, wanted her to work directly with her teacher.

[78] By 1874, Bell's initial work on the harmonic telegraph had entered a formative stage, with progress made both at his new Boston "laboratory" (a rented facility) and at his family home in Canada a big success.

With a change in administration and charges of conflict of interest (on both sides) arising from the original trial, the U.S. attorney general dropped the lawsuit on November 30, 1897, leaving several issues undecided on the merits.

Meucci's testimony was disputed due to lack of material evidence for his inventions, as his working models were purportedly lost at the laboratory of American District Telegraph (ADT) of New York, which was incorporated as a subsidiary of Western Union in 1901.

According to one of his biographers, Charlotte Gray, Bell's work ranged "unfettered across the scientific landscape" and he often went to bed voraciously reading the Encyclopædia Britannica, scouring it for new areas of interest.

Bell's inventions spanned a wide range of interests and included a metal jacket to assist in breathing, the audiometer to detect minor hearing problems, a device to locate icebergs, investigations on how to separate salt from seawater, and work on finding alternative fuels.

[153] Bell and his assistant Charles Sumner Tainter jointly invented a wireless telephone, named a photophone, which allowed for the transmission of both sounds and normal human conversations on a beam of light.

[163] Garfield's surgeons, led by self-appointed chief physician Doctor Willard Bliss, were skeptical of the device, and ignored Bell's requests to move the President to a bed not fitted with metal springs.

[163] Bell's own detailed account, presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1882, differs in several particulars from most of the many and varied versions now in circulation, by concluding that extraneous metal was not to blame for failure to locate the bullet.

Perplexed by the peculiar results he had obtained during an examination of Garfield, Bell "proceeded to the Executive Mansion the next morning ... to ascertain from the surgeons whether they were perfectly sure that all metal had been removed from the neighborhood of the bed.

On returning to Baddeck, a number of initial concepts were built as experimental models, including the Dhonnas Beag (Scottish Gaelic for 'little devil'), the first self-propelled Bell-Baldwin hydrofoil.

[170] The AEA was headed by Bell and the founding members were four young men: American Glenn H. Curtiss, a motorcycle manufacturer at the time and who held the title "world's fastest man", having ridden his self-constructed motor bicycle around in the shortest time, and who was later awarded the Scientific American Trophy for the first official one-kilometre flight in the Western hemisphere, and who later became a world-renowned airplane manufacturer; Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, an official observer from the U.S. Federal government and one of the few people in the army who believed that aviation was the future; Frederick W. Baldwin, the first Canadian and first British subject to pilot a public flight in Hammondsport, New York; and J.

The paper did not propose sterilization of deaf people or prohibition on intermarriage,[182] noting that "We cannot dictate to men and women whom they should marry and natural selection no longer influences mankind to any great extent.

Even after Bell agreed to engage with scientists conducting eugenic research, he consistently refused to support public policy that limited the rights or privileges of the deaf.

On the behalf of the citizens of Canada, may I extend to you an expression of our combined gratitude and sympathy.Bell's coffin was constructed of Beinn Bhreagh pine by his laboratory staff, lined with the same red silk fabric used in his tetrahedral kite experiments.

To help celebrate his life, his wife asked guests not to wear black (the traditional funeral color) while attending his service, during which soloist Jean MacDonald sang a verse of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem":[194] Under a wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie.

Upon the conclusion of Bell's funeral, for one minute at 6:25 p.m. Eastern Time,[195] "every phone on the continent of North America was silenced in honor of the man who had given to mankind the means for direct communication at a distance".

[148][196] Alexander Graham Bell was buried atop Beinn Bhreagh mountain, on his estate where he had resided increasingly for the last 35 years of his life, overlooking Bras d'Or Lake.