Alexander Graham Bell is remembered today as the inventor of the telephone, but he was also an outstanding teacher of the deaf and a prolific inventor of other devices.

Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a family of speech educators. His father, Melville Bell, had invented Visible Speech, a code of symbols for all spoken sounds that was used in teaching deaf people to speak. Aleck Bell studied at Edinburgh University in 1864 and assisted his father at University College, London, from 1868-70. During these years he became deeply interested in the study of sound and the mechanics of speech, inspired in part by the acoustic experiments of German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), which gave Bell the idea of telegraphing speech.

When young Bell's two brothers died of tuberculosis, Melville Bell took his remaining family to the healthier climate of Canada in 1870. From there, Aleck...