Beyond the telephone: Discover Alexander Graham Bell’s other groundbreaking inventions

According to the mots recent estimations, around 85% of the world’s population owns a smartphone or landline telephone - that’s 8.31 billion people who are able to communicate thanks to the ingenuity of one man - Alexander Graham Bell.

Born in Edinburgh in 1847, Bell was a curious and creative child whose interest in inventing and making devices began when he was 12 years old. His family emigrated when he was in his early 20s - moving first to Canada, then Boston, where Alexander would take up a position at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes.

Early work into developing the telephone

It was in Boston that Bell began working on transmitting and receiving sound waves, in the same way telegraph messages could be sent down cables. The breakthrough came in 1875 and while there were others working on the same principle such as Italian inventor Antonio Meucci, Bell was the first to secure a patent for his invention.

Alexander Graham Bell Day celebrates the anniversary of the day when patent 174,465 was granted for Bell’s acoustic telegraph machine that would eventually become the telephone - 7 March 1876. The holiday is recognized by an official act of the legislature in Nova Scotia, Canada.

The telephone was the Scottish-born Canadian-American inventor‘s greatest invention but not his only one. During his lifetime he has 18 patents granted in his name alone a further 12 with collaborators.

He is credited with inventing the metal detector, the Hydrodome - a type of hydrofoil watercraft, a photophone as well as a device to locate icebergs.

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