The telephone

Alexander Graham Bell never planned to be an inventor, he wanted to be a musician or a teacher of deaf people. The subjects that he studied in school included music, art, literature, Latin and Greek. They did not include German, which moat scientific and technical writers used in their books, or science or math.

.In 1863, when Alexander was only sixteen, he became a teacher in a boys' school in Scotland. He liked teaching there, but he still wanted to become a teacher of deaf people. He read all the books about sound that he could find, and started to work on some of his own experiments. Reading scientific books was't easy for him, but he worked very hard, and learned a lot about the laws of sound.

In 1868, a terrible thing happened to the Bell family. Alexander's two brothers died of tuberculosis. Then Alexan­der became ill with the same disease. The doctor suggested a better climate, and the whole family moved to Canada. Alexander could not work for a year, but he continued his experiments with sound. He became interested in the tele­graph, and he tried to find a way to send musical sounds through electric wires. These experiments were not very successful.

After a year of rest, Alexander was offered a job at the School for the Deaf in Boston, Massachusetts. He was so successful that he was able to open his own school when he was only twenty-five.

About this time, Alexander became interested in finding a way to send the human voice through an electric wire. The parents of some of the children whom he taught contributed money for equipment. He found an assistant, Tom Watson, who worked in an electrical shop and knew a lot about building electric machines. Tom and Alexander worked together to build a machine that people could use to talk to one an­other over long distances.

The first permanent telephone line was built in Ger­many in 1877. And in 1878, the first telephone exchange was established in. New Jersey. By 1915, a coast-for-coast telephone line was opened in the United States - 5440 kilometers from New York to San Francisco. Alexander Graham Bell was invited to open the new line, and he asked his old friend, Tom Watson, to help,