New mural unveiled depicting Alexander Graham Bell
A NEW mural of Alexander Graham Bell has been unveiled in the city’s Southside.
Located on the side of The Brooklyn Cafe on Minard Road, the artwork is part of the Shawlands Mural Trail and was created by Don Fiyas.
Bell, who was born in Edinburgh’s New Town on March 3, 1847, is credited with revolutionising how we communicate through the invention of the telephone in 1876.
It was on March 10 of that year he made history with a crackly phone call to his assistant Thomas Watson where he said: “Mr Watson, come here – I want to see you.”
While some dispute remains over who truly created the device, with scientists Antonio Meucci and Elisha Gray being rival claimants, it was Bell who first patented the invention before founding the Bell Telephone Company in 1877.
Although the father of the telephone did not show great academic promise as a youngster, he habitually tinkered with home inventions and enjoyed problem- solving from an early age. Bell’s fascination with speech and hearing dated back to his teenage years when he began studying the mechanics of vocalisation.
This interest was inherited from his parents – his mother was deaf and his father was a professor of elocution at the University of Edinburgh.
He attended the Royal High School and enrolled at the University of Edinburgh before his entire family moved to Canada in 1870. Bell then moved to the United States the next year where he worked with deaf children using a system of symbols called “visible speech” which his father had developed.
By the age of 26, Bell was a professor of vocal physiology and elocution at the Boston University School of Oratory where he met his wife, Mabel Hubbard, who attended as a deaf student.
In Boston, Bell, along with Watson, was preoccupied with developing a means of transmitting speech. They managed to create a receiver which turned electricity into sound in 1875, which Bell then patented as the telephone the following year.
We can consider with some wry amusement today that the inventor was said to have refused to keep a telephone in his office due to the fear that it would prove a distraction from his work.