Now listen to the first part of the talk about the inventor of the telephone. As you listen to the talk, write down the missing information in the notes below.
Today people can talk to each other even if they are thousands of miles apart. They can hear each other as clearly as if they were in the same room. The man who made this possible was Alexander Graham Bell. His invention is the telephone. The telephone sends the human voice from one end of the world to the other.
Bell is famous not only as an inventor. He is also well known as a writer of books to help people who cannot speak or hear. He was a teacher of such people. This made him interested in sound. This interest led to his invention.
Alexander Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847. As a boy he was interested in inventions. He went to the Universities of Edinburgh and London. His father and grandfather had both been teachers of deaf people. His father had worked out a system of “Visible Speech”, that is, a system by which a deaf person can “see” what people say by reading their lips. Bell learned this system. He soon became a teacher of the deaf and he opened his own school for deaf people in Canada.
Through his teaching, Bell became interested in the sound of the human voice. He thought that it should be possible to send sound across a distance. That is what the word telephone means – far sound. With his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, he worked day and night on this idea. They strung wires across several rooms. Each time when they thought that they had found a way, they tried to talk through the wires. Each time they were disappointed. After each failure, they made some changes and tried again.