It is perhaps as an advocate for the deaf that Bell made his most profound impact. Every deaf child who appealed to him found an open hand and an open heart. To the end of his life, he considered himself above all a "Teacher of the Deaf."

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Alexander Graham Bell was named after his grandfather, Alexander Bell. The senior Bell guided the family from its roots in the Scottish shoemaking industry to prominence in Edinburgh and London.

Alexander Bell had a flair for drama and left shoemaking to try his luck on the stage. Unfortunately, his new career could not support his family. Instead, he used his trained actor's voice to give lessons in speech and elocution. After he and his wife divorced, Alexander and his fourteen year-old son Melville, moved to London.

Alexander Bell's book, the Practical Elocutionist, gave him entrance into London's intellectual community. The fact that this Scot was able to make his living by teaching English to Englishmen says much about his abilities!

His son Melville was soon old enough to follow in his father's footsteps. As a young man, he suffered from chest infections and was sent to Newfoundland to recover his health. There, he worked as a shipping clerk and indulged his interest in the theatre. By 1842, he was back in London, ready to make his mark in the world of speech and elocution.

Aleck Bell's parents were a strong and loving influence on his life. He was indebted to them for three of his major interests: music, speech and photography.

Aleck's mother, Eliza, was almost totally deaf. In addition to providing all Aleck's early schooling, his mother also taught him the English, manual alphabet used by the deaf. She gave him his first lessons on the piano, but soon realized that Aleck's skill called out for a more experienced teacher. Accordingly, Aleck became the star pupil of an acclaimed pianist. Auguste Benoit Bertini died before the lessons had advanced very far. Perhaps if he had lived, Aleck's life would have taken a different course.

His younger brother Ted was the first to succumb, falling victim to tuberculosis at the age of 18. The elder brother, Melly, died of the same disease three years later, in 1870. Melville and Eliza could think only of saving the one son left to them. In his youth, Melville had been sent to Canada for reasons of health. He believed that Aleck would also flourish in its climate and made plans to emigrate. Aleck was, by this time, enrolled in the University of London, where he studied anatomy and physiology. He had no wish to cut short his university career. In the end, however, he agreed to accompany his parents to Canada. Mabel & Deafness

Mabel Hubbard, Alexander Graham Bell's wife, was born on November 25, 1857, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her parents were Gardiner Greene Hubbard and his wife Gertrude McCurdy.

At the age of five, a bout with scarlet fever left this bright little girl totally and permanently deaf. In Massachusetts, the only school for the deaf was a boarding school in Hartford. The school's program focused on the use of sign language, which had been developed a hundred years before. Mabel's parents, however, feared that sign language would isolate the little girl from her friends and family. They decided to investigate other possibilities.

Like her future husband, Mabel Hubbard grew up in an extraordinary family. Her Hubbard grandfather was a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Her father, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, graduated from Dartmouth College and entered a leading Boston law firm..

Gertrude McCurdy Hubbard was a woman of rare gifts. She forbade her other children to help Mabel by making signs. Instead, they were encouraged to enunciate the words clearly, while looking directly at Mabel. In this way, Gertrude Hubbard managed to preserve the vocabulary that Mabel had before her illness. She also encouraged her daughter to read, as a way of learning new words.

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At the age of 16, Mabel Hubbard was already an accomplished young woman. Although deaf since the age of five, she had received a superior education. However, her mother and her teacher, Mary True, were satisifed with the quality of her speech. Mary True had met Alexander Graham Bell when they were both teaching at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes. She suggested that Mabel take private lessons with Professor Bell.

In spite of a 10-year age gap, Mabel and Aleck quickly became friends. When invited to the Hubbard home for tea, Aleck ensured future invitations by mentioning his wish to invent a multiple telegraph. By 1874, he and Mabel's father were partners.

Mabel's parents were worried by Aleck's obvious interest in their daughter. She was only 17, while they mistakenly believed him to be about 35. In the end, they permitted Aleck to tell Mabel of his feelings. He promised to change his life for her.

Some promises are harder to keep than others. To Mabel's dismay, Aleck firmly maintained his habit of working well into the night and sleeping through the morning. Shortly after their engagement, she informed him that she was painting his portrait. The painting turned out to be the image of a great white owl!

Mabel and her family were also distressed by Aleck's tendency to jump from one subject to the next. Her father persuaded Mabel to present Aleck with an ultimatum: no marriage until the multiple telegraph was completed. Aleck was furious at this. He was also distressed by his parents' reaction to the engagement. Deaf herself, Eliza Bell did not want the trait passed on to her grandchildren. When she wrote to ask if Mabel's deafness was inherited, Aleck found it hard to forgive his mother.

In the end, love conquered all obstacles. Mabel and Aleck were married in the Hubbards' Cambridge home on July 11, 1877. As a wedding present, Aleck gave Mabel all but ten of his shares in the newly-formed Bell Telephone Company.

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From the day he was born, Alexander Graham Bell's life was shaped by two forces: that of sound, and that of silence. Aleck's grandfather was a famous speech expert, while his father, Melville, achieved international acclaim for his work in phonetics. Both believed that communication was the highest ideal that people could strive for.

Yet Aleck's mother, Eliza, was deaf. The boy grew up with a painful awareness of the isolation imposed by deafness. His mother taught him the standard English finger alphabet. He, in turn, translated general conversation for her. It was a service he would willingly perform for any deaf person he ever met.

Aleck had a very keen sense of pitch. This was partly due to his mother, who had him trained as a pianist from a very early age. His father further refined his sense of pitch by drilling him in Visible Speech. This phonetic alphabet was the elusive goal of phoneticians throughout the world. Melville's version consisted of 34 symbols. Each symbol represented a way to use the lips, tongue, or voice to produce a sound. The horseshoe curve, for example, represented the tongue. The direction in which it was pointing indicated the tongue's position.

By reading a page of symbols, the trained student could reproduce any sound made by humans, including coughs, clicks and sneezes. Aleck and his brothers were often called upon to demonstrate the new system.

Melville saw Visible Speech as a way to teach people to enunciate clearly, in properly-accented English. Aleck, however, saw it as a way of teaching the deaf to speak. In 1868, he was invited to teach Visible Speech to four little girls who suffered from deafness. He felt he had discovered his life's work.

Bell spent a term teaching Visible Speech at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes. He also lectured at the Clarke School, established by Gardiner Greene Hubbard. Hubbard's daughter, Mabel, deaf since the age of five, became another of Aleck's students.

Before long, Alexander Graham Bell and Gardiner Greene Hubbard were partners in the telephone business. Hubbard with frustrated with Bell's devotion to teaching. On the eve of the Centennial Exhibition in Philadephia, Aleck resisted leaving his classes to exhibit the telephone. Even then, just before his greatest triumph, his first thought was for the deaf.

In the years following the invention of the telephone, Bell continued to work on behalf of the deaf. He lobbied to establish day-schools throughout the United States and travelled widely in this cause.

By this time, Bell had become a well-known advocate of the deaf. Parents constantly appealed to him for help and advice -- among them the father of the deaf and blind child, Helen Keller. The secretaries at Bell's office were instructed to give these parents instant access to Bell. As Helen Keller said of him, "He is never quite so happy as when he has a little deaf child in his arms."

Like Helen Keller, Christy MacKinnon of Cape Breton wrote an account of her meeting with Dr. Bell. Bell encouraged the family to educate the little girl, who later attended the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and became a commercial artist.

When Bell first began his work, only 40% of deaf children were taught to speak. At the time of his death, that number had risen to over 80%. In 1956, the AAPTSD became the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf. Bell's own statistical records on hereditary deafness, initially kept in the Volta Bureau in Washington, are now part of the Association's collection. In addition to desseminating information on deafness, the association explores the role of new technology in aiding hearing-impaired children. It still publishes the Volta Review. Bell's work has lived on.

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