240 The Smithsonian Institution 



with his consent, placed under the general charge of the In- 

 stitution, where it has been employed for objects cognate with 

 those contemplated by the donor. 



The present brief notice of Doctor Bell would have been a 

 fuller one were it not that a reluctance to be the object of 

 public notice has made it difficult to find the necessary facts 

 for the biographer. 



We know of his life little more than that he was born in 

 Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847; that he is under- 

 stood to have been educated in London and Edinburgh ; that 

 in 1870 he removed to Canada, and that in 1872 he settled 

 in Boston, where he introduced the system of visible speech 

 invented by his father, which was especially for the benefit 

 of the deaf and dumb, and where he became professor of 

 vocal physiology in the Boston University. 



At this time the transmission of sound by electricity at- 

 tracted his attention, and he made the invention which 

 brought him his present great and deserved fame. It was at 

 the Centennial Exhibition held in Philadelphia in 1876 that 

 the telephone was first exhibited. It attracted the immediate 

 notice of Sir William Thomson (now Lord Kelvin), and 

 other eminent electricians, and almost at once it engrossed 

 the attention of the public, and the news of the discovery 

 spread over the civilized world. 



Doctor Bell's scientific work was by no means confined to 

 the telephone, although it is in connection with that invention 

 that his name is best known. He has added various devices 

 connected with the transmission of speech by electricity, among 

 which is that described by Antoine Breguet in the Comptes 

 Rendus of the French Academy of Sciences of iSSo. 1 



Doctor Bell, among other rewards of his invention of the 

 telephone, received the Volta prize of fifty thousand francs 



1 Volume XCI, pages 595 and 652. 



