Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone grew out of his research into ways to improve the telegraph. Alexander Graham Bell was not trying to invent the telephone, he was just trying to help out people in need. Young Alexander Graham Bell, Bell as his family knew him, took to reading and writing at a precociously young age. Bell family lore told of his insistence upon mailing a letter to a family friend well before he had grasped any understanding of the alphabet. As he matured, Bell displayed what came to be known as a Bell family trademark--an expressive, flexible, and resonant speaking voice. .
Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the inventor spent one year at a private school, two years at Edinburgh's Royal High School (from which he graduated at 14), and attended a few lectures at Edinburgh University and at University College in London, but he was largely family-trained and self-taught. He moved to the United States, settling in Boston, before beginning his career as an inventor. With each passing year, Alexander Graham Bell's intellectual horizons broadened. By the time he was 16, he was teaching music and elocution at a boy's boarding school. He and his brothers, Melville and Edward, traveled throughout Scotland impressing audiences with demonstrations of their father's Visible Speech techniques. Their father invented Visible Speech but he didn't have much luck with it. It is a technique were ever sound that comes out of a persons mouth can be represented with a visual character. .
Bell had the good fortune to discover and inspire Thomas Watson, a young repair mechanic and model maker, who assisted him enthusiastically in devising an apparatus for transmitting sound by electricity. As the two collaborated on ways to refine Bell's "harmonic telegraph," Bell shared with Watson his vision of what would become the telephone. Watson was intrigued, and a partnership was forged.
