Perhaps more than any other invention, the telephone has changed the fabric and texture of our society. In fact, without the telephone, the Internet probably would not exist. Alexander Graham Bell was only 29 years old when he invented the telephone, and it was only one of many inventions and contributions that he made to our society. In addition to the telephone, Bell invented a type of telegraph that could transmit more than one message at a time and a device called a photophone, which transmitted sound on a beam of light. He also worked on the phonograph, aerial vehicles, hydroairplanes, and the selenium cell. In addition, he founded the National Geographic Society. Several excellent books about Bell have been written. You might visit your local library and request a copy of Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude by Robert Bruce (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973, 1990) and the more recent biography Alexander Graham Bell: Making Connections by Naomi Pasachoff (Oxford University Press, 1998).

Alexander Graham Bell's Path to the Telephone, at cti.itc.virginia.edu/~meg3c/albell/homepage.html, reconstructs the path Bell took when he invented the telephone. It includes a detailed cognitive map that shows the inspiration for Bell's work and discusses some of the sources of his ideas in the work of other scientists and inventors. You can also view excerpts from Bell's original notebooks. At The Telephone History Web Site, www.cybercomm.net/~chuck/phones.html, you can find links to Web pages with telephone history, photographs of antique telephones, histories of U.S. and international telephone companies, telephone history articles, and lots more. You might also find it interesting to visit AT&T's Web site, at www.att.com/technology/history/chronolog/
1876telephone.html, where you can watch a Quick Time movie of Bell and Watson if your computer system has the proper movie player.