BELL, ALEXANDER GRAHAM Ameri can inventor and physicist, inventor of the telephone; son of Alexander Melville Bell, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh and the University of London, and, because of failing health, re moved with his father to Canada in 1870. In 1872 he opened in Boston a school for training teachers of the deaf and also gave instruction in the mechanics of speech. The following year he became professor of vocal physiology in Boston university. He exhibited in 1876 an apparatus embodying the results of his studies in the transmission of sound by electricity, and this in vention, with improvements and modifications, constitutes the modern telephone (q.v.). He was the inventor also of the photo phone, an instrument for transmitting sound by vibrations in a beam of light, and of phonographic apparatus. Later, he interested himself in the problem of mechanical flight. He gave numerous addresses and published many scientific monographs, including one on the formation of a deaf variety in the human race. Bell was the founder of the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, was for a time president of the National Geographic Society, appointed by Congress in 1898 a regent of the Smithsonian Institution, and was a member of many learned societies. He died on Aug. 2, 1922, at his summer home near Baddeck, Nova Scotia.