Alexander Graham Bell biography

Alexander Graham Bell, was the inventor of the telephone. Bell was born in Edinburgh on 3 March 1847. He was the son of Melville, a speech and elocution teacher who developed the first International Phonetic Alphabet and Eliza, who was deaf from the age of five. Bell was the only child to survive into adulthood, with his younger and elder brothers, Ted and Melly, dying of tuberculosis. These biographical facts foretell the strong values, personality and determination of the man destined to radically change the preferred mode of long distance communications to voice, and thus transform virtually all aspects of modern life.Bell developed a passion for communication from a young age. He was to become an extraordinary man with a visionary understanding of its power and potential. Educated at the universities of Edinburgh and London, Bell immigrated to the US in 1870. In his twenties, he set about developing a multiple telegraph that could send several Morse code messages. In 1872, Bell s tarted attending MIT’s public lectures on experimental mechanics, including one in October by Professor Charles R. Cross that began a long, fruitful collaboration.At the talk, Cross demonstrated a device invented by his colleague Edward C. Pickering, who then chaired MIT’s physics department. At the time of Cross’s lecture, MIT (which had been incorporated in 1861 on the Boston side of the Charles River) had recently opened the Rogers Laboratory of Physics in a new building on Boylston Street. The facility was the first of its kind in the United States, a well-outfitted working laboratory that allowed students to conduct experiments illustrating the physical laws they learned about in class.Of particular interest to Bell, the new laboratory had an impressive set of equipment identical to that used in the path breaking work of Hermann von Helmholtz, one of the world’s leading acoustical researchers. In 1873, Bell accepted a position as a professor of vocal physiology and elocution at the fledgling Boston University (which had been chartered in 1869). The post drew him into even closer contact with Boston’s scientific community, affording him the chance to get better acquainted with Professor Cross, who would eventually succeed Pickering as chair of MIT’s physics department.In April 1874, after Bell addressed MIT students and faculty about his acoustical studies and his eff orts to teach the deaf to speak, Cross—apparently impressed—granted him unfettered access to the Institute’s facilities for his further research. Bell seized the opportunity. Of course, Bell won his patent claim as the sole inventor of the telephone, and public knowledge about the contributions of others mostly faded into oblivion.The many surviving primary documents from the period, however, leave little doubt of the important supporting role that Cross and the Rogers Laboratory played in helping Bell gain vital, detailed, and of ten hands-on knowledge about the cutting-edge work of others in the field, including Pickering, Helmholtz, Reis, and Elisha Gray, the inventor whose path breaking design for a liquid transmitter Bell seems to have appropriated to make his world-famous call to Watson. Many years later, with Bell’s legal claim to the telephone long since secured, he publicly acknowledged Cross’s contribution.Bell told the crowd of 1,500 assembled at Symphony Hall for MIT’s 50th-anniversary gala—and more than 5,000 alumni and guests who were listening in by phone at Alumni Association gatherings across the country—that Cross had not only made â€Å"many advances in the telephone itself † but inspired many students to â€Å"go forth from the Institute to perfect the work. † On 7 March 1876, Bell patented the telephone (Patent 174,465) at the tender age of 29. On March 10, 1876, Bell supposedly knocked over the battery acid he and Watson were using as tran smitting liquid for early telephone tests, and shouted, â€Å"Mr.Watson, come here; I want you. † Watson, working in the next room, heard Bell’s voice through the wire. Bell introduced the telephone to the world at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. In 1877, Bell formed the Bell Telephone Company. He later sued Western Union over patent infringement of his telephone copyright, and won. In the 1880s, Bell used his considerable fortune to establish research laboratories to work with deaf people. Helen Keller was among his many students.Bell, though, was able to translate his exceptional values into his private life. He lobbied the cause of deaf people and to establish day schools for them throughout the US. When he set out on this challenge, only 40 per cent of deaf children were taught to speak. At the time of his death in 1922 the figure was 80 per cent — testimony enough in itself to his leadership qualities. Like all exceptional leaders, Bell m ade himself accessible to all. He encouraged one family — the Kellers — to educate their little girl Helen, who was deaf.She later attended the Boston Museum of fine arts and became a highly successful commercial artist. Employers today can learn much from Bell's great achievements — nurture ideas, encourage innovation and pursue developments, however radical they might seem at the time. Likewise, there remains a need today for companies to accept and foster their links and social responsibilities within the communities in which they operate and beyond. Bell proved that leaders and business can create the circumstances to improve our quality of life.In researching this article, I have grown to respect the great depth and leadership qualities of Alexander Graham Bell, a hugely successful entrepreneur and a great humanitarian. While telephones, fax, mobiles, text messaging, and the like may sometimes drive you mad, they have undoubtedly revolutionised the world fo r the better, and it can all be traced back to the leadership and vision of one man. Bell is the greatest creator ever of shareholder value and an inspirational figure for the to the cause of the â€Å"children of a lesser God† — it must earn him the title of Greatest Briton in Management and Leadership.Other Bell inventions include an electric probe, a device used to locate bullets and other metal objects in the human body, and the vacuum jacket, which when placed around the chest, administered artificial respiration. He’s also credited with inventions related to the iron lung and triangular aircraft wings. In 1898, Bell became the president of National Geographic because he believed that geography could be taught through pictures. Bell’s fascination with aeronautics led to his â€Å"hydrodrome† boat, a vessel that traveled above the water at high speeds.The hydrodrome reached speeds in excess of 70 mph, and for many years was the fastest boat in the world. Bell died August 2, 1922, in Nova Scotia, Canada But unlike so many great pioneers and inventors, Bell followed through, visualizing the future and realizing the potential of his remarkable invention. Shortly after the invention of the telephone, Bell had told his father: â€Å"The day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid on to houses, just like water or gas†¦ and friends will converse with each other without leaving home. How right he was.Remember this prediction was at a time when the telephone was in its infancy and its full potential was far from recognized. Bell's invention changed for good the way people live their lives. Telephones and telephone lines have enabled us to network global companies via computers, make transactions electronically, or simply talk to our loved ones to let them know all is well, wherever in the world we might be at the time. The telephone is not only capable of transmitting voice, but also of transmitting emotion and, therefor e, allows us to communicate not only what we are thinking but how we feel.In a stroke of genius, Bell shrank the world and transformed the lives of the citizens of his country of birth and education, Great Britain, and, indeed, the lives of people around the world. Like many great people, Bell appeared to benefit from luck and skill in equal measure, and it was while he was trying to develop multiple morse code that he stumbled on the concept that speech could be reproduced through sound waves in a continuous undulating current. This truly brilliant discovery is the principle behind the telephone.Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955 to two university students, Joanne Carole Schieble and Syrian-born Abdulfattah â€Å"John† Jandali (Arabic: ), who were both unmarried at the time. [32] Jandali, who was teaching in Wisconsin when Steve was born in 1955, said he had no choice but to put the baby up for adoption because his girlfriend's family objected to their relationship. [33] The baby was adopted at birth by Paul Reinhold Jobs (1922–1993) and Clara Jobs (1924–1986), an Armenian-American[3] whose maiden name was Hagopian. 34] Later, when asked about his â€Å"adoptive parents,† Jobs replied emphatically that Paul and Clara Jobs â€Å"were my parents. â€Å"[35] He stated in his authorized biography that they â€Å"were my parents 1,000%. â€Å"[36] Unknown to him, his biological parents would subsequently marry (December 1955), have a second child Mona Simpson in 1957, and divorce in 1962. [36] The Jobs family moved from San Francisco to Mountain View, California when Steve was five years old. [1][2] The parents later adopted a daughter, Patti.Paul was a machinist for a company that made lasers, and taught his son rudimentary electronics and how to work with his hands. [1] The father showed Steve how to work on electronics in the family garage, demonstrating to his son how to take apart and rebuild elec tronics such as radios and televisions. As a result, Steve became interested in and developed a hobby of technical tinkering. [37] Clara was an accountant[35] who taught him to read before he went to school. [1] Clara Jobs had been a payroll clerk for Varian Associates, one of the first high-tech firms in what became known as Silicon Valley. 38] Jobs was an intelligent and innovative thinker, but his youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. At Monta Loma Elementary school in Mountain View, he was a prankster whose fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him to study. Jobs tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school—a proposal his parents declined. [39] Jobs then attended Cupertino Junior High and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. [2] At Homestead, Jobs became friends with Bill Fernandez, a neighbor who shared the same interests in electronics.Fernandez introduced Jobs to another, older computer whiz kid, St ephen Wozniak (also known as â€Å"Woz†). In 1969 Woz started building a little computer board with Fernandez that they named â€Å"The Cream Soda Computer†, which they showed to Jobs; he seemed really interested. [40] Jobs frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California, and was later hired there, working with Wozniak as a summer employee. [41] Following high school graduation in 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Reed was an expensive college which Paul and Clara could ill afford.They were spending much of their life savings on their son’s higher education. [40] Jobs dropped out of college after six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes. [42] He continued auditing classes at Reed while sleeping on the floor in friends' dorm rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money, and getting weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple. [43] Jobs later said, â€Å"If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fontsSteve Jobs introduced in 1988, was an even more expensive marvel of hardware and software design; it at-tracted even fewer customers. Today, Windows running on Intel-compatible chips remains the most common software platform for per-sonal computers (though cellphones far outsell PCs and have become the dominant mode of computing). But Mi-crosoft has introduced only incremen-tal innovations, following the path set by the Macintosh more than 25 years ago. And Android-based smartphones and tablets, which rely on Google s free and open operating system, follow the lead of the iPhone and the iPad.My point is that Microsoft, Intel, and Google have taken the usual route to platform leadership, with inexpen-sive or free products, relatively open viewpoints interfaces, and extensive efforts to cul-tivate a broad ecosystem of partners. But Jobs and Appl e have shown us an-other path to platform leadership, and not just for a niche product segment: Design breakthrough products that set new standards for form, function, and aesthetics; market them creatively and aggressively, with some modest reduc-tions in price over time; open them up gradually as industrywide platforms, and let the chips fall where they may.Jobs wanted Apple to create computers that would be as elegant and simple to use as a type-writer or even a toaster. Now, looking back, we can see that every product Jobs championed, whether or not it succeed-ed commercially, set new standards for aesthetics as well as utility, such as in ease-of-use or handling graphics and multimedia. What stands out most to me are the ultra-simple, intuitive user interfaces of the Macintosh (GUI plus mouse, albeit invented earlier at the Stanford Research Institute and Xerox PARC) and then the iPod s clickwheel and the iPhone and iPad touchscreens.Today s PCs, digital media players, smartpho nes, and tablets based on Windows or even Android are as good as they are only because of how much Steve Jobs and Apple raised the bar for everyone. Charisma and Leadership In the 1996 PBS documentary, Tri-umph of the Nerds, Larry Tesler, who used to work at Apple, discussed how Steve Jobs was able to inspire people to surpass what even they believed they could accomplish. He would never settle for anything less than someone s absolutely best effort, and then some.That is how Jobs raised the bar for the Macintosh project whose competi-tion was the character-based IBM PC and compatibles and many products since then, most recently the iPad. As Steve Jobs moved forward in his career, he also brought related but formerly distinct technologies and businesses together. In fact, he felt compelled to shed the historic Apple Computer name in 2007 in favor of Apple, Inc. to reflect the broader set of aspirations that he and the company had adopted.It is instructive again to compare Jobs and A pple with Gates and Microsoft. Gates main entrepreneurial legacy has been to create a mass-mar-ket software products company that continues to print money and ex-ploit those remarkable gross margins of packaged software , Jobs solved an extremely vexing problem for the industry and for consumers: how to price digital content in the form of music, video clips, movies, and TV pro-grams. This innovation in digital servic-es is no less profound than Steve Jobs innovations in consumer products. he master Strategist Early observers of Jobs and Apple, in-cluding myself, underestimated his ability to master the business side of technology. Clearly, over time, Jobs got better at this much better perhaps as the world caught up to what he was trying to do. Two incidents stand out. First, when he rejoined Apple in 1996, the firm was practically bankrupt, with only a few months of cash left. But Jobs got a $150 million investment from archrival Microsoft as well as a commitment from Bill Gates t hat Microsoft would continue to produce Office for the Mac.This agreement was critical to maintain the Macintosh business, then the only real source of revenue for Apple. Second, in 2005, Jobs abandoned his 20-year commitment to the Motorola micro-processor and adopted archrival Intel s technology. This move helped bridge the growing cost-performance gap with Windows PCs, and enabled the Macin-tosh to continue as a second platform that was also much more interoperable with the Windows world.