60+ Alexander Graham Bell Quotes & Biography

This is when Alexander Graham Bell was born: March 3, 1847. He was born in Scotland. When he came to the United States from Scotland in 1800, he became an inventor, scientist, and teacher for the deaf. His most important work was to make the telephone and the phonograph better (1886). His research on hearing and speech led him to try out hearing aids, which led to Bell getting the first U.S. patent for the telephone in 1876. Below is the collection of Alexander graham bell quotes that will surely inspire you to achieve your goal.

• When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us. — Alexander Graham Bell

• Before anything else, preparation is the key to success. — Alexander Graham Bell

• Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus. — Alexander Graham Bell

• “The inventor is a man who looks around upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea. The spirit of invention possesses him, seeking materialization.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “Mr. Watson — Come here — I want to see you. [First intelligible words spoken over the telephone]” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “There are two critical points in every aerial flight-its beginning and its end.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “I have traveled around the globe. I have seen the Canadian and American Rockies, the Andes, the Alps and the Highlands of Scotland, but for simple beauty, Cape Breton outrivals them all!” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “Such a chimerical idea as telegraphing vocal sounds would indeed, to most minds, seem scarcely feasible enough to spend time in working over. I believe, however, that it is feasible and that I have got the cue to the solution of the problem.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “Man is the result of slow growth; that is why he occupies the position he does in animal life. What does a pup amount to that has gained its growth in a few days or weeks, beside a man who only attains it in as many years.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “We are all too much inclined, I think, to walk through life with our eyes shut. There are things all round us and right at our very feet that we have never seen, because we have never really looked.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “The only difference between success and failure is the ability to take action.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “God has strewn our paths with wonders and we certainly should not go through life with our eyes shut.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• Sometimes we stare so long at a door that is closing that we see too late the one that is open. — Alexander Graham Bell

• Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds. I may be given credit for having blazed the trail, but when I look at the subsequent developments I feel the credit is due to others rather than to myself. — Alexander Graham Bell

• America is a country of inventors, and the greatest of inventors are the newspaper men. — Alexander Graham Bell

• What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it. — Alexander Graham Bell

• Educate the masses, elevate their standard of intelligence, and you will certainly have a successful nation. — Alexander Graham Bell

• A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with – a man is what he makes of himself. — Alexander Graham Bell

• The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion. — Alexander Graham Bell

• A man’s own judgment should be the final appeal in all that relates to himself. —- Alexander Graham Bell

• “Don’t keep forever on the public road, going only where others have gone and following one after the other like a flock of sheep. Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “Man is an animal which, alone among the animals, refuses to be satisfied by the fulfillment of animal desires.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• It is not, of course, complete yet – but some sentences were understood this afternoon… I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem – and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid onto houses just like water or gas – and friends converse with each other without leaving home. — Alexander Graham Bell

• “The achievement of one goal should be the starting point of another.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth. Ideas do not reach perfection in a day, no matter how much study is put upon them.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “Another discovery which came out of my investigation was the fact that when one gives his or her order to produce a definite result and stands by that order, it seems to have the effect of giving one what might be termed a second sight which enables him or her to see right through ordinary problems.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “The final result of our researches has widened the class of substances sensitive to light vibrations, until we can propound the fact of such sensitiveness being a general property of all matter.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “Night is a more quiet time to work. It aids thought.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “The great advantage [the telephone] possesses over every other form of electrical apparatus consists in the fact that it requires no skill to operate the instrument.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “I have always considered myself as an Agnostic…” — Alexander Graham Bell 

• “With every door that closes a new one opens.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “It is the man who carefully advances step by step…who is bound to succeed in the greatest degree.”  — Alexander Graham Bell

• “Washington is no place in which to carry out inventions.”  — Alexander Graham Bell

• “I would impress upon your minds the fact that if you want to do a man justice, you should believe what a man says himself rather than what people say he says.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “Dumbness comes from the fact that a child is born deaf and that it consequently never learns how to articulate, for it is by the medium of hearing that such instruction is acquired.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “My knowledge of electrical subjects was not acquired in a methodical manner but was picked up from such books as I could get hold of and from such experiments as I could make with my own hands.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “The nation that secures control of the air will ultimately control the world.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “One day there will be a telephone in every major city in the USA.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “The day will come when the man at the telephone will be able to see the distant person to whom he is speaking.”  — Alexander Graham Bell

• “One day every major city in America will have a telephone.”  — Alexander Graham Bell

• “Every time you do you will be certain to find something you have never seen before.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “Watson, … if I can get a mechanism which will make a current of electricity vary in its intensity, as the air varies in density when a sound is passing through it, I can telegraph any sound, even the sound of speech.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “Ordinary people who know nothing of phonetics or elocution have difficulties in understanding slow speech composed of perfect sounds, while they have no difficulty in comprehending an imperfect gabble if only the accent and rhythm are natural.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “The inventor…looks upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “Morse conquered his electrical difficulties although he was only a painter, and I don’t intend to give in either till all is completed.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “The telephone will be used to inform people that a telegram has been sent.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “Wherever you may find the inventor, you may give him wealth or you may take from him all that he has; and he will go on inventing. He can no more help inventing that he can help thinking or breathing.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “From my earliest childhood, my attention was specially directed to the subject of acoustics, and specially to the subject of speech, and I was urged by my father to study everything relating to these subjects, as they would have an important bearing upon what was to be my professional work.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “Neither the Army nor the Navy is of any protection, or very little protection, against aerial raids.”— Alexander Graham Bell

• “I do not recognize the right of the public to break in the front door of a man’s private life in order to satisfy the gaze of the curious… I do not think it right to dissect living men even for the advancement of science. So far as I am concerned, I prefer a post mortem examination to vivisection without anaesthetics.” —- Alexander Graham Bell

• “I have heard articulate speech produced by sunlight I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing! … I have been able to hear a shadow, and I have even perceived by ear the passage of a cloud across the sun’s disk.”  —- Alexander Graham Bell

• “I have discovered that my interest in my dear pupil, Mabel, has ripened into a far deeper feeling than that of mere friendship. In fact, I know that I have learned to love her very sincerely.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “Observe, Remember, Compare.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “Grand telegraphic discovery today … Transmitted vocal sounds for the first time … With some further modification I hope we may be enabled to distinguish … the “timbre” of the sound. Should this be so, conversation viva voce by telegraph will be a fait accompli.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “I have had the feeling that a properly constructed flying-machine should be capable of being flown as a kite; and conversely, that a properly constructed kite should be capable of use as a flying-machine when driven by its own propellers.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “In this experiment, made on the 9th of October, 1876, actual conversation, backwards and forwards, upon the same line, and by the same instruments reciprocally used, was successfully carried on for the first time upon a real line of miles in length.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• It is a neck-and-neck race between Mr. Gray and myself who shall complete our apparatus first. He has the advantage over me in being a practical electrician – but I have reason to believe that I am better acquainted with the phenomena of sound than he is – so that I have an advantage there. — Alexander Graham Bell

• “Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “There cannot be mental atrophy in any person who continues to observe, to remember what he observes, and to seek answers for his unceasing hows and whys about things.” — Alexander Graham Bell

• It is hardly an exaggeration to say that oral teachers and sign teachers found it difficult to sit down in the same room without quarreling, and there was intolerance upon both sides. To say ‘oral method’ to a sign teacher was like waving a red flag in the face of a bull, and to say ‘sign language’ to an oralist aroused the deepest resentment. — Alexander Graham Bell

Related Topics: William Shakespeare quotes and Abraham Lincoln Quotes.

Alexander Graham Bell Biography

Early Life

When Bell came up with his most famous invention, he thought it was an invasion of his work as a scientist. He didn’t want to have a telephone in his study. Bell came up with a lot of other ideas later in his life, like optical telecommunications, hydrofoils, and aeronautics. The National Geographic Society was not started by 33 people. Bell was the second president of the society from January 7, 1898, to 1903. He had a big impact on the magazine while he was in this job, which was from 1898 to 1903. Alexander graham bell quotes are also very well-known for inspiration and motivation.

Childhood and Educational Career

This is the date Alexander Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was born on March 3, 1847. It was at 16 South Charlotte Street. A stone inscription marked it as the place where Alexander Graham Bell was born. They were Melville James Bell (1845–70) and Edward Charles Bell (1848–67). Both of them died from tuberculosis. When he was born, Professor Alexander Melville Bell was his father, and his mother was Eliza Grace (née Symonds). He was named after his grandfather. It wasn’t added until he was 10 years old. To close family and friends, he was always called “Aleck.”

Alexander Graham Bell had a lot of strong influences when he was young that had a big impact on his later life. This is what people called the city where Bell grew up, Edinburgh, Scotland. It was known as “Athens in the North” because of its rich culture of arts and science. His grandfather and father were very knowledgeable about the mechanics of the voice and how to speak well, so they could help him with that. Alexander’s mother, who was almost deaf, became a talented pianist and encouraged him to take on big challenges, even though she could not hear well.

Early on, Bell showed that he was sensitive and had a talent for art, poetry, and music that his mother encouraged him to use. With no formal training, he learned how to play the piano and became the family’s piano player. Even though he was usually quiet and introspective, he had a lot of fun with mimicry and “voice tricks” that were a lot like ventriloquism. During family visits, he kept the guests entertained with his “voice tricks.” Bell was also deeply affected by his mother’s gradual hearing loss. When he was of 12 years, his mother start to lose her hearing. Bell learned a manual finger language so he could sit by her side and tap out silently the conversations that were going on in the family room.

Working Career

During the year 1871, Alexander Graham Bell moved to Boston and began working on a device that would allow the telegraph transmission of several messages set to different frequencies at the same time. It took Bell many long days and nights to get the harmonic telegraph just right between 1873 and 1874. It was during his experiments that he became interested in another idea, which was to send the human voice over a wire. Bell’s benefactors didn’t like the distraction. Thomas Watson, a skilled electrician, was hired to help Bell get back on track with the harmonic telegraph. But soon, Watson fell in love with Bell’s idea of voice transmission, and the two formed a great partnership. Bell was the idea man, and Watson had the skills to make Bell’s ideas come to life.

He is best known for his work on the development of the telephone. Worked on the design and patent of the first practical telephone with Thomas Watson, who was his assistant at the time. Many other things happened in his later years, like making the phonograph better. Over a two-mile telephone wire that ran from Cambridge to Boston in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson talked to each other over the phone on October 9, 1876. People have never talked on the wire before.

Personal Life

He was born on March 3, 1847. They were Melville James Bell and Edwin Charles Bell. Both of them died of tuberculosis. He chose the name “Graham” for his 11^th birthday because his father was taking care of a Canadian who had become a friend of the family. To close family and friends, he was always called “Aleck.”

He and his family moved to Canada in 1870 after the death of two of his brothers. This was so that he could keep his health. In the same way, his father had taught deaf people to communicate, he started working on telephonic messages. From 1912 to 1918, he was the head of the board of scientific advisers to the Eugenics Record Office, which was part of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. He went to meetings often. In 1921, he was the honorary president of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, which took place in New York City.

Death

It was August 2, 1922 when he died of complications from diabetes at his private estate, Beinn Bhreagh. Phones across North America were turned off for one minute at his funeral. In the last 35 years of his life, Dr. Alexander Graham Bell lived more and more at his home on Beinn Bhreagh mountain, which overlooks Bras d’Or Lake. He was buried there. There were three people left to mourn him when he died: his wife and his two daughters, Elsie May and Marian, and nine of his grandchildren.