Great Achievement of Alexander Graham Bell

Waikato Times, Volume 125, Issue 20910, 15 September 1939, Page 4

Great Achievement of Alexander Graham Bell

“ The first machine ever to create intelligible human speech made it* debut on January 5 at the Benjamin Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Widely publicised in magazines, newsreels and newspapers, it is being exhibited as the newest scientific wonder at the New York World s Fair. It is called the Voder. Yet, in 1860, Alexander Gratiam Bell, then a mere boy, created the fore-runner of this amazing machine, an achievement which foretold the genius that was to give men's voloes the power to span continents through a copper wire. Bell, who was bom in Scotland in 1847, the son of a cultured family especially interested in teaching the art of speech, as a young lad once made a crude head of gutta peroha which he fitted with an Ingenious apparatus representing the organs of speech, lie blew into this with a bellows and manipulated It in such a manner that it produced uncanny sounds that sounded like words. For his work, Alexander Bell chose to teach the deaf. So he came to meet and fall in love with lovely Mabel Hubbard and out of her deafness came the inspiration for the _ telephone—a stirring romantic drama that comes to the screen in Darryl F. Zanuck's production of “The Story of Alexander Graham Bell," with Don Ameche in the title role and Loretta Young and Henry Fonda heading the stellar cast. In 1870 Bell went to America with his father. He made close friends of Gardiner G. Hubbard a Boston business man whose daughter Mabel had been made deaf by scarlet fever, and Thomas Sanders a rich n.an whose son had been born deaf. Mr Hubbard and Mr Sanders became Bell's chief supporters. Through intiuence and through money, they enabled the inventor to realise his great dream. Bell’s story is a drama of accomplishment; the obscure young scientist, his discouraging struggles, his Invention of the telephone, his desperate battle against public ridicule and powerful opponents, his ultimate triumph—and the flame of his genius kept alight by the love and faith of a young girl, heauiiful Mabel Hubbard, daughter of his friend.