ACADEMIC LISTENING TEST PRACTICE
ALEXANDER BELL - INVENTOR OF
THE TELEPHONE
ALEXANDER BELL - INVENTOR OF
THE TELEPHONE
For Students Preparing for Academic Tests / IELTS and TOEFL
Listen as you read the script.
Playing Time: 2 minutes 49 seconds
Did you know that there are now around 8 billion people in the world? And that there are more telephones in the world than there are people? It’s hard to imagine a world without the telephone and the person we have to thank for the telephone is Alexander Graham Bell, who invented it in 1876.
Alexander was born on March 3rd, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. As a young boy, he proved to be exceptionally talented in music, poetry and art. And when he was only 12 years old, he invented a machine that could be used in a flour mill. Also, when he was just 12, his mother began to lose her hearing and later became completely deaf. This greatly affected Alexander, who became increasingly interested in the scientific study of sound and the human voice. In 1870, at the age of 23, Alexander moved from England to Canada with his parents, where they bought a farm in the province of Ontario. It was there that he built a small workshop to continue his experiments in sound.
In 1871, Alexander moved to Boston, in the United States to teach deaf students how to communicate. One of his students was Helen Keller, who was unable to see, hear, or speak but who later became a famous author and political activist. Starting from 1873, he began to teach less and focus his energy more on his experiments with sound. On March 10, 1876, while working on his invention, Mr. Bell spoke the first words ever, into a working telephone: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,” when he had a small accident in his laboratory. The first telephone, a machine that was able to carry the human voice over long distances, had been invented. One year later, in 1877, Alexander created the Bell Telephone Company, and, by 1886, over 150,000 people in the United States owned one.
Although many other inventors of the time had also been at work to create a device to transmit sound, all 587 court challenges to his patent were unsuccessful. Of special note, however, was an Italian inventor named Antonio Meucci, who claimed to have invented a telephone in Italy as early as 1834. Unfortunately, for Meucci, there was not enough evidence to legally support his claim.
Bell is now widely recognized by many as the inventor of the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell died in Canada, in 1922, at the age of 75.
Alexander was born on March 3rd, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. As a young boy, he proved to be exceptionally talented in music, poetry and art. And when he was only 12 years old, he invented a machine that could be used in a flour mill. Also, when he was just 12, his mother began to lose her hearing and later became completely deaf. This greatly affected Alexander, who became increasingly interested in the scientific study of sound and the human voice. In 1870, at the age of 23, Alexander moved from England to Canada with his parents, where they bought a farm in the province of Ontario. It was there that he built a small workshop to continue his experiments in sound.
In 1871, Alexander moved to Boston, in the United States to teach deaf students how to communicate. One of his students was Helen Keller, who was unable to see, hear, or speak but who later became a famous author and political activist. Starting from 1873, he began to teach less and focus his energy more on his experiments with sound. On March 10, 1876, while working on his invention, Mr. Bell spoke the first words ever, into a working telephone: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,” when he had a small accident in his laboratory. The first telephone, a machine that was able to carry the human voice over long distances, had been invented. One year later, in 1877, Alexander created the Bell Telephone Company, and, by 1886, over 150,000 people in the United States owned one.
Although many other inventors of the time had also been at work to create a device to transmit sound, all 587 court challenges to his patent were unsuccessful. Of special note, however, was an Italian inventor named Antonio Meucci, who claimed to have invented a telephone in Italy as early as 1834. Unfortunately, for Meucci, there was not enough evidence to legally support his claim.
Bell is now widely recognized by many as the inventor of the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell died in Canada, in 1922, at the age of 75.
Note: For more cool ESL resources about telephones, visit my All Things Topics site.