11th Grade

Part One

DICTATION

Alexander Graham Bell has gone down in history as the inventor of the telephone – but he
was a man of other achievements besides that. Not least among those was his work in helping
the deaf to communicate.

This was a cause of personal significance to Bell because his mother had suffered hearing loss
following a childhood accident. During his childhood in Edinburgh in the 1850s and 1860s,
Bell noticed that his mother, who had home-schooled Bell, could understand him if he spoke
close to her forehead, as she could feel the vibrations of his voice. He went on to devise other
means of helping his mother to cope with her near-deafness, to the point that she was able to
become a concert

The young Bell devoted more and more of his time to improving the lives of deaf people. In
doing so, he continued the work of his father and grandfather, who were experts in the
workings of the human voice Despite having had only three years of formal education, Bell
became a teacher at an all-male boarding school, where he made use of a system developed by
his father for teaching people how to read through special symbols.
It was particularly useful for deaf students, so Bell specialised in teaching the deaf for the rest
of his career in education.

Although his invention of the telephone gave him his own company, Bell had little interest in
the commercial world and relied on a friend who had loaned him money to set up the business
to deal with its finances. This freed Bell up to focus on yet more inventions. They included a
metal jacket that helped people with breathing problems and an early form of metal detector,
which he was asked to create to use on President James Garfield after someone shot him.