Bell was born into a family specialising
in elocution: both his father and his grandfather were authorities
on the subject, and before long he himself was teaching people how
to speak. Largely family trained and self-taught, in 1863, at the
age of 16, he and his brother Melville began researching the mechanics
of speech. Starting with the anatomy of the mouth and throate, they
sacrificed the family cat in order to study the vocal chords in
more detail.
In 1864 Bell became a resident master in Elgin's
Weston House Academy in Scotland, where he conducted his first studies
in sound and first conceived the idea of transmitting speech with
electricity. His idea was to make a device that could mimic the
human voice and reproduce vowels and consonants. His father has
already spent years classifying vocal sounds and had developed a
shorthand system called Visible Speech, in which every sound was
represented by a symbol, with the intention of teaching the deaf
to speak by putting these sounds together.
