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READING PRACTICE QUIZZES
Who Invented the First Telephone?
Did you know that there are more telephones in the world than there are people? Cell phones alone add up to more than 6 billion (there are over 7 billion people in the world)! 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 3, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. As a young boy, he was very talented in music, poetry and art, and when he was only 12 years old, he began inventing things. Also, when he was 12, his mother began to lose her hearing and was later to become completely deaf. This greatly affected Alexander, who became very interested in the scientific study of sound and the human voice. In 1870, at the age of 23, Alexander moved 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, people who could not hear, how to communicate. One of his students was Helen Keller who was unable to see, hear or speak. Starting from 1873, he began to teach less and focus his energy on experiments with sound. On March 10, 1876, while working on his invention, Mr. Bell spoke the first words ever into a 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. By 1886, over 150,000 people in the United States owned one, and our world would never be the same again. Alexander Graham Bell died in Canada in 1922. Alexander Graham Bell
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