Alexander Graham Bell
Telephone inventor and electroacoustic precursor
Major contribution
Bell’s telephone work helped establish electrical speech transmission, a technical foundation on which later public-address systems depended.
Bell developed the telephone in 1876 and formed the Bell Telephone Company the following year. His relevance to sound reinforcement lies in the electrical capture and reproduction of speech, rather than in the construction of a concert PA.
Bell continued investigating ways to convey sound: with Charles Sumner Tainter he developed the photophone, which transmitted sound through light. These communication experiments belong to the background of electroacoustics; they should not be confused with the later combination of microphones, electronic amplifiers and loudspeakers for public audiences.
Key work
- Telephone (1876)
- Bell Telephone Company (1877)
- Photophone, with Charles Sumner Tainter (1880)
In the chronology
Selected sources
- Inventor and Scientist · Library of Congress
- Timeline: 1880 to 1887 · Library of Congress
- The History of Live Sound – Part 1 · HARMAN Professional Solutions