Born to a family steeped in speech and elocution—his father developed a system of phonetic symbols and his mother was deaf—Bell grew up fascinated by sound and hearing. That upbringing shaped his life's work, from teaching deaf students to inventing the telephone, which he patented at age 29 and demonstrated with the famous words, 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.'
Bell's mother's deafness and his father's career teaching elocution gave young Alexander an obsession with the mechanics of speech and sound that never left him. He experimented with a homemade 'talking machine' as a teenager, using a sheep's larynx and rubber to mimic human vocal cords, once astonishing the family dog by manipulating its jaw to produce sounds resembling words.
That fascination led him to teach at schools for the deaf, and it was this work—not idle tinkering—that pushed him toward inventing a device to transmit voice electrically. On March 10, 1876, just after his patent was granted, he uttered the first intelligible sentence over a telephone wire to his assistant Thomas Watson in the next room.
Bell's telephone company became AT&T, and by the time of his death in 1922, over 13 million phones were in use across the United States—a communications revolution traceable to a boy born in Edinburgh obsessed with helping his deaf mother hear.