普通高中课程标准实验教科书 英语选修8 Unit 3 Using Language

　　ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

　　Alexander Graham Bell was born in 1847 in Scotland, but when he was young his family moved to Boston, USA. His mother was almost entirely deaf, so Alexander became interested in helping deaf people communicate and in deaf education. This interest led him to invent the microphone. He found that by pressing his lips against his mother's forehead, he could make his mother understand what he was saying.

　　He believed that one should always be curious and his most famous saying was:

　　"Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do you will be certain to find something that you have never seen before. Follow it up, explore all around it, and before you know it, you will have something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the result of thought."

　　It was this exploring around problems and his dynamic spirit that led to his most famous invention - the telephone in 1876. Bell never set out to invent the telephone and what he was trying to design was a multiple telegraph. This original telegraph sent a message over distances using Morse code (a series of dots tapped out along a wire in a particular order). But only one message could go at a time. Bell wanted to improve it so that it could send several messages at the same time. He designed a machine that would separate different sound waves and allow different conversations to be held at the same time. But he found the problem difficult to solve. One day as he was experimenting with one end of a straw joined to a deaf man's ear drum and the other to a piece of smoked glass, Bell noticed that when he spoke into the ear, the straw drew sound waves on the glass. Suddenly he had a flash of inspiration. If sound waves could be reproduced in a moving electrical current, they could be sent along a wire. In searching to improve the telegraph,

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