Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh into a family devoted to speech and elocution, and much of his life's work grew from teaching deaf students, including his future wife. His experiments with sending sound over a wire led to a telephone patent in 1876, filed on the same day as a rival caveat by Elisha Gray, which fed lasting disputes over who invented the device. The Bell Telephone Company he helped found grew into a communications giant. He worked on many other projects, from aircraft to hydrofoils, though his support for eugenics, aimed at deaf people, is a darker part of his record.