This coming week, many of us Welsh folk will be celebrating St David’s Day on the 1st March – the birth date of Dewi Sant (St David), the patron Saint of Wales.

But did you know that this week is also the birthday of another legend – inventor Alexander Graham Bell. The 3rd March is Bell’s Birthday, and although he wasn’t born in Wales, he is a fellow Celt, being born in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Bell is of course, known for being the inventor of the telephone – arguably one of the world’s greatest, and most used, inventions. Bell had been fascinated with speech and vocalisation most of his life – his mother and his wife were profoundly deaf and so his experiments with hearing and speech devices eventually led Bell to patent the telephone, although he later refused to have a telephone in his office because he thought it to be an intrusion into his work!

Although the telephone was Bell’s most famous invention, throughout his long career he was also credited with a great many more important inventions, especially in the fields of optical telecommunications and aeronautics. As well as an inventor, he was also a scientist and engineer.

His work to patent the design of the telephone took many years, and was the result of much experimentation and design. It was finally patented on March 7th 1876 by the US Patent Office.

Since then, the telephone has become one of the most commonly used technical inventions in the world, and is still in use today. We’re pretty sure that the design has changed in almost unrecognisable measures since the very first models were produced. And we wonder what on earth Mr Bell would make of today’s mobile phones – a whole generation of devices that are used for so much more than simply talking.

But, whatever he would think, every one of us that uses a phone, a mobile, or even the internet has got a lot to thanks old Mr Bell for – where would we be without him!

Image from wikipedia commons