Alexander Melville Bell, father of Alexander Graham Bell, born at Edinburgh in 1819. He was a distinguished teacher of elocution in that city; in 1865 removed to London to act as a lecturer in University College; and in 1870 went to Canada and became connected with Queen's College, Kingston. He is inventor of the system of 'visible speech,' in which all the possible articulations of the human voice have corresponding characters designed to represent the respective positions of the vocal organs. This system has been successfully employed in teaching deaf and dumb to speak Besides writing on this subject he has written on elocution, stenography, etc.

Alexander Graham Bell, (1847–1922) was born at Edinburgh in Scotland, he was educated at Edinburgh and in Germany, and settled in Canada in 1870.

In 1872 he went to the United States and introduced for the, education of deaf-mutes the system of visible speech contrived by his father Alexander Melville Bell. He became professor of vocal physiology in Boston University, at the Philadelphia exhibition in 1876, he exhibited his telephone, designed and partly constructed some years before. In 1877 he founded the Bell Telephone Company He also invented the gramophone (1897) as a successful rival to Thomas Edison's phonograph.

He later carried out research in a number of other areas, including hydrofoil speedboats and aeronautics.