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Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922, Great Britain): Telephone

In today's information age, communications are everything. And no other technology has brought people together more than the telephone, invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. The Scotsman's invention paved the way for a connected world market and was a stepping stone for future developments of information technology like the mobile phone and the Internet.

Bell grew up in a musical family in Edinburgh and started teaching music at the age of sixteen. He became fascinated with the way a tuning fork would vibrate with sound and based on these observations, conceived of sending speech over a wire. However, this was deemed impossible at the time, as sending one single signal over a telegraph wire was considered state-of-the-art. But Bell kept dreaming.

At the age of 24, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where he found like-minded inventors for his project. What initially started as an experiment for sending multiple messages over a single telegraph wire, ultimately brought Bell and his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, closer to their vision.

Bell devised a transmitter consisting of a wire that connected to a metal cup filled with diluted sulphuric acid. On 10th March 1876, Bell picked up the receiver and conducted the first phone call to his colleague in the other room. As legend has it, Bell said: "Watson, come over here, I need you."

Still only 29, Alexander Graham Bell had made a groundbreaking invention and received the patent for his telephone in 1876. He founded the Bell telephone company in 1877 and offered the patent for his telephone to the Western Union bank for $100,000 but was rejected on the grounds that the telephone was "just a toy." Two years later, the bank offered $25 million for the patent, but by then Bell wasn't interested in parting with it.

A busy researcher all his life, Bell filed numerous other patents for inventions like the photo-phone for transmitting sound on a beam of light, as well as his early metal detectors. His legacy lives on every time we pick up the telephone.

A man known for his humility, Bell pointed out his research team's involvement in the breakthrough. "Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds," he said.

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