"Recognised as the inventor of the first practical telephone, Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh in 1847.
It was after settling with his parents in North America when he was aged 23 that he dedicated his genius to intensive research on both hearing and speech.
As a pioneer in what became known as acoustic telegraphy, this culminated in his development of a device that utilised a liquid transmitter with a diaphragm that caused a needle to vibrate when the device was spoken into.
It was a basic forerunner of what we now know as that indispensable tool of modern communications, the telephone.
