Alexander Graham Bell

Bell was raised in a household devoted to elocution and the speech of the deaf — his mother was deaf, his father invented Visible Speech — and his life's work began as pedagogy rather than invention. After his two brothers died of tuberculosis, his family emigrated to Canada in 1870; Bell crossed into Boston the following year to teach at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes. His telephone patent, granted on 7 March 1876 after a now-famous race against Elisha Gray, was filed only hours before Gray's caveat. The Bell Telephone Company followed in 1877. Bell himself disliked telephones; he founded the journal Science, helped establish the National Geographic Society, and spent his later decades on aeronautics and hydrofoil experiments at his Nova Scotia estate.