Alexander Graham Bell Alexander Graham Bell is a name of great significance in American history today. A skillful inventor and generous philanthropist, he astounded the world with his intuitive ideas that proved to be both innovative and extremely practical in the latter half of the 19th century. Most notable, of course, are Bell's work in developing the telephone and his venerable life-long endeavor to educate the deaf. Originally, his only wish was to help deaf people overcome their difficulty in learning verbal communication, and later was pushed into researching the possibility of a device that could transmit the human voice electronically over a distance. After building his first