No other source could ever equal Bell's personal and detailed description of the steps leading to his remarkable invention. This description is included in Bell's testimony before various courts in the years 1879, 1883 and 1887 when his exclusive patents rights were being questioned by the United States Government. In preparing his defense, Bell provided important insights into the process of his own experimentation leading to the first crude telephone. In his introduction, Charles H. Swan describes Bell's testimony as "... the most detailed and best arranged statement of his telephone work".

Introduces the life and accomplishments of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor most widely known for developing the telephone.

". . . rarely have inventor and invention been better served than in this book." – New York Times Book Review Here, Edwin Grosvenor, American Heritage's publisher and Bell's great-grandson, tells the dramatic story of the race to invent the telephone and how Bell's patent for it would become the most valuable ever issued. He also writes of Bell's other extraordinary inventions: the first transmission of sound over light waves, metal detector, first practical phonograph, and early airplanes, including the first to fly in Canada. And he examines Bell's humanitarian efforts, including support for women's suffrage, civil rights, and speeches about what he warned would be a "greenhouse effect" of pollution causing global warming.

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone or did he? Inventor Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci was also working on a telephone at the same time. Watch Meucci and Bell race to be first to the invention finish line.

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