Alexander Graham Bell, inventor  of the Telephone, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on March 3, 1847. He was educated at Edinburgh and London Universities. Son and  grandson  of teachers of speech, Graham Bell was from his childhood fascinated by experiments in speech conducted by his grandfather and the lessons which his father gave. Because of ill health, he moved with his father to Canada in 1870. In 1872 Graham Bell opened a School in Boston for training teachers of the deaf and also gave instructions in the mechanics of speech. The following year he became Professor of Vocal  Physiology  in  Boston  University.

While working to devise a Multiple Telegraph, the thought of reproducing speech over distances constantly  stirred his mind. On June 2, 1875, while working in Boston on Multiple Telegraph apparatus, Bell heard over an electric wire a sound corresponding to the twang of a steel spring at the other end. Recognising this as a manifestation  of the  undulatory current principle, he gave his assistant Thomas A. Watson, instructions for embodying it in a model of a  telephone. This apparatus transmitted speech sounds the next day, June 3. Further experiments produced an instrument which on March 10, 1876, transmitted the first complete sentence: "Mr. Watson,  come here; I want you". This was the beginning of the telephone,  the day of its invention.

The telephone was first shown publicly at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. There the telephone attracted attention amidst its formidable rivals such as the first electric light and the first printed telegraph. Bell went to England and further perfected the two-piece device into a single instrument containing the transmitter and the receiver. Incredibly, the London Times described it as an American humbug. All the same, the first telephone exchange in England was established in London in September, 1876.

Bell and Watson lived to inaugurate the first transcontinental telephone between Washington and San Francisco in 1915. Bell was the founder of the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech  to the Deaf and of the Volta Bureau for increasing knowledge relating to deafness. He was for a time President of the National Geographic Society and was appointed a Regent of the Smith-sonian Institution in 1898.

The great pioneer and  inventor  died on August 2, 1922 at his summer home near Baddeck, Nova  Scotia,   Canada. A fitting tribute was paid to him when all the telephone stations on the Bell Tele­phone network in U.S.A. and Canada remained silent for one minute  on  the day of the funeral.

The Indian P&T Department deems it a great privilege to bring out a commemorative stamp in honour of this great man whose epoch-making invention has revolutionised the world of communications.

Source : Information Folder issued by Indian Posts & Telegraph Department, Government of India