Alexander Melville Bell
A pioneer of education and speech-science, Alexander Melville Bell (1819 - 1905) was
the author of many books. One of Bell's sons, Alexander Graham Bell, became famous as the
inventor of the telephone, partly on the basis of what he had learnt from his father.
The thinking of Bell senior foreshadows much of what emerged 50 years after his death as the
generative linguistics of Noam Chomsky. What Bell recommended for the
practice of 'elocution' - what is now seen as the treatment of children's problems with speech -
only makes sense in the context of speech as something which is learnt, as opposed to a set
of habits.
Bell senior was the first to start discovering the modern
theory of speech-sounds. He was the first to understand that what made a vowel a vowel
and what made it sound different from other vowels was the shape of the space in which it
was resonated. But his achievements and originality were lost. The same discoveries were
made again in the 1940s without any knowledge of what Bell had first proposed in 1849. This
work in the 1940s provided the basis for what we now
know as text-to-speech and automatic speech-recognition. But 100 years earlier, Bell was describing
the first machine which would artificially reproduce a single vowel.
Bell's work was
rediscovered, and given its due recognition, in 1985 by the junior member of the team
which had been working on speech-synthesis
in the early 1950s.
Bell also seems to have been the first person to say in English that education and fun did
not have to be contradictory. He thought that children would find it easier to learn English
spelling if teachers played games with the sounds of speech, and only introduced the written letters
slowly and carefully. It is not clear if Bell knew of the work of
Friedrich Fröbel, published
in German in 1826, and not translated into English for another 50 years after Bell's proposal,
when this sort of thinking had been popularised by Maria Montessori.