Alexander Graham Bell
Awards & Honours
3
Awards Won
5
Honours
3
Records
Bell's honors reflect a career that moved between engineering, education, and public science. The French government awarded him the Volta Prize in 1880 for the telephone, and he used the 50,000 francs to establish the Volta Bureau, which supported research and teaching on deafness. The Royal Society of London gave him the Hughes Medal in 1913, and the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, which he had helped found, awarded him its Edison Medal in 1914. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and received honorary degrees from several universities. His name is attached to the Bell System, Bell Labs, and numerous schools and foundations.
Awards
Honours & Distinctions
National Inventors Hall of Fame
Inducted posthumously for the invention of the telephone.
Hughes Medal
Awarded for his work in electricity and magnetism, particularly the telephone.
Edison Medal
Awarded for meritorious achievement in electrical engineering.
Volta Prize
Awarded for the invention of the telephone; he used the prize money to establish the Volta Bureau.
President of the National Geographic Society
Served as second president from 1898 to 1903.
Records & Feats
First U.S. patent for the telephone
Patent 174,465, granted March 7, 1876, for the method of transmitting vocal sounds telegraphically.
First intelligible telephone call
On March 10, 1876, Bell spoke the first complete sentence over a telephone wire to Thomas Watson.
Hydrofoil speed record
His HD-4 hydrofoil set a world marine speed record of 70.86 mph in 1919.