Alexander Graham Bell Answers the Call - Hardcover

MARY ANN FRASER has worked on more than sixty books for children, including No Yeti Yet (Peter Pauper) and Heebie-Jeebie Jamboree (Boyds Mills). She lives in Simi Valley, California.

From the beginning, the world all around spoke to Alexander Graham Bell. And he listened.

His family called him Aleck. To his eager ears, the hustle and bustle of 1840s Edinburgh, Scotland, was a symphony of every pitch and tone.

He even wandered into a field once to see if he could hear the wheat grow. Each new sound whispered to Aleck's curiosity. How was he able to hear? What made one noise different from another? Why could he hear some sounds but not others?

While Aleck trained his ears to the sounds of speech, his mother heard very little of it. Eliza Bell had lost most of her hearing as a child. Still, she was a gifted portrait painter and pianist, filling their home with art and song. To hear notes, she lay an ear tube across the piano's soundboard.

Aleck had to speak into the same ear tube for his mother to understand him. The awkward device acted as a hearing aide, but a poor one at best. How he wished he could find a better way for his mother to clearly hear his voice, the piano, the world around them.

Along with his brothers, Melly and Ted, Aleck learned to play the piano before he could read. Sometimes the music rang in his mind for days. He'd lay awake at night puzzling over how instruments produced notes. How were he and his brothers able to hear the notes when his mother needed the aid of an ear tube?

His father explained that sounds are vibrations. Unlike his mother's, Aleck's ears were able to collect the vibrations and send the information to his brain. Of course, Aleck had to test this notion out for himself. Could other parts of his body sense sound vibration, too?