Bell, on top step with Dexter King, founder of the school, and Ira Allen, chairman of school committee, three steps down are teachers Annie Bond, Sarah Fuller, Ellen Barton, and Mary True, students are seated on the steps and standing on the sidewalk at entrance to the Pemberton Square School (Boston School for the Deaf). Alexander Graham Bell (March 3, 1847 - August 2, 1922) was a Scottish-American speech therapist and inventor of the telephone. Bell followed his father and grandfather into the speech therapy profession, but also studied sound waves and the mechanics of speech. By 1871, he had moved to the United States, becoming professor of vodal physiology in Boston. There he performed his experiments in converting sound waves into electrical impulses for transmission down wires. In 1876, he patented the telephone and founded what has become the AT&T company. In later years he made many improvements to the telephone, worked with Langley and Curtis on flying machines, and founded the journal "Science." He died of complications arising from diabetes in 1922 at the age of 75. Photograph from the Gilbert H. Grosvenor Collection of Photographs of the Alexander Graham Bell Family, dated 1871.