7. Bell and His Legacy
7. 貝爾和他的遺產(chǎn)
Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1847. He was the son of a man who was consumed with the workings of the human voice, how it is produced and used, and especially, in teaching the deaf how to use it. Perhaps this obsession of the elder Bell was one of the reasons he married whom he did. For the woman who would give birth to the inventor of the telephone... was deaf!
亞歷山大·格雷尼姆·貝爾于1847年生于蘇格蘭的愛丁堡市。他的父親全神貫注于研究人的聲音的發(fā)生和作用的全過程,特別是教耳聾的人如何運用聲音。也許,老貝爾的這一執(zhí)著愛好是促使他日后同成為自己妻子的人結(jié)婚的原因之一。因為后來生下電話的發(fā)明者的那位婦女......是個聾人!
Young Alexander Graham Bell grew up with his father's passions. In 1870, because of poor health, he migrated to Canada. It was not long before his success in teaching the deaf to speak brought him to the attention of a wealthy merchant in Boston who had a deaf daughter, Mabel. Would Mr. Bell please teach Mabel how to speak? Yes, he would. And did. And they fell in love. It was she who inspired him through a lot of the exhausting experiments, who pulled him through the depressions that often inflict those whose drive to succeed is so intense, while he developed the then remarkable instrument that transformed speech into electrical impulses that could then be converted back into human speech at the end of a wire He had pierced yet another solitude, the one that up until then had denied human speech between people distant from one another. A year later, in 1877, he and Mabel were married. He later became an American citizen.
年輕的亞歷山大·格雷尼姆·貝爾帶著自己父親的執(zhí)著愛好長大。1870年,他由于健康不佳移居加拿大。不久之后,他就以成功地教會耳聾者說話而引起波士頓一位富商的注意。這位商人有個耳聾的女兒梅布爾。可否請貝爾先生教梅布爾說話呢?可以。他愿意教。他教了梅布爾。他們相愛了。是梅布爾鼓舞他進行了所有那些使人精疲力竭的實驗,也是梅布爾使他克服了不時產(chǎn)生的沮喪情緒——那種常常困擾著緊張工作去奪取成功的人們的沮喪情緒——使他得以研制出當時很了不起的一種工具。它能把人說的話轉(zhuǎn)變?yōu)殡娒}沖,之后又在金屬絲的未端使之還原成人說的話。這樣他就打破了又一種孤寂,那種在此之前一直使相距遙遠的人無法通話的孤寂。一年之后,1877年,他同梅布爾結(jié)為夫妻,他后來成為美國公民。
Alexander Graham Bell died in 1922: Mabel five months later. She loved him that much. His name is likely to live as long as man really history. After all, there is this constant reminder of how he brought the human family into closer touch.
亞歷山大·格雷厄姆·貝爾死于1922年,梅布爾在他去世5個月后也死了,因為她太愛貝爾了。貝爾的名字很可能會像人類記憶歷史那樣永世長存。畢竟有了這樣一件物品,它經(jīng)常提醒人們,是貝爾使人類大家庭彼此得以保持史密切的聯(lián)系。