email_body: To all of you who are without the luxury of a dial tone this morning:  Qwest Communications is working on the malfunctioning phone circuit.
  We don't  know when the service will be reinstated; but in the meantime you can reflect  on what life was like before the darn thing was invented.
  Bell, Alexander Graham                   b. , March 3, 1847, Edinburgh                 d. Aug. 2, 1922, Beinn Bhreagh, Cape Breton Island, Nova  Scotia, Can.
  Scottish-born American audiologist best known as the inventor  of                 the telephone (1876).
  For two generations his family had been                 recognized as leading authorities in elocution and speech  correction,                 with Alexander Melville Bell's Standard Elocutionist passing  through                 nearly 200 editions in English.
  Young Bell and his two  brothers were                 trained to continue the family profession.
  His early  achievements on                 behalf of the deaf and his invention of the telephone before  his 30th                 birthday bear testimony to the thoroughness of his training.
  Alexander ("Graham" was not added until he was 11) was the  second of the three sons of Alexander Melville Bell and Eliza Grace Symonds  Bell.
  Apart  from one year at a private school, two years at Edinburgh's Royal High  School (from  which he was graduated at 14), and attendance at a few lectures at Edinburgh  University and at University College in London, Bell was largely family  trained and  self-taught.
  His first professional post was at Mr. Skinner's school in  Elgin, County  Moray, where he instructed the children in both music and elocution.
  In 1864  he  became a resident master in Elgin's Weston House Academy, where he conducted  his  first studies in sound.
  Appropriately, Bell had begun professionally as he  would  continue through life--as a teacher-scientist.
  
subject_line: Phone outage
  