"A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth." -- John Singer Sargent

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Alexander Graham Bell


This marble 1922 statue of Alexander Graham Bell (Mar. 3 1847 - Aug. 2, 1922) by Moses Wainer Dykaar Stands in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington,
DC.
"Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell studied speech from an early age. While trying to improve the telegraph, Bell discovered that the voice could be transformed into electric current and transmitted over a wire. He exhibited his telephone at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where the startled emperor of Brazil exclaimed, "I hear, I hear!" Bell's invention revolutionized communication, leading to the establishment of the Bell Telephone Company. Upon learning of the inventor's death, his friend and competitor Thomas Edison observed: '[he] brought the human family in closer touch.'" -- National Portrait Gallery

The Henry Luce Center says this about Dykaar's statue of Bell.
"Alexander Graham Bell is known around the world for his invention of the telephone in 1876. He created many other innovative devices, including a gigantic man-lifting kite, a balancing rudder for airplanes, and a telephone probe to detect bullets in the human body. He would often get up in the middle of the night to work out a new idea, and once took apart his wife’s new venetian blinds in order to construct a propeller. Bell was a lecturer on vocal physiology at Boston University and a founder of the American Association for the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf." -- Henry Luce Center

“The more intelligent the person the better portrait he makes.” Moses Dykaar, The Washington Post, 1932
 

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