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ALEXANDER MELVILLE BELL

Alexander Melville Bell was a Scottish teacher of elocution. He was born in 1819 at Edinburgh in 1819 and died in 1905. He was a distinguished teacher of elocution in Edinburgh until in 1865 he removed to London to act as a lecturer in University College. In 1870 he went to Canada and became connected with Queen's College, Kingston. Latterly he went to Washington, where he died. He was inventor of 'visible speech', in which all possible articulations of the human voice have corresponding characters designed to represent the respective positions of the vocal organs, a system employed in teaching the profoundly deaf to speak. Besides writing on this subject he wrote on elocution, stenography, etc.
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