Most folks remember him as the inventor of the telephone. And, having invented something interesting, he also must have been a US citizen. Only partial truths!

Below contains a number of tidbits I picked up largely from Wikipedia.

First, Bell was born it Great Britian. At 23, he went off to Canada. And 3-4 years later, then began researching at Boston University.

It's debatable whether he was the first inventor of the telephone. Outside of the US and Canada, many countries credit the telephone invention with the Italian inventor, Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci.

But, that by no means makes Bell a dunce, this was a bright dude.

Bell is listed in the 100 Greatest Britians, 100 Greatest Americans, and 10 Greatest Canadians (they don't get so many people up there ;-)

One of his inventions is a photophone, which sent sound over a beam of light. He didn't really go far with it due to poor communication quality.

He also invented the metal detector and HydroFoil.

He was also a big proponent of Eugenics, a philosophy which promotes compulsory sterilization of those who, as Bell put it, were a "defective variety of the human race." These ideas were adopted by many states -- in fact, by the 1930's, half of all states in the US had eugenics laws. The ones from California were used as a model for Eugenics in Nazi Germany.

Bell did a lot of work with deaf education, but that was exactly the population he didn't feel should be allowed to procreate.

Ironicly, his wife was deaf, and they had kids. None of his kids were deaf.

Bell labs, and the decibel, were named after Alexander Graham Bell.