Bell's family were practitioners in elocution and speech correction and he himself trained in this. Born in Edinburgh, as a child he was taught mainly at home. For a short time he attended Edinburgh University and University College, London, after which he taught music and elocution at a school in Elgin, Scotland. It was in Elgin that he carried out his first studies on sound.

From 1868 Bell worked in London as his father's assistant, but after the death of his two brothers from tuberculosis, the family moved to Canada, where Alexander, who had also become ill, recovered. In 1871 he went to Boston where he gave lectures on his father's method of ‘visible speech’ – a system of phonetic symbols for teaching the deaf to speak. A year later he opened a school for teachers of the deaf. In 1873 he became professor of vocal physiology at Boston University.

With financial help from two of his deaf students, Bell experimented with the transmission of sound by electricity, aided by Thomas Watson, his technician. His multiple telegraph was patented in 1875 and, in 1876, the patent for the telephone was also granted. Bell's wife Mabel Hubbard, whom he married in 1877, was deaf. Later she founded the Aerial Experiment Association.

In 1880 he received the Volta Prize from France and the money was used to fund the laboratories in which an improved form of the gramophone was invented by Thomas Edison. Although best known as the inventor of the telephone, Bell investigated a wide range of related technical subjects, including sonar and various equipment for the deaf. In 1885 he bought land and established laboratories and a summer home on Cape Breton Island.