| 1847 | March 3 | Alexander Bell is born to Alexander Melville and Eliza Symonds Bell in Edinburgh, Scotland. |
1864 | April | Alexander Melville Bell (AGB’s father) develops Visible Speech, a kind of universal alphabet that reduces all sounds made by the human voice into a series of symbols. |
| 1865-66 | | Bell returns to Elgin to teach and experiments with vowel pitches and tuning forks. |
| 1868 | May 21 | Bell begins teaching speech to the deaf at Susanna Hull's school for deaf children in London. Bell attends University College in London. |
| 1871 | April | Moving to Boston, Bell begins teaching at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes. |
| 1872 | March-June | Bell teaches at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Boston and at the American Asylum for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. |
| 1873 | | Boston University appoints Bell Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at its School of Oratory. Mabel Hubbard, his future wife, becomes one of his private pupils. |
| 1874 | Spring | Bell conducts acoustics experiments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He and Clarence Blake, a Boston ear specialist, begin experimenting with the mechanics of the human ear and the phonautograph, a device that could translate sound vibrations into visible tracings. |
| 1877 | July 11 | Mabel Hubbard and Bell are married. |
| 1883 | | At Scott Circle in Washington, D.C., Bell starts a day school for deaf children. Bell is elected to the National Academy of Sciences. |
| 1886 | | Bell establishes the Volta Bureau as a center for studies on the deaf. |
| 1887 | February | Bell meets six-year-old blind and deaf Helen Keller in Washington, D.C. He helps her family find a private teacher by recommending that her father seek help from Michael Anagnos, director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind. |
| 1890 | August-September | Bell and his supporters form the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf. |
| 1901 | winter | Bell invents the tetrahedral kite, whose shape of four triangular sides would prove to be light, strong, and rigid. |
| 1907 | October 1 | Glenn Curtiss, Thomas Selfridge, Casey Baldwin, J.A.D. McCurdy, and Bell form the Aerial Experiment Association (AEA), which is funded by Mabel Hubbard Bell. |
| 1909 | February 23 | The AEA's Silver Dart makes the first flight of a heavier-than-air machine in Canada. |
| 1919 | September 9 | Bell and Casey Baldwin's HD-4, a hydrofoil craft, sets a world marine speed record. |
| 1922 | August 2 | Bell dies and is buried at Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia |
