Alexander Graham Bell: A Whisper in the Next Room

Boston, the evening of 10 March 1876. A man of 29 bends over a small funnel above a cup of water and says: 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.' In the next room, behind a closed door, a young man holds a piece of metal to his ear. Will speech travel through the wire?

This is a novel, not a biography. It starts with a boy in Edinburgh who speaks close to his mother's forehead because her ears cannot hear, follows him as he builds a head that says 'Mama', then as a young man teaching deaf children to speak, and then as the man who chased sound until it passed through a wire from one room to another. The events, dates and names are real, and the story is told in scenes and dialogue as if you were watching it.

The science is explained with pictures from daily life: a hand on the throat feeling speech tremble, a piano string answering the one who sings to it, a tap that opens and closes. No equations and no difficult terms. A final section tells you clearly what is real and what is imagined in every chapter.

The book is written in Arabic.