American Security and Trust Co. Issued to and Signed by A. Melville Bell - Stock Certificate

Stock issued to A. Melville Bell, father of Alexander G. Bell, and signed on back. 

Alexander Melville Bell (1819-1905) was a researcher of physiological phonetics and was the author of numerous works on orthoepy and elocution. He was the father of Alexander Graham Bell.

He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He studied under and became the principal assistant of his father, Alexander Bell, an authority on phonetics and defective speech. From 1843 to 1865 he lectured on elocution at the University of Edinburgh, and from 1865 to 1870 at the University of London. In 1868, and again in 1870 and 1871, he lectured in the Lowell Institute course in Boston.

In 1870 he became a lecturer on philology at Queen's College, Kingston, Ontario; and in 1881 he removed to Washington, D.C., where he devoted himself to the education of deaf mutes by the "Visible Speech" method of orthoepy, in which the alphabetical characters of his own invention were graphic diagrams of positions and motions of the organs of speech. Melville Bell died at age 86 in 1905. He was interred in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C.