Bell was born in
St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland. He married Ellen Adine Highland and together they had eleven children. He later followed his brother Melville to Canada, emigrating from Ireland to
Brantford, Ontario along with his wife and several of his children, While residing at Brantford, Ontario, Bell was an assistant to an important early test of the telephone, newly invented by his nephew Alexander Graham. Bell spoke to his nephew from the Brantford telegraph office, reciting lines from
Shakespeare's
Hamlet ("
To be or not to be...."). listened to his uncle's voice emanating from his receiver housed in a metal box. Initially David Bell's voice couldn't be heard distinctly as "...all kinds and sizes of wire were used in stringing from the house to Mount Pleasant road." However, the Dominion Telegraph manager, Walter Griffin, decided to attach the wire to a telegraph battery to see if it would improve the transmission, which it did, and then "the voices then came in distinctly." David's son
Charles James Bell (Dublin, 12 April 1858 – 1 October 1929) would marry Roberta Wolcott Hubbard (4 June 1859 – 4 July 1885), and then Grace Blatchford Hubbard (9 October 1861 – 16 July 1948), sisters of
Mabel Hubbard (Alexander Graham Bell's wife), and become President of the
American Security and Trust Company in the Washington, D.C. area. David Charles wrote several works on elocution and speech, and in 1878 also co-authored ''Bell's Standard Elocutionist: Principles and Exercises'' along with his brother Melville. He died in Washington, D.C., age 86, and was survived by three sons and four daughters. ==Dublin arrest and confusion with the Irish Republican David Bell==