In 1870, Bell and his family settled on a farm outside Brantford after immigrating from Scotland. While living in Brantford, Bell conducted much of his pioneering research on the transmission of sound. In the summer of 1874, it was at Melville House, Brantford that Bell first had the idea of creating a device to transmit speech electrically—a concept that would become the telephone. For this reason, Brantford is often called “The Telephone City”.