Chester Gordon Bell was born in Kirksville, Missouri. He grew up helping with the family business, Bell Electric, repairing appliances and wiring homes. Bell received a B.S. (1956), and M.S. (1957) in electrical engineering from MIT. He then went to the university of New South Wales in Australia on a Fulbright Scholarship, where he taught classes on computer design, programmed one of the first computers to arrive in Australia (called the DEUCE) and published his first academic paper. Returning to the USA, he worked in the MIT Speech Computation Laboratory under Professor Ken Stevens, where he wrote the first Analysis by Synthesis program.