On a recent trip to Nova Scotia, my husband and I visited Cape Breton Island. We used Sydney as our hub. From there, we took day trips to Louisbourg (spectacular), a Highland village, the Marconi Museum (unfortunately closed for the season), and the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site. Of course, we all remember Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but he explored much more than telephony. Within the museum are displays of Melville Bell’s (A. G. Bell’s father) Visible Speech system for teaching the deaf how to enunciate, there are also displays of the myriad of inventions and experimental objects. One can find hundreds of thousands of copies of notes and letters written by Bell and those nearest him—the originals are housed in the Library of Congress in the United States. I was so impressed by the breadth of Bell’s interests, that I purchased a biography of the great inventor:

Gray, C. (2006). Reluctant genius: The passionate life and inventive mind of Alexander Graham Bell. Toronto, ON: HarperCollins Ltd.

Naturally, Reluctant Genius recounts Bell’s life from his time as a young boy back in Edinburgh when he was encouraged to construct a model of the human speech mechanism and when he “taught” the family dog to speak a real sentence. The book traces his family’s move to London and the deaths of his brothers from tuberculosis. The Bell family had decided to move to Canada because of Alec’s bout with tuberculosis. Having visited previously, Melville believed the clean air would help his last remaining son to overcome the deadly illness. They moved to Brantford, Ontario.

From Ontario, Melville travelled to various places in the United States to promote Visible Speech. He later sent Alec to teach Visible Speech in a special school for the deaf in Boston. Alec settled into Boston to teach at the school for the deaf by day, and work on his inventions by night. He was interested in the telegraph and was certain that one should be able to transmit more than one signal at a time. Others such as Thomas Edison and Elisha Grey were also working on multiplexing. One summer, on his way back to Ontario, someone gave him some parts of a human ear. Alec attempted to construct an apparatus to help the deaf see the sound of words. He called it an “ear phonautograph” (p. 72). “He was struck by the way that sound vibrations acting on a tiny membrane could move relatively heavy bones. Melville’s terse diary entry for July 26, 1874 read, ‘Electric Speech (?)’” (p. 73). It was Alec’s keen understanding of how people make sounds and how the ear reacts to sound that led him to believe it would be possible to develop an instrument in which one could speak (receiver), and in doing so, through vibrations create “undulating electrical currents” that, in turn, could be send along a telegraph wire. At the other end of the wire, the current would flow through and electromagnet and cause a membrane to vibrate. The listener’s ear would also vibrate at the same rate as the undulating currents created by the speaker (p. 74). The listener could, then, hear the words.

On his return to Boston, again teaching by day and experimenting by night, he became convinced that it would be possible to actually create a “telephone.” It was in Boston where he met Gardiner Hubbard, a fairly wealthy businessman whose daughter, deaf in early childhood due to Scarlet Fever, was taking private lessons in elocution and Visible Speech. (Alec subsequently he fell in love with Mabel. According to the biography, Alec did not merely fall in love, but became consumed with passion for the young 17 year old. It was to become a very happy marriage and life-long partnership.)

Working with Thomas Watson and funded by Gardiner Hubbard and others, Bell did, indeed, develop the telephone. It was a terrible struggle for Gardiner and Mabel to convince Alec to apply for patents and to demonstrate the device. It seems that it was through sheer luck in timing and through luck of being surrounded by strong and clever people that Bell ever received credit or wealth from his invention. Hubbard, exasperated with waiting for patent results from London, applied for a US patent without Bell’s knowledge—just hours before another inventor. This gave them 17 years of protection to complete the development of the telephone. Hubbard, one of the people organizing the 1876 World Exposition in Philadelphia, summoned Bell to demonstrate his telephone. Bell refused. Mabel, in one of her first and prescient interventions in Bell’s life, packed Alec’s bags and brought him to the train station. Alec could not refuse her and went grumbling to the exposition. While there, he nearly missed his opportunity to demonstrate the telephone—but was saved by Dom Pedro II, emperor of Brazil whom he had met at the school for the deaf in Boston a couple months earlier. Dom Pedro was keenly interested in Bell’s demonstration. In the end, Bell had won gold medals for both his demonstration of the telephone and his demonstration of Visible Speech. Clearly, Bell’s success resulted partially from his own creativity, but greatly so from the effort of those around him. 

The author of this biography, Charlotte Gray, does a brilliant job of describing the relationships between Bell, his wife, fellow scientists, and business partners. I was struck by the apparent happy marriages of Bell’s parents as well as Mabel’s parents. Gray also reconstructs the tapestry of 19^th and early 20^th century life by recounting anecdotes from various sources. Her description of New Year’s Eve, 1900 is delightful:

There was such a fear of riots in San Francisco, reported the Nation’s Business, that Police Chief Sullivan had planted five policemen at each corner of Market Street to prevent “indiscriminate public kissing on the part of persons who had not been properly presented to each other." (p. 344)

Gray also details the extensive litigations contesting the ownership of the telephone patent. This period pained Bell greatly. For the rest of his life, he wrote copious notes of his experiments and his day to day life. Some of Bell’s most significant work includes:

1. Visible Speech originally developed by Melville Bell.
2. Work with the deaf. Bell was a benefactor and close friend of Helen Keller.
3. Telephone – patent #174 465.
4. Tetrahedral cells for kites. Such cells are now used in geodesic domes.
5. Work on the first designs for airplanes.
6. Hydrofoils – Bell’s team developed the fastest boat in the world, held the world’s record for 10 years.
7. The Photophone, the precursor to fibre optics.
8. The first iron lung developed in response to the death of an infant son.
9. A primitive metal detector used to detect a bullet in President Garfield’s back. (The test failed because of the metal springs in the bed, Garfield died.)

Charlotte Gray comments at the end of the book that her visit to the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site in Baddeck, Nova Scotia inspired her to research his life.

I have discovered a much more neurotic and unconventional individual than I had expected. I have come to realize his incredible dependence on his wife, Mabel Hubbard Bell. Brilliantly intuitive in his research, Bell could be demanding and insensitive to those he loved. (p. 431-432)

The great inventor died on August 2^nd, 1922. On the day of his funeral, “Every AT&T telephone on the continent was silent for one minute to honor the passing of Alexander Graham Bell” (p. 423). Six months later, Mabel died of pancreatic cancer. Some say she really died of a broken heart.