"Reluctant Genius: Alexander Graham Bell and the Passion for Invention"by Charlotte Gray Click here to download the PDF version. Invention – Alexander Graham Bell was a giant. He is both typical of a period in which scientific ingenuity was creating a new world, and an aberration, because he cared so little for fame and fortune and never seemed to care whether he beat rivals such as Thomas Edison, Elisha Gray or the Wright Brothers.
Everybody knew when Bell entered a room, because his kindly warmth and engaging guffaw captured everybody’s attention. Yet he was also complicated and neurotic: he preferred to work at night and sleep through the day; he developed headaches if his compulsive daily routines were disturbed; he hid in his attic with a cigar and a book rather than attend social events. Bell was not a scientist in today’s sense of the word: he never attended university, and he relied on intuition for his intellectual breakthroughs.		“The inventor is a man who looks around upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world.” — Alexander Graham Bell

Thanks to his father, a speech therapist in Edinburgh, he grasped from an early age how human speech and hearing works. It was his understanding of sound waves, and how these might relate to electrical waves, that allowed him, as a young man, to invent the telephone before his many rivals got there. At the same time, his mother’s deafness ignited in him a determination to release people like her from their prison of silence. Throughout his life, he was pulled in two directions -- the humanitarian urge to improve deaf education, and the intellectual excitement of scientific breakthroughs.

As a young man of 23, Bell was fascinated by electricity and the challenge of improving Samuel Morse’s telegraph. Intent on producing a telegraph system that could carry more than one message at a time, he stumbled on the idea of a device that could carry messages in human speech rather than in dots-and dashes. But he was so impulsive and erratic that he would never have managed to patent his “speaking telegraph” were it not for the insistence of his backer Gardiner Hubbard, a Boston lawyer. And he would not have won the race to get his invention to market if he had not fallen in love with Hubbard’s daughter.

Mabel Hubbard, who lost her hearing during childhood, came to study articulation with Bell when she was 15. Over the next two years, Bell fell in love with his beautiful young student. When he blurted out his feelings to her parents, Gardiner Hubbard told Bell that, if he wanted a chance to marry Mabel, he had better complete his invention first. In 1876, Bell won the race to invent the telephone by a whisker: his main rival, Elisha Gray, filed his papers only two hours after Alec filed his patent application. Patent No. 174,465, which recognized Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone with the exclusive right to commercialize it, was one of the most valuable patents ever granted. The telephone patent made Alec famous and the Bells rich, but Alec always hungered to do more.

A new chapter opened in the Bells’ lives in 1885, when they visited Cape Breton, and fell in love with its bracing climate and rolling hills. Acquiring a headland near Baddeck on Bras d’Or Lake, the Bells named it Beinn Bhreagh (“beautiful mountain” in Gaelic) and established a family fiefdom of cottages, boat houses, a laboratory, an observatory and a magnificent mansion known as The Point. For the next 37 years, they divided their time between Washington and Cape Breton.

During the second half of his life, Alexander Graham Bell explored ideas as varied as flying machines, hydrofoils, selective sheep breeding, tetrahedral constructions, salt-water distillation and energy conservation. In 1919, a Bell-designed hydrofoil sped across Bras d’Or Lake in Cape Breton, setting the record for the fastest boat in the world.

Had the Bells been closer to such centres of political or economic power as Washington, New York, or even Ottawa, they might have made millions from the purchase of these inventions by governments or entrepreneurs. But for Bell, invention was not about profit, but about satisfying his own omnivorous curiosity. As the Age of Specialization dawned, he remained a generalist who continued to believe, in his own words, that “The inventor is a man who looks around upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees; he wants to benefit the world.” With the telephone, this fascinating and generous man successfully changed the world forever.

During the second half of his life, Alexander Graham Bell explored ideas as varied as flying machines, hydrofoils, selective sheep breeding, tetrahedral constructions, salt-water distillation and energy conservation. In 1919, a Bell-designed hydrofoil sped across Bras d’Or Lake in Cape Breton, setting the record for the fastest boat in the world.

Had the Bells been closer to such centres of political or economic power as Washington, New York, or even Ottawa, they might have made millions from the purchase of these inventions by governments or entrepreneurs. But for Bell, invention was not about profit, but about satisfying his own omnivorous curiosity. As the Age of Specialization dawned, he remained a generalist who continued to believe, in his own words, that “The inventor is a man who looks around upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees; he wants to benefit the world.” With the telephone, this fascinating and generous man successfully changed the world forever.