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A Day of Bells

Today was Bell day giving me an opportunity to bore Gill senseless with telephone information but in compensation I took her to the opera.
When I heard that there was a museum dedicated to Alexander Graham Bell I imagined it was a small museum run by dedicated volunteers, I was somewhat taken aback to find it is huge and run by the Canadian Parks department. Bell moved to Baddeck to get away from the unpleasant climate of Washington and to escape the attention he was getting regards his famous telephone which, as anyone who has read “It Will Never Catch On” (available at Amazon, order your copy now) will know he was not the first or only inventor. Bell started as a teacher of the deaf and then developed a working telephone but he also greatly improved the gramophone (Edison paid him $200,000 for the rights to his improvements). He designed and built one of the first aeroplanes in 1909 and his hydrofoil set the water speed record of 70mph in 1919 holding it for 10 years.

In the main hall of the museum (pictured above) is a working replica of the plane (it flew in 2002) and behind it the long tube is the remains of his hydrofoil.
He managed to carry sound waves in a beam of light and designed little greenhouses to use the sun to heat and then condense seawater to make it drinkable, pictured below. A true polymath.

It was Bell who christened the effect of the atmosphere trapping heat as the Greenhouse Effect. He did not have a telephone in his office, he did not want to be interrupted by that cursed device!

The picture opposite shows a yacht with experimental hydrofoils fitted, about 100 years before they became popular on racing yachts.

The museum told the story of all his inventions, when he had cracked a problem he moved onto something else, so once the telephone business was established he lost interest, the aeroplane project only lasted a few years, the plane flew so that was it.
Fortunately his wife was more grounded and looked after both Alexander, the house and the money allowing him to invent.
As part of our visit we were allowed to put on white gloves and handle some of his artifacts including a small notebook. He always had a little book in which he noted anything of interest, his scribblings were as bad as mine.
And then we went to the opera – it was called the Bells of Baddeck and guess what – it told Alexander and his wife Mabel’s story in song. In honour of Mabel, who was profoundly deaf, they had subtitles alongside the stage which was a great help as I struggle to make out what sopranos are singing.
Tomorrow we may go down a coal mine, watch this space.