Alexander Graham Bell

The invention of the telephone freed Bell from further concerns with earning a living. As a result, he was able to dedicate his life to discovery and invention. His wife Mabel, and several young associates, helped him share these discoveries with the world.

Bell died in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, on August 2, 1922. At the time of his burial, all telephone service stopped for one minute throughout the U.S., in simple respect for a life well-lived.

All his life, Alexander Graham Bell sought peace and strength in nature. As a young boy, he often retreated to the cool hills around his home, where he would lie and watch the birds soaring overhead.

Friends and family commented on Bell's fine black eyes. Unfortunately, these beautiful eyes were also extremely sensitive to light. All his life, Bell was plagued by headaches, usually brought on by stress and overwork.

Each year, he sought a way to escape the heat and stress of the city. In the early years in Boston, he went north to Canada, visiting his parents in Brantford, Ontario. There, he sought out his "dreaming place," high on a cliff overlooking the Grand River. It was there he conceived the basic principle of the telephone.

As a married man, Bell took his family to the mountains or the New England seashore. They discovered Baddeck by accident. In 1885, when Alec was 38 years old, he and Mabel planned to accompany Alec's father on a visit to Newfoundland. Gardiner Greene Hubbard advised them to stop over in Cape Breton, where Hubbard owned shares in the Caledonia Coal Mines.

Bell had read a travelogue entitled "Baddeck and that Sort of Thing," written in 1874 by Charles Warner. He decided to explore the village and was enchanted: not only did the scenery remind him of his boyhood rambles in Scotland, but the villagers came from the same Scottish stock as he himself. Best of all, the weather was delightfully cool. Bell never could bear the heat of Washington in the summertime.

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Beinn Bhreagh, meaning Beautiful Mountain in Gaelic, was the Bell's estate in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, in Canada. At first, the family lived in "The Lodge," a thirteen-room house surrounded by gardens. A small playhouse built nearby for the children, was known as the Pansy Lodge. Before long, however, the Bells were making plans for their big house on the Point.

Beinn Bhreagh Hall was completed in November, 1893. Alec and Mabel could well afford to build the house of their dreams. By the mid-1880's, they were receiving almost $40,000 a year on investments.

The house itself is a curious combination of styles: its design is 19th century, industrialist, while its construction is rural, Nova Scotia artisan. Inside were 11 fireplaces, including the great stone fireplace in the main hall. A glassed-in porch and stone terrace overlooked the sweep of the Bras d'Or Lakes. It was a house for young people to ramble through, fresh in from the beach or from sailing. A tennis court and stone observatory, built to house Bell's telescope, lay close by.

Several of the boats were built right in the Beinn Bhreagh boathouse. Perhaps the most famous was Gilbert Grosvenor's yacht, the Elsie, launched in 1917. This trim little yacht with the red sails would become a familiar sight in Grosvenor's National Geographic Magazine. The Elsie was recently rebuilt and still sails the waters of Cape Breton.

Alexander Graham Bell believed that most people would welcome the chance to advance science and new technology. This belief found its expression in the "National Geographic Society."

The Society had actually been founded in January, 1888 by a group of men with a common interest in geography. Mabel Bell's father, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, was a founding member and the Society's first president.

The magazine itself was first published as a scholarly journal. An early article entitled "On the Telegraphic Determinations of Longitude" was a typical entry. The magazine was not a bestseller.

Bell accepted the presidency in January, 1898. He devoted a great deal of thought to the Society and its magazine. Most people, he thought, remembered geography as a dull subject. Bell felt the magazine needed an editor able to convey his own enthusiasm about geography. At the time, his daughter Elsie was interested in a young man named Gilbert Grosvenor. Bell invited him to take on the task.

Grosvenor made many decisions which seem obvious to us now. At the time, most magazine photographs were added almost as an afterthought. No one had ever thought to make them the basis of an article. In fact, most magazine editors still preferred painted illustrations.

Bell and Grosvenor both felt that the magazine's current format was too dry and technical. They also agreed that the Society would draw its membership from the general public, and not merely from the small scientific community. This, they felt, would give ordinary people the opportunity to fund scientific research.

Many of the photographs he took at Beinn Bhreagh found their way into early editions. Bell himself published an article on tetrahedrons, complete with photos. His article entitled "Aerial Locomotion," appeared in the January, 1907 issue. In that year, National Geographic also covered the opening ceremonies for Bell and Baldwin's tetrahedral tower.

Today, in the United States, there are several collections of Bell artifacts and archives. As he neared the end of his life, Bell obviously wished to set the record straight for biographers. The last volume of the Beinn Bhreagh Recorder is filled with detailed family geneologies. Even in Bell's own lifetime, a copy of the Beinn Bhreagh Recorder was sent to the Smithsonian for safe-keeping. In 1976, the entire Bell collection of notes and papers was placed in the Library of Congress in Washington. There, researchers may consult over 300 boxes of original documents.

In addition, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington contains approximately 150 artifacts relating to Bell and the early days of the telephone, dating back as far as 1873. The original four telephone devices Bell used in the Centennial Exhibition of Philadelphia are contained in this collection, along with several early commercial telephones. The exhibit entitled "The Information Age" dedicates a section to the work of Alexander Graham Bell. In addition to telephone devices, visitors may also view the transmitter and receiver of Bell's multiple telegraph.

Bell's statistical work on deafness is also available to researchers. In Bell's time, this data grew to fill an entire room of the Volta Laboratory, situated in Melville and Eliza Bell's backyard in Washington.

When it outgrew the laboratory, Melville and Eliza contributed $15,000 towards the construction of a new building right across the street. By 1908, the Volta Bureau was one of the finest collections on deafness in the world. Today, the records belong to the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf, in Washington, D.C.

Bell always said that the telephone was conceived in Brantford, Ontario and born in Boston, Massachusetts. As a young man, Bell frequently fled the heat of Boston to join his parents at their home in Tutelo Heights, just south of Brantford.

Melville Bell's estate on the Grand River consisted of a 13 1/2 acre farm and a house which they immediately christened "Melville House." Melville and Eliza always preferred country life to the hectic pace of the city. Melville was now in semi-retirement. He expected Aleck to shoulder the task of launching his phonetic alphabet in North America.

In 1871, Aleck accepted a position teaching Melville's Visible Speech at the Boston School for the Deaf. He returned to Tutelo Heights each summer and Christmas. There, he often escaped to his "dreaming place," high on a bluff over the Grand River. His father may have been surprised to learn that his dreams were not of Visible Speech, but of telephones.

One day in July, 1874, as Bell was in his "dreaming place," in Brantford, the basic principle of the telephone came to him in a sudden flash of original insight. He and his father spent long hours discussing the possibilities of his new discovery.

The first telephone was built in Boston. However, Bell had only tested his new device across wires set up between rooms. He did not yet know whether the messages could be transmitted on telegraph wires. He decided to test the concept on a visit to Brantford in 1876. On August 4, Bell sent a message from Mount Pleasant to Brantford, a distance of five miles. His fame and fortune were assured.

Bell spent the rest of that summer demonstrating his new device to friends and family. The first long distance telephone call was made between Brantford and Paris, Ontario, a distance of seven miles, on August 10. Because the message was routed through Toronto, however, it and actually travelled a total distance of 68 miles.

The Bell Homestead became a Canadian National Historic Site in 1953. The house has been restored to reflect the decor of the 1870's, when Alexander Graham Bell knew it as a young man. Almost 90% of the original Bell family possessions have been restored to the site.

Throughout Alexander Graham Bell's lifetime, the artifacts and authentic records of his work were kept in the old kite house at Beinn Bhreagh, Bell's summer estate in Baddeck. Thirty years after his death, his two daughters, Elsie Bell Grosvenor and Marion Bell Fairchild, presented the contents of their father's old "museum" to the People of Canada.

The Canadian government pledged to provide a building to house the collection. The resulting Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site is located in Baddeck, the scene of so many of Bell's adventures. Situated on his beloved Bras d'Or Lakes, it affords a fine view of the estate, still known as Beinn Bhreagh.

The Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site is situated on 25 acres of land, donated by the government of Nova Scotia. Its triangular design was inspired by Bell's tetrahedrons, the four-sided triangles used by the inventor in his kite-making.

Today, the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site contains the world's largest and most comprehensive collection of Bell artifacts and archives. Replicas of early telephone models explore the development of the telephone. Over 600 poster-size photographs trace the course of Bell's life. The photograph collection was compiled by Gilbert Grosvenor, Bell's son-in-law and an early editor of the National Geographic Magazine.

In 1978, The site was expanded in 1978 to include the enormous hydrofoil hall. The hall houses both the hull of original HD-4 and a full-sized reproduction of the craft, complete with outriggers and decks.

The site also functions as a centre for the study of Bell's scientific and humanitarian work. There, researchers may consult copies of Bell's letters, dicated notes, and home notes. The A.E.A. Bulletin and Beinn Bhreagh Recorder provide new insights into this exciting time in history. The children's interpretive program encourages young visitors to repeat Bell's experiments.