Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Alexander Graham Bell is commonly remembered as an elderly fellow with a
full white beard, yet the “eureka moment” that led to his most
famous invention happened in Brantford, Ontario, when he was 27, and the
patent for his “speaking telegraph” was issued on his 29th birthday.
Nearly five decades lay ahead for him, and they were as remarkable as
those of his youth.

This enjoyable and informative book, the author’s fourth biography,
reads like a novel, yet all of its quotations and conversations come
verbatim from diaries and letters in an “extraordinarily extensive
collection of family correspondence.” These personal papers enable
Gray to write not just the biography of an inventor, but a romance,
beginning with Bell’s passionate pursuit of a deaf woman who first
came to him as a teenaged student when he was a teacher of the deaf in
Boston, and subsequently of “his incredible dependence on her.” Both
are buried on Cape Breton Island, with which Bell fell in love in 1885,
and their home there is an integral part of their story, for it was
there that many of his inventions were born and it was to Nova Scotia
that many celebrated figures of the time came to see him.

Gray’s title refers to Bell’s reluctance to involve himself in the
commercial side of his inventions. His family lived a life of wealth
from the telephone because his father-in-law was “a skillful patent
attorney and knowledgeable entrepreneur,” but Bell quickly lost
interest in his invention and turned to other pursuits, often decades
ahead of his time. His hydrofoils, common today, set speed records on
water but were left to decay for lack of government interest. He used
the phrase “greenhouse effect” to describe the results of
atmospheric pollution, and urged the use of ethanol as “a beautifully
clean and efficient fuel.” His early work on record players was taken
up by the much more commercially aggressive Thomas Edison, and much of
his decades-long pursuit of a flying machine was of more commercial
benefit to others than to him. His indifference continually frustrated
his wife and ensured “that he could never be the Bill Gates of the
nineteenth century.”

This is a rich biography, replete with clearly explained technical
advances and moving accounts of work with the deaf, set in an age of
enormous scientific progress and social change. But looming over all is
a great love story, painstakingly researched and beautifully told.