The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell
In this hype-driven world where inventive genius is often displaced by package design and product-placement consultants, it can be instructive and enjoyable to amble through history to gaze over the shoulder of a great 19th century inventor. Reluctant Genius, Charlotte Gray’s new biography of Alexander Graham Bell effortlessly puts the reader into the inventor’s life along with his wife Mabel, the remarkable Bell family and a diverse cast of supporting characters. Drawing on primary sources such as the Bell family papers, diaries and letters spanning 140 years, Gray portrays much more than just the technical hurdles of Bell’s life as an inventor. The author is equally concerned with Bell’s emotional life and human foibles and she portrays the complexity of his life with objectivity and tact. This is particularly evident in her account of Bell’s unusual relationship with Hellen Keller and the strain it caused for Mabel and their children.
The text is thorough but fast-paced. It begins with Bell’s childhood years in Edinburgh where Alec and his brothers first invented a “speaking machine” in answer to their father’s challenge and ends with the inventor’s attempts to perfect a hydrofoil. And yes, of course — Bell’s telephone and related inventions are also vividly rendered. However, this biography’s main accomplishment is that it succeeds in transforming the oft-seen image of Bell as the aging, grey-haired, “Father of the Telephone” into the complex, passionate and driven man that appears on the book’s cover.
Gray’s life of Bell rings true.
Reluctant Genius, 478 pages
Harper-Collins Publishers Limited
Release Date: August 2006