Reluctant Genius

Charlotte Gray

We all know him as the inventor of the telephone, a white-bearded figure in the photographs taken near the end of his days when he became the ubiquitous “Father of Telephony.” But the young Alex Bell was a passionate and wild-eyed genius, a man given to fits of brilliance and melancholy. He loved, above all, to invent — well beyond the telephone, his technologies for photophones, tetrahedrals, flying machines and hydrodomes laid the groundwork for future achievement.

And he loved his wife, Mabel, the beautiful but deaf young woman from a blueblood Boston family, who became the mainstay of this eccentric inventor and a far greater influence on his life than previously considered.

Gray delves deeply into Alexander Bell’s personality to discover why he left the intellectual stimulation of mid-century Edinburgh; why he married a woman so different from his own temperament and background; and why he shunned wealth and fame, becoming a spectator on the industry he had spawned.

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