Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and The Conquest of Solitude

Robert V. Bruce

A prominent public personality, Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), inventor of the telephone, teacher of the deaf, phonetician, showman and sage, was also a very private individual. With unrestricted access to Bell's vast personal files, Robert V. Bruce takes the proper measure of Bell the man in this biography, which portrays Bell as intense, curious, struggling to overcome his very real limitations as a scientist and the negative effects of early fame (he invented the telephone while still in his 20s) and sheds light on 19th- and 20th-century technology and on Bell's inventions, including tetrahedral construction, the bullet probe, the "vacuum jacket" (a precursor of the iron lung) and the telephone. Bruce also explores Bell's research and experiments on the airplane, the phonograph and the hydrofoil, and offers detailed information about the long and dramatic battle waged by Bell and his backers to establish the legitimacy of their claims on the basic telephone patents. Bruce illuminates the field which Bell considered his foremost vocation, the teaching of the deaf, describing Bell's friendship with Helen Keller, his marriage to a deaf girl to whom he had given lessons in speech, and his funding of The Volta Review, a journal concerned with the deaf and hard of hearing still in existence — like Bell's other magazines, Science and National Geographic. Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude was a finalist for the 1974 National Book Award in biography.