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We all owe a great deal to the Scottish genius of Alexander Graham Bell. Not only did he invent the telephone, which was to transform the culture, the social fabric and the economy of the United States and eventually the world, his remarkably fertile imagination also spawned a raft of inventions most of us have never associated with his name.
He devised the first practical phonograph, the metal detector, the hydrofoil and the respirator, conducted pioneering experiments in aviation, founded the National Geographic Society and its famous magazine and did seminal work in deaf education.
On a brilliant late summer day in 1850, Professor Alexander Melville Bell headed out of Edinburgh with his wife and three young sons for an excursion in the countryside south of the city. The family drove their carriage past the craggy hill known as Arthur’s Seat and then by Queen Mary’s Craigmillar Castle, finally stopping to picnic at Ferniehill. The boys, Melville, Aleck and Edward tumbled out to play. A nearby wheat field with its shimmering waves of ripened grain proved irresistible to the middle son, Aleck. Three or four years old, he was a curious and independent boy with curly brown hair and an often dreamy, thoughtful expression. Impulsively setting off to explore, he was soon deep among shafts of grain that reached well over his head. Could you hear the wheat grow? Aleck wondered. For a long time, he sat listening intently to the silence. Then, in a panic, he realised he was lost in the dense wheat; he sobbed until he finally cried himself to sleep.
‘I was awakened by my father’s voice,’ the boy would recall decades later. ‘Aleck, Aleck,’ he shouted in stentorian tones that effectively dispelled my slumbers.’ Racing toward the sound, the wayward youngster was soon in
