The other inventions of Alexander Graham Bell

ALEXANDER Graham Bell may sit in our pantheon of Great Scots inventors as the man who came up with the telephone, but most of us don't know the half of his achievements.

While his native Edinburgh has never managed anything more than a humble inscribed stone at his birthplace, travel to the picturesque village of Baddeck, on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, where Bell spent much of his later life, and you find a museum that bears witness to an extraordinarily creative imagination which never rested - even after his notable invention in 1876.

Giant kites, flying machines, record-breaking hydrofoils and experiments in everything from sound reproduction to genetics - they're all displayed and documented at the impressive Bell Museum, built in 1956 and enshrined as National Historic Site of Canada. The building’s elegant A-frame timbers reflect the tetrahedral method Bell devised some 30 years before space-frame construction came into use.

Born in 1847, Bell was 23 when he emigrated to Brantford, Ontario. There, and in Washington DC, he worked with deaf children, his related experiments with sound eventually leading to the telephone.

After years of defending his telephone patent in the courts, the Scots polymath and his wife Mabel spent summers at Baddeck, by the vast salt lake expanse of the Bras d'Or, and fell in love with the area. They established a summer retreat with a Gaelic name, Beinn Bhreagh - "beautiful hill", where Bell spent much of the last 37 years of his life.

The bearded, teddy-bear-like figure portrayed in the museum's many photographs belie a formidably questing intellect.

"I have got work to do," he once said. "So much work on so many subjects that I want many more years of life to finish it all."

He wasn't kidding. In 1909, the Silver Dart, designed by the Aerial Experiment Association he formed, took off from the frozen lake at Baddeck, to become Canada's first heavier-than-air flying machine.

You can see large, tetrahedral kites and Bell's other aviation experiments at the Bell Museum, as well as an awe-inspiring, full-sized replica of the HD4, his 60ft-long, torpedo-hulled hydrofoil, powered by two aero engines. In 1919, just three years before he died, the hydrofoil roared across the Bras d'Or to chalk up a water speed record of 70.86mph that would not be broken for another decade.

Whenever asked his occupation, he would reply "teacher of the deaf", but at Bheinn Bhreagh, Bell experimented with genetics, cross-breeding sheep, he transmitted sound on light, an early precursor of today's fibre optics, and built a treadle-powered "graphophone", a wax cylinder improvement on the Edison phonograph.

"He had a hugely productive imagination," says Sharon Morrow, of the Bell Museum, which is planning a new hall of aviation to mark the Silver Dart centenary in 2009.

"He was a really dynamic person, and very much a humanitarian,” she adds. “By the age of 29, with his invention of the telephone, he had wealth and fame and the means to do as he wished, but whenever the opportunity arose, he took that humanitarian approach."

Bell remains a local hero in Baddeck, Morrow agrees, pointing across to the wooded peninsula of the Bheinn Bhreagh estate, which is still owned by the Bell family.

“After Bell died and his daughters were getting on,” she says, “they realised there was so much history there that needed to be protected and they gifted all the artefacts and documentation to the government of Canada if it would provide a place to display and protect them."

Inventors were born, not made, Bell believed: "You may give him wealth or take away all that he has, and he will go on inventing. He can no more help inventing than he can help thinking or breathing."