Alexander Graham Bell: more than Mr Telephone
Bell is famous for the phone but the inventor also paved the way for modern flight and inspired architecture from Disney World to Argentina
We all know Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but his remarkable inventiveness did not stop there. From his early 40s until his death, he researched an astounding range of subjects at his lakeside retreat in the scenic town of Baddeck in Cape Breton, Canada.
On a recent visit to the museum in Baddeck dedicated to his work, I was amazed to find that more than half the exhibits related not to telephony but to his experiments with hydrofoils, aircraft and - perhaps most intriguingly - geometric shapes.
It struck me that, arguably, geometric structures are as important to the modern world as telecommunication and the internet.
In the early 1900s, at the dawn of the aviation age, Bell became interested in how the geometry of a flying object could help lift it off the ground and stay aloft. The Wright brothers had made history in 1903 with the first controlled, powered and sustained human flight. But questions remained about how to construct a large flying machine with enough wing surface to provide the necessary lift, that wouldn't weigh the aircraft down.
Bell's experiments showed that for some geometric shapes, increasing the surface area of the wing does not have to increase proportionally the weight of the wing. Thus, a flying machine with a large surface area and the appropriate geometric shape for its wing can fly.
Instead of one big wing, he assembled a stack of small wings each in the form of a tetrahedron - a pyramid-shaped polygon that is the strongest known structure. By joining together two sides of a four-sided tetrahedron, he built kites, of any size, without increasing the weight-to-surface ratio.
In 1907, he built a large kite of 3,393 tetrahedral cells that carried a pilot in flight for seven minutes, reaching a height of 51 metres. It was the first flight of a passenger-carrying aircraft in Canada. Bell's idea for a tetrahedral airplane never materialised because it was not aerodynamically efficient. But examples abound of geometric design inspiring other scientists, engineers and architects. Among the best-known: Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome.
