Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude

A reprint of the 1973 biography of the American inventor. Divided into pre-telephone, telephone, and post-telephone sections, also covers his work with the Smithsonian, the deaf, the National Geographic Society, and Science magazine. Paper edition ($12.95) not seen. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

"Both a lucid picture of an extraordinary scientific career and an engaging account of a remarkable man. . . . Professor Bruce doesn't scant the astonishing variety of Bell's interests and accomplishments, which ranged all the way from supporting important scientific periodicals . . . to teaching the deaf to speak and fighting for their right to do so . . . to inventing everything he could imagine. . . . At the same time, he has given us an extremely candid personal picture of this titan of American technology."―Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

"The brilliant Scottish immigrant's story is more complicated, and more fascinating, than his myth. This authoritative, scientifically informed biography vividly portrays a man who, unlike his single-minded contemporary Thomas Edison, was a divided genius."―Newsweek

"The first full-scale life based on the voluminous Bell papers. It is an absorbing story. . . . The technical trials and errors, Bell's almost naive persistence, the actual components he worked with, are all attentively documented by Professor Bruce. We are, as well, given a vivid picture of the human environment out of which the telephone emerged, as one individual after another, each of immense importance to Bell, sought to advise, encourage, deter, rectify his failings or even defeat him. . . . It is in Bruce's account of Bell's life after the telephone . . . that the man himself emerges and the book takes on its most powerful interest. It becomes, as the author writes, a study not of long adversity culminating in a final crescendo of triumph, the usual pattern for heroic tales, but of a long personal struggle against the deadening handicap of early fame. . . . As it turns out, Bell's post-telephone days, from 1876 to August, 1922, when he died at age 75, were in many ways his best."―New York Times Book Review

"Until now, Alexander Graham Bell has been eclipsed by that invention which so changed communication that it is among the few which can genuinely be called revolutionary. Here he emerges not as a myth but as a man."―Los Angeles Times