Beyond the telephone: Bell on Cape Breton

Right in the center of Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Island, at the start (and finish) of the Cabot Trail, a circuitous coastal road that is the island's top tourist attraction, is a small village called Baddeck.It is an exceedingly pretty place, set amid rolling hills beside the Bras d'Or Lakes, but it is saved from obscurity only by one famous former resident: Alexander Graham Bell.

It is often not until travelers arrive in town that they realize Bell spent most of his last 37 years in Baddeck. And that he did some of his most experimental inventing here; died, and is buried here.

Why Baddeck, of all places? The inventor first came to Cape Breton in 1885 while he was traveling from Boston to Newfoundland to inspect a coal mine owned by his father-in-law. Bell made a point of stopping in Baddeck because he had been so enthralled by the book "Baddeck, and That Sort of Thing," by Charles Dudley Warner.

Bell and his wife, Mabel, rowed across the bay to a headland protruding into the large saltwater lake, and climbed to the top. They were so enraptured by the view, which he found reminiscent of his native Scotland, that in 1886 he began purchasingthe land. Over the next seven years, he bought out all the farms on the hill and renamed the place Beinn Breagh, Gaelic for "beautiful mountain."

Granted, Bell was biased, but he is recorded as declaring, "I have seen the Canadian and American Rockies, the Andes and the Alps, and the highlands of Scotland, but for simple beauty, Cape Breton outrivals them all."

The allusion to Scotland is not mere fancy. Resemblance to the place is one reason immigrants from Scotland chose to settle Cape Breton more than 200years ago, coerced onto wooden vessels of dubious seaworthiness by the general economic hardship in the Highlands.

Scottish culture imbues the place, evident even in the accent of the people. Near Baddeck is a Gaelic college, open in summer to anyone, Scottish descent or not, who wishes to learn to dance over swords or speak the tongue-twisting language. (It sounds something like German with a brogue, spoken with a mouth full of mashed potatoes.)

Bell built a mansion on Beinn Breagh in 1893 and used it as a base for his adventures in invention. Not the telephone – he conceived that in Brantford, Ontario – but a host of other endeavors. Today, an excellent museum chronicles the work of the clever Scot. An afternoon stroll through its airy halls reveals many surprises about the breadth of Bell's inventive genius.

Always ahead of his time, he dabbled in sheep genetics, using animal husbandry, not DNA, to develop a breed that consistently produced twin-bearing sheep – a much better return, he thought, on the cost of raising a lamb.

Bell delved into just about every facet of science. When two uncles of one of his assistants were found dead in a dory at sea, with food but no water, his mind went to work. He thought it a poor reflection on man's intelligence that he should die of thirst on a sea of water, so he devised a system of pumping fog into a bottle. When partially submerged in the cool sea, the moisture condensed into potable water.

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