Alexander Graham Bell

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexander Graham Bell was honored after his death in an unusual way. When his funeral ended, for one minute at 6:25 p.m. Eastern Time, every telephone on the continent of North America was silenced. The man being remembered is credited with patenting the first practical telephone. Yet he regarded his invention as an intrusion on his real work as a scientist, and he refused to keep one in his study. Born in Scotland, he lived in three countries, and the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom all claim him as a native son. He also co-founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885. This documentary asks what drew a teacher of speech toward electricity, and why a family so occupied with voices produced a machine that carries them. It asks who raced him to the patent office, and how many courts tried to take his claim away. And it asks which of his many inventions he prized most of all.

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• 2. A Family of Voices

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  On South Charlotte Street in Edinburgh, a stone inscription marks the house where Alexander Bell was born on the 3rd of March 1847. His father, Alexander Melville Bell, was a phonetician, and his mother was Eliza Grace Bell. He had two brothers, Melville James and Edward Charles.

  The boy began life with a single name. At age 10 he begged his father for a middle name, as his brothers had. On his 11th birthday he was allowed to take Graham, out of respect for Alexander Graham, a Canadian whom his father was treating and who was a family friend. To close relatives and friends he remained Aleck.

  At age 12, Bell built a dehusking machine for the flour mill run by the family of his best friend, Ben Herdman. It paired rotating paddles with sets of nail brushes, and the mill used it steadily for years. In return, Ben's father, John Herdman, gave the two boys a small workshop in which to invent.

  Without any formal training, Bell mastered the piano and became the family's pianist. His mother encouraged his gifts for art, poetry and music. Though quiet by nature, he loved mimicry and voice tricks close to ventriloquism, which entertained guests in the family parlour.

  Bell's mother began to lose her hearing when he was 12. He learned a manual finger language so he could sit beside her and tap out the conversations swirling around the room. He also spoke in clear, modulated tones directly against her forehead, and she heard him with reasonable clarity. This preoccupation pushed him toward the study of acoustics.

  Speech was the family trade. His grandfather Alexander Bell taught elocution in London, an uncle taught it in Dublin, and his father taught it in Edinburgh. His father's book The Standard Elocutionist appeared in 168 British editions and sold over 250,000 copies in the United States alone. It explained how to teach deaf people to form words and to read lips.

  The elder Bell also taught his sons a written system called Visible Speech, in which each symbol stands for a sound. Young Alexander became so skilled that he joined his father's public demonstrations. He could read Visible Speech notation for nearly any language, including Latin, Scottish Gaelic and Sanskrit, and recite the text accurately with no prior knowledge of its pronunciation.

  School held him less firmly. At the Royal High School in Edinburgh he left at age 15 after only four forms, with a record marked by absences and lacklustre grades. Biology interested him, and most other subjects did not, to his father's dismay. He then spent a year in London with his grandfather on Harrington Square, where a love of learning took hold through long hours of discussion and study.

  At 16, Bell became a pupil-teacher of elocution and music at Weston House Academy in Elgin, Moray. He was enrolled in Latin and Greek, and he taught classes himself in return for board and £10 per session. In 1868 he was accepted at University College London, though he never finished his studies there.

  In 1863 his father took the boys to see a mechanical man built by Sir Charles Wheatstone, based on earlier work by Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen. It imitated a human voice. Bell laboriously translated von Kempelen's German book, and he and Melville built their own talking head. Their father offered to pay for supplies and promised a big prize if they succeeded.

  Melville made the throat and larynx, while Bell took on the harder job of a realistic skull. When a bellows pushed air through the windpipe and the lips were adjusted, the head said a recognizable Mama, to the delight of neighbours who came to watch. Bell then turned to a living subject, the family's Skye Terrier, Trouve. After teaching the dog to growl steadily, he reached into its mouth and shaped its lips and vocal cords to produce a rough "Ow ah oo ga ma ma". Visitors believed the dog was asking "How are you, grandmama?"

  At age 19, Bell used tuning forks to explore resonance and sent a report to the philologist Alexander Ellis, a colleague of his father. Ellis replied that similar work already existed in Germany, and he lent Bell Hermann von Helmholtz's The Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. Helmholtz had already conveyed vowel sounds with a similar tuning fork contraption.

  Bell worked from his own mistranslation of a French edition and reached a conclusion that would guide his later work. He reported: "Without knowing much about the subject, it seemed to me that if vowel sounds could be produced by electrical means, so could consonants, so could articulate speech." He later called it "a valuable blunder" and said he might never have begun his experiments had he read German. Soon he was stringing a telegraph wire from his own room to a friend's.

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• 3. Teaching the Deaf

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  In May 1870, Melville died of complications from tuberculosis, three years after Edward had died of the same disease. Their father had once recovered from a debilitating illness by convalescing in Newfoundland, and he now feared for his one remaining son. He asked Bell to sell all the family property and settle Melville's affairs. Bell took on his brother's last student and cured a pronounced lisp. He also had to end his relationship with Marie Eccleston, who was not prepared to leave England.

  In 1870-23-year-old Bell travelled with his parents and his brother's widow, Caroline Margaret Ottaway, to Paris, Ontario. They stayed with Thomas Henderson, a Baptist minister and family friend. The Bells soon bought a 10.5-acre farm at Tutelo Heights, near Brantford, bordering the Grand River. Bell turned the carriage house into a workshop, close to a wooded hollow above the river that he called his dreaming place.

  The Canadian climate suited him, and his frail health rapidly improved. Across the river at the Six Nations Reserve near Onondaga, he learned the Mohawk language and wrote its unwritten vocabulary in Visible Speech symbols. For this work he was named an Honorary Chief and took part in a ceremony where he wore a Mohawk headdress and danced traditional dances.

  In April 1871, Bell travelled to Boston after Sarah Fuller, principal of the Boston School for Deaf Mutes, invited his father to train her instructors. The elder Bell declined in favour of his son, and the younger man succeeded. He repeated the programme at the American Asylum for Deaf-mutes in Hartford, Connecticut, and at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts. Gardiner Greene Hubbard, president of the Clarke School, later recommended him as a private teacher.

  In October 1872, Bell opened his School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech in Boston, and his first class numbered 30 students. That same year he became professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at the Boston University School of Oratory. One of his private pupils was Helen Keller, who came to him as a young child unable to see, hear or speak. She later said Bell had dedicated his life to the penetration of that "inhuman silence which separates and estranges".

  Keller performed the sod-breaking ceremony in 1893 for Bell's new Volta Bureau, dedicated to "the increase and diffusion of knowledge relating to the deaf". In 1891 he founded the American Association for the Promotion of the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf in New York, endowing it with $25,000. He stayed neutral on whether oral methods, manual methods or a mix served students best, and he encouraged speech therapy, lip-reading and sign language alike.

  Still, an 1898 paper set out his belief that with enough effort the deaf could learn to read lips and speak, a view known as oralism, which would let them join wider society. Members of the Deaf community have criticized Bell for favouring lip-reading over sign language.

  By 1873, the days and evenings of teaching left little room for experiments, and Bell began working late into the night in rented rooms at his boarding house. He locked his notebooks inside a specially made table, afraid his work would be discovered. Severe headaches followed. In autumn 1873 he gave up his lucrative Boston practice and kept only two students.

  The first was six-year-old Georgie Sanders, deaf from birth. The second was Mabel Hubbard, 15, who had lost her hearing to scarlet fever near her fifth birthday and had learned to read lips. Georgie's father, the wealthy businessman Thomas Sanders, offered Bell free room, board and a room to experiment at his mother's home in Salem. Mabel was ten years younger than Bell, and he came to love her. Her father, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, would soon matter to Bell in another way as well.

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• 4. Race to the Patent

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  In 1874, William Orton, president of Western Union, called the growing volume of telegraph messages "the nervous system of commerce". Orton had contracted with the inventors Thomas Edison and Elisha Gray to send several messages down one wire and avoid the great expense of new lines. Bell was working on a similar idea, a harmonic telegraph that sent multiple tones along a wire using a device with several metal reeds. When he described it to Hubbard and Sanders, the two began funding his experiments.

  That summer in Brantford, Bell tried a phonautograph, a pen-like machine that traced the vibrations of sound waves onto smoked glass. He wondered whether he could generate undulating electrical currents matching those waves, and turn them back into sound with tuned reeds. He had no working model to prove it. Hubbard's patent attorney, Anthony Pollok, handled the legal paperwork.

  In March 1875, Bell and Pollok visited Joseph Henry, director of the Smithsonian Institution, to ask about the apparatus. Henry said Bell had "the germ of a great invention". When Bell said he lacked the knowledge to proceed, Henry answered, "Get it!" Bell also needed hands that could build, and a chance meeting in 1874 brought him Thomas A. Watson, an experienced electrical designer and mechanic at Charles Williams's machine shop. With support from Sanders and Hubbard, Bell hired Watson as his assistant.

  On the 2nd of June 1875, Watson accidentally plucked one of the reeds. At the receiving end of the wire, Bell heard the reed's overtones, which speech would require. One reed, not many, was enough. This led to the so-called gallows telephone, which carried indistinct, voice-like sounds but not clear speech.

  Bell had agreed to share U.S. profits with Hubbard and Sanders. He asked an associate in Ontario, George Brown, to patent his acoustic telegraph in Britain first, since Britain issued patents only for discoveries not previously patented elsewhere. His lawyers were to apply in the United States only after word came from Britain.

  On the 14th of February 1876, Elisha Gray filed a caveat with the U.S. Patent Office for a telephone design using a water transmitter. The same morning, Bell's lawyer filed Bell's application. Bell was in Boston that day and did not reach Washington until the 26th of February. Historians still debate who arrived first, and Gray later challenged the priority of Bell's patent.

  The patent office issued Bell patent 174,465 on the 7th of March 1876. It covered transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically by electrical undulations similar in form to the vibrations of the air. Bell returned to Boston that day. The next day he drew in his notebook a diagram similar to the one in Gray's caveat.

  On the 10th of March, Bell got his telephone to work using a liquid transmitter much like Gray's design. A diaphragm vibrated a needle in water and varied the electrical resistance in the circuit. Bell said, "Mr. Watson, come here," and then "I want to see you." Watson, listening in an adjoining room, heard the words clearly.

  Bell has long been accused of stealing the telephone from Gray. His defenders reply that he used the water design only after his patent was granted, as an experiment to satisfy himself that intelligible articulate speech could travel electrically. The examiner had raised the question of priority for the variable resistance feature. Bell pointed to an earlier application, filed on the 25th of February 1875, that described a cup of mercury rather than water. Gray had abandoned his caveat without contesting Bell's priority.

  The examiner, Zenas Fisk Wilber, later swore in an affidavit that he was an alcoholic deeply in debt to Bell's lawyer, Marcellus Bailey, with whom he had served in the Civil War. He said he showed Bailey Gray's caveat. He also said he showed it to Bell, who paid him $100. Bell denied giving Wilber any money in his own affidavit, and he said they discussed the patent only in general terms. In a letter to Gray, however, Bell admitted learning some of the technical details.

  After March 1876, Bell concentrated on improving the electromagnetic telephone. He never used Gray's liquid transmitter in public demonstrations or in commercial use.

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• 5. Calls and Courtrooms

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  On the 3rd of August 1876, Bell sent a telegram from the Brantford telegraph office to the village of Mount Pleasant, 4 miles away, saying he was ready. He then made a telephone call over the telegraph wires, and faint voices answered. The next night he amazed guests at the Bell Homestead with a call to the Dominion Telegraph Company office in Brantford. The line ran along telegraph lines and fences and through a tunnel, and guests heard people reading and singing.

  A third test on the 10th of August 1876 used the telegraph line between Brantford and Paris, Ontario, 8 miles away. Many sources call it the world's first long-distance call, though it worked only one way. The first two-way conversation came on the 9th of October 1876, over roughly 2.5 miles between Cambridge and Boston. Bell stood on Kilby Street in Boston, while Watson was at the offices of the Walworth Manufacturing Company.

  Bell and his partners offered to sell the patent outright to Western Union for $100,000. The deal failed, and an apocryphal story says Western Union's president dismissed the telephone as a toy. Two years later, Bell told colleagues he would consider $25 million for the patent a bargain. By then the Bell company no longer wanted to sell. His investors became millionaires, and Bell at one point held assets of nearly $1 million.

  At the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Bell's early prototype brought the telephone international attention. Emperor Pedro II of Brazil was among the visitors. The judge Sir William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, called it "the greatest by far of all the marvels of the electric telegraph". Pedro became the first person to buy stock in the Bell Telephone Company, and one of the first private-home telephones was installed in his palace at Petrópolis.

  On the 14th of January 1878, at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, Bell demonstrated the telephone to Queen Victoria. She spoke by telephone with Cowes, Southampton and London, the first publicly witnessed long-distance telephone calls in the United Kingdom. The queen found the process "quite extraordinary" though the sound was "rather faint". She asked to buy the equipment, and Bell offered instead to make her a set of telephones.

  The Bell Telephone Company was created in 1877, and by 1886 more than 150,000 people in the United States owned telephones. In 1879 the company acquired Edison's carbon microphone patents from Western Union. Callers no longer had to shout to be heard, and the telephone worked over longer distances.

  The courts proved harder than the wires. Over 18 years the Bell Telephone Company faced 587 court challenges to its patents, five of them reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. None succeeded in establishing priority over Bell, and the company never lost a case that reached a final trial. Bell's laboratory notes and family letters traced a long lineage of experiments. Both Gray and Amos Dolbear had acknowledged Bell's prior work in personal letters to him, which weakened their later claims.

  On the 13th of January 1887, the U.S. government moved to annul Bell's patent for fraud and misrepresentation. After nine years of decisions and reversals, the prosecuting attorney had died and both Bell patents had expired. The judges kept the case going because of its value as precedent. Following a change in administration and charges of conflict of interest on both sides, the attorney general dropped the suit on the 30th of November 1897 with several issues undecided.

  The Italian inventor Antonio Meucci claimed in a deposition for that 1887 trial that he had built a working telephone model in Italy in 1834. His testimony was disputed for lack of material evidence, since his models were said to be lost at an American District Telegraph laboratory in New York. The last case involving Meucci ended when he died. On the 11th of June 2002, the U.S. House of Representatives stated that his work on the telephone should be acknowledged. Some modern scholars do not agree that Meucci influenced Bell.

  Abroad, Bell delayed his German patent application, and the firm Siemens & Halske set up a rival maker of near-identical telephones with no royalties owed. The International Bell Telephone Company was established in Brussels in 1880, and further agreements eventually consolidated a global telephone operation. The strain of constant court appearances led Bell to resign from the company.

  On the 25th of January 1915, Bell stood at the AT&T head office at 15 Dey Street in New York City. Thomas Watson heard him at 333 Grant Avenue in San Francisco, over a wire stretching 3,400 miles.

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• 6. Beinn Bhreagh and Beyond

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  On the 11th of July 1877, Bell married Mabel Hubbard at the Hubbard estate in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a wedding present he gave her 1,487 of his 1,497 shares in the new Bell Telephone Company. The couple took a year-long honeymoon in Europe, and Bell brought a handmade model of his telephone along, making it a working holiday. Despite the telephone's fame, it was not at first profitable, and his main income came from lectures until after 1897.

  Mabel asked her husband to spell the family nickname as Alec rather than Aleck, and from 1876 he signed his name Alec Bell. They had four children. Elsie May, born in 1878, married Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor of National Geographic fame. Marian, called Daisy, married David Fairchild. Two sons, Edward in 1881 and Robert in 1883, died in infancy.

  Bell became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1882. In 1915 he said, "I am not one of those hyphenated Americans who claim allegiance to two countries." The family lived in Washington, D.C., so that he could attend to the many patent cases.

  In 1885 the Bells vacationed at the village of Baddeck on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. The following year Bell began building an estate across from Baddeck, overlooking Bras d'Or Lake. A large house called The Lodge was finished by 1889, and a larger complex with a new laboratory followed. They named it Beinn Bhreagh, Gaelic for Beautiful Mountain, after his ancestral Scottish highlands.

  The estate included a boatyard that employed up to 40 people building experimental craft, lifeboats and workboats for the Royal Canadian Navy, and pleasure boats. Villagers accepted the Bells as their own. When the Halifax Explosion struck on the 6th of December 1917, Mabel and Bell mobilized the community to help the victims.

  In 1880, the French government gave Bell the Volta Prize, with a purse of 50,000 French francs, for inventing the telephone. Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas were among the judges. Bell used the money to create the Volta Laboratory Association in Washington, D.C. The next year it improved Edison's phonograph by recording on wax instead of tinfoil and incising the grooves rather than indenting them. Edison later adopted both changes.

  The laboratory was also where Bell and his assistant Charles Sumner Tainter invented the photophone, a wireless telephone that sent voice on a beam of light. On the 21st of June 1880, Tainter sent a voice message from the roof of the Franklin School in Washington, D.C., to Bell at his laboratory window, 213 metres away. Voice radio transmissions were still 19 years in the future. Bell told a reporter shortly before his death that it was "the greatest invention I have ever made, greater than the telephone". It foreshadowed fibre-optic communication, which spread worldwide in the 1980s.

  Bell's inventions ranged widely. After the shooting of President James A. Garfield in 1881, he developed an early metal detector using an induction balance. In tests it worked, but it did not find the bullet. Garfield's surgeons, led by Doctor Willard Bliss, were sceptical and refused to move the President to a bed without metal springs. Bell's own account to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1882 said a steel-wire mattress had not caused the failure, and that the bullet lay too deep.

  He held 18 patents in his own name and shared 12 with collaborators. His ideas included an audiometer to detect minor hearing problems, a device to find icebergs, and ways to separate salt from seawater. His house used fans blowing across large blocks of ice as primitive air conditioning. He thought methane could be made from farm and factory waste, and in a 1917 magazine article he considered heating houses with solar energy.

  In March 1906, Scientific American published an article by William E. Meacham explaining hydrofoils and hydroplanes. Bell began sketching hydrofoil boats, and in summer 1908 he and Frederick W. Baldwin, known as Casey, started experiments. During his world tour of 1910-11 they rode the Forlanini hydrofoil boat on Lake Maggiore, and Baldwin said it was as smooth as flying. Their experiments led to the HD-4, powered by Renault engines, which reached 54 mph.

  After the First World War, Bell's report to the U.S. Navy let him obtain two 350 hp engines in July 1919. On the 9th of September 1919 the HD-4 set a world marine speed record of 70.86 mph, which stood for a year.

  Bell's interest in flight led him to tetrahedral box kites and the Cygnet wings. In October 1907, at his wife's suggestion and with her financial support, he formed the Aerial Experiment Association at Baddeck. Its young members were Glenn H. Curtiss, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, Frederick W. Baldwin and J. A. D. McCurdy. On the 12th of March 1908, their Red Wing biplane lifted off over Keuka Lake for the first public flight in North America. Selfridge died on the 17th of September 1908 in a crash of the Wright Flyer, the first person killed in a powered heavier-than-air flight. A $15,000 grant from Mabel kept the group going.

  On the 23rd of February 1909, McCurdy flew the Silver Dart from the frozen ice of Bras d'Or Lake, making the first aircraft flight in Canada. Bell had worried it was too dangerous and arranged for a doctor to be present. The association then disbanded, and Baldwin and McCurdy started the Canadian Aerodrome Company.

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• 7. Heredity Questions

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  For more than 30 years at Beinn Bhreagh, Bell kept meticulous records of breeding experiments with rams and ewes. He was trying to breed sheep with four functional nipples and enough milk to nurse twin lambs. The work drew attention from scientists studying heredity in humans, and one later assessment called his heredity research "the soundest, and most useful study of human heredity proposed in nineteenth-century America".

  In November 1883, Bell presented a paper to the National Academy of Sciences titled Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race. It compiled data on the inheritance of deafness. He found that having deaf relatives was an important factor in producing deaf children, and that deaf parents had deaf children at a rate many times higher than the general population. The paper also discussed hypothetical public policies to end deafness, and it criticized schools that segregated deaf children from mainstream classrooms.

  The paper did not propose sterilizing deaf people or banning their intermarriage. Bell wrote, "We cannot dictate to men and women whom they should marry and natural selection no longer influences mankind to any great extent." He framed the question as open. If deaf people marrying one another had no more deaf offspring than the general population, he argued, conclusions drawn from animal experiments could not safely be applied to people.

  An 1885 review in the American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb said Bell did not advocate legislative interference with the marriages of the deaf, because the results of such marriages had not yet been sufficiently investigated. The reviewer added that earlier editorial remarks had done the author an injustice. Historians have noted that Bell explicitly opposed laws regulating marriage and never mentioned sterilization in any of his writings.

  In 1906, Charles Davenport, a Harvard professor who headed the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and founded the American Breeder's Association, asked Bell to join a new committee on eugenics chaired by David Starr Jordan. In 1910, Davenport opened the Eugenics Records office at Cold Spring Harbor. To lend it scientific credibility, he named Bell chairman of its Board of Scientific Directors. Luther Burbank, Roswell H. Johnson, Vernon L. Kellogg and William E. Castle also sat on the board.

  In 1921, New York's Museum of Natural History hosted the Second International Congress of Eugenics, chaired by Davenport. Bell presented no research and gave no speech, but he was named honorary president to attract other scientists. Even after he agreed to engage with scientists doing eugenic research, he consistently refused to support public policy that limited the rights or privileges of the deaf.

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• 8. Farewell and Honors

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  Bell died of complications from diabetes on the 2nd of August 1922 at his private estate in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, at age 75. He had also suffered from pernicious anemia. His last view of the land was by moonlight on his mountain at 2:00 a.m. While tending him, Mabel whispered, "Don't leave me." Bell signed "no...", lost consciousness, and died shortly after.

  Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King cabled Mabel that it would ever be a source of pride to Canada that the great invention associated with her husband's name was part of its history. Bell's laboratory staff built his coffin from Beinn Bhreagh pine and lined it with the same red silk used in his tetrahedral kite experiments. Mabel asked guests not to wear black. The soloist Jean MacDonald sang a verse of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem".

  Bell was buried atop Beinn Bhreagh mountain, overlooking Bras d'Or Lake, where he had lived increasingly for the last 35 years of his life. He was survived by Mabel, his daughters Elsie May and Marian, and nine grandchildren.

  Honors had flowed to him in growing numbers, and he received so many honorary degrees that requests became nearly burdensome. He held at least a dozen, among them eight LL.D.s, two Ph.D.s, a D.Sc. and an M.D. They came from institutions including Gallaudet College, Heidelberg University, Harvard, St Andrews, Oxford and the University of Edinburgh. France made him a member of the Légion d'honneur. The Royal Society of Arts in London gave him the Albert Medal in 1902, and the Franklin Institute awarded the Elliott Cresson Medal in 1912. The American Institute of Electrical Engineers, which he helped found in 1884, gave him its Edison Medal in 1914.

  He also shaped institutions. Bell served as the second president of the National Geographic Society from 1898 to 1903, writing for its magazine under the pseudonym H. A. Largelamb, an anagram of his name. He was primarily responsible for the heavy use of illustrations and photography. From 1898 until 1922 he was a Regent of the Smithsonian Institution. With Gardiner Greene Hubbard he helped found the journal Science in the early 1880s. His Volta Bureau, established in 1887, later became the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.

  His name now lives in everyday units and prizes. The bel and the smaller decibel, units of sound pressure level, were invented by Bell Labs and named after him. Since 1976, the IEEE has awarded the Alexander Graham Bell Medal for outstanding contributions to telecommunications. In 1936 the U.S. Patent Office put him first on its list of the country's greatest inventors. A commemorative stamp followed in 1940, with a first-day ceremony in Boston on the 28th of October, and it remains the most valuable stamp of its series.

  In 1997, the 150th anniversary of his birth, the Royal Bank of Scotland issued a commemorative £1 note, and Canada struck a C$100 gold coin. Polls in the 2000s ranked him 57th among the 100 Greatest Britons, among the Top Ten Greatest Canadians, and among the 100 Greatest Americans. The back of the Scottish banknote carries his profile and signature, a diagram of a telephone receiver, sign language and phonetic symbols, the geese that helped him understand flight, and the sheep he studied to understand heredity.

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