Falrchild: Alexander Graham Bell 



199 



In reading the life of Benjamin 

 Franklin I have been struck by a 

 certain similarity between the simple 

 directness of intellectual attack which 

 characterized Franklin's kite experi- 

 ment in the thunder storm and those 

 of Mr. Bell. The problems which they 

 attacked were never trivial in character 

 and they both appeared to take logical 

 roads towards their solution and I 

 cannot but attribute this similarity to 

 a similar clearness of their mental 

 processes. 



REMARKABLE MEMORY 



The ordinary biographies are so 

 taken up with the accounts of a man's 

 accomplishments that it is not easy 

 to get at those things which actually 

 characterized him as an unusual human 

 being and I cannot discover whether, 

 for instance, Benjamin Franklin had 

 the word-memory- which was so char- 

 acteristic of Mr. Bell. It was natural 

 for Mr. Bell to remember the exact 

 wording of any letter which he had 

 dictated, even though some time had 

 elapsed since he wrote it, and to one 

 with a poor word-memory such as I 

 have, the storage house of his brain 

 seemed like a tremendous library with 

 every book on its proper shelf and cata- 

 logued. And it was not an effort for 

 him to pull out the right book, either. 



I say it was not an effort, but I would 

 not give the idea that his brain was 

 not only capable of tremendous effort 

 but of almost incredibly sustained 

 effort. I think he had an hypothesis 

 that the brain took a certain time to 

 get itself into working trim and that 

 his own, after even 24 hours of con- 

 tinuous exertion could perform actually 

 better than it could at the beginning. 

 At any rate, he sometimes drove it for 

 as much as 48 hours without stopping 

 to give it rest and at the end of this 

 time he felt it was going as well as at 

 the beginning. 



Throughout the whole period when 

 I had the privilege of knowing him, his 

 mind seemed either engaged on some 

 line of thought or was resting itself in 

 the excitement of a detective story. It 

 was not as so many brains are, dawd- 



ling over the trivialities of human per- 

 sonalities or commonplace occurrences. 

 It was manifestly a great brain and he 

 kept it in constant activity acquiring 

 knowledge. If there appeared in the 

 newspaper an account of any strange 

 natural phenomenon like the fall of a 

 meteor or some unaccountable death, 

 his quick eye was sure to see it and 

 make note of it for the entertainment of 

 the dinner table. 



His curiosity was phenomenal and 

 there seemed to be a strange fascina- 

 tion for him in a secret; it was some- 

 times amusing to see how his mind 

 would come back to the subject of the 

 secret after the matter had been left 

 far behind in the conversation. This 

 unquenchable, unflagging curiosity ap- 

 peared to be a quality of his personality 

 and was what made it possible for him 

 to maintain his keen interest in every- 

 thing even through months of compara- 

 tive solitude. 



LOVE OF COMPANIONSHIP 



It would be a mistake to give the 

 idea that Mr. Bell did not require 

 companionship, for there never was a 

 man who had more continuously by 

 his side a congenial and immensely 

 stimulating companion upon whom he 

 was peculiarly dependent for intellec- 

 tual support. How much the love and 

 devotion of Mrs. Bell has been respon- 

 sible for the long series of experiments 

 and the many discoveries which Mr. 

 Bell made, is evident from the feeling 

 often expressed by his intimate friends 

 that any life of Mr. Bell would have to 

 include a life of Mrs. Bell as well, 

 for her personality, quite as great 

 in its way as his, formed the most 

 important factor of any in the en- 

 vironment in which this great man 

 developed and lived. Had his been a 

 life of sordid care or one of unhappy 

 family relations or even one of uncon- 

 genial surroundings, the output of 

 scientific achievements must have been 

 quite other than it was. 



At their Cape Breton home he and 

 Mrs. Bell have always welcomed all 

 who came, and their cordiality is 

 famous. But this has never been 



