Alexander Graham Bell Museum in Baddeck

• Author: WantsToTravelMore
• Accommodation:

Parks Canada operates a number of historic sites in Nova Scotia including, but not limited to, Port Royal, Fortress Louisbourg and the Alexander Graham Bell Museum.  In my experience, the parks are things like Banff and Yoho National Parks.  No history, all space.

Well, in Baddeck, Mr. Bell is a town hero.  Scotland via Boston and Washington, he was looking for a place that was more like Scotland without all the tuberculosis.  He and his wife landed in Baddeck, based on a travel book.  I suspect the huge Scottish influences in the area helped.

However, forget the telephone.  I had forgotten he’d been part of Canada’s first motorized flight of an airplane, specifically the Silver Dart.  His work in helping the deaf had him connect with, and have glowing words from, Helen Keller.

Hydrofoils and artificial lungs are on the list of his inventions.

What struck me was that as a 19^th century inventor of the same era as Edison, Ford and Tesla, he seemed to lack some of the personality disorders that the others had.  There was an early skeleton of a frog that he had prepared, but he refused to kill animals for his studies.  He took ones that had expired on their own.

Makes you think.

Historians were lucky because due to the many years of patent legal trouble over the telephone, Bell started keeping meticulous records. Here we are all this time later benefiting from this.

More information: parks.canada.ca/lhn-nhs/ns/grahambell/visit

Where to stay in Baddeck