Happy Birthday, Great-Grandfather!
-- 10/13/97
That's what author Edwin S. Grosvenor will be saying when his new illustrated book, Alexander Graham Bell: The Life and Times of the Man Who Invented the Telephone (Abrams), appears in November on the occasion of the inventor's 150th birthday.
For some 90 years, members of Grosvenor's family have meant to write a biography of their illustrious forebear, Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922).The author's father, Melville Grosvenor, failed to do it.
So did his father, Gilbert, who was Bell's son-in-law.
Both were writers and served as editor of National Geographic magazine, which Bell, a founder of the National Geographic Society, conceived. "But they were overwhelmed by the amount of material about Bell," explained Edwin Grosvenor, noting that the Library of Congress houses nearly 150,000 documents on the inventor.
Now, 75 years after Bell's death, his great-grandson Edwin has joined with Emmy Award-winning documentary film producer and writer Morgan Wesson, a former curator of the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., to produce a photos-and-text history of unusual warmth about this fascinating American.
"Bell is one of the best-known figures in our history, yet he is so strongly associated with the telephone that many people are not aware of his other accomplishments," Grosvenor said. "Besides inventing the phone, early airplanes, the hydrofoil, the metal detector and the respirator, he was deeply involved in educational reform, women's suffrage and civil rights efforts. He was way ahead of his time on many things, including conservation. He coined the term 'greenhouse effect' in 1919."
With an introduction by Pulitzer-winning Bell biographer Robert V. Bruce, the 304-page book includes 400 photographs, most never published before, showing all facets of Bell's life, from his Edinburgh childhood to his unceasing experiments with everything from the telephone to flight to "thought transference" to the rise of the phone industry. It offers glimpses of many contemporaries: Mark Twain on his Hartford back porch, an early phone user who nonetheless grumbled, "The voice carries entirely too far as it is. If Bell had invented a muffler or a gag he would have done a real service"; of Bell (whose mother and wife were deaf) with Helen Keller and the teacher to whom he introduced her, Annie Sullivan; and of sundry others from phone linemen to Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers and John Pierpont Morgan.
The book is also a kind of history of Edwardian life in America, and the Bells were one of the most-photographed families of the era. "I must have found a thousand photographs hidden under seed catalogues and calendars at Beinn Bhreagh Hall, Bell's home in Nova Scotia. It was weird. I'd find more and more as I dug into drawers. I call it `personal archeology.' My Aunt Mabel, who is 92 and has lived in that house nearly all her life, had never seen most of these photos," said Grosvenor. Aunt Mabel did, however, provide important perspective: "I was so lucky as a writer to have Aunt Mabel and her incredible memory available to me," he said. "She's the family historian. If I needed a quote from the turn of the century, I could just call her up and get one."A mid-40ish Yale graduate, Grosvenor, who lives in Bethesda, Md., with his wife, Deborah Clarke Grosvenor, a literary agent, and their son, formerly edited the magazines Current Books and Portfolio, and now heads an on-line educational resource called Leaderlearning. He first worked with the Bell papers in 1975 while researching a master's thesis at Columbia University on the establishment of National Geographic.
"That was it," he says. "Once I saw all this material, I was hooked."
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