Yachtsman Silver Donald Cameron writes: Canada's Economic Action Plan, it appears, doesn't reach Baddeck. In that picturesque village, federal agents are trying to kill an iconic small business oriented towards a US market—and that after decades of government investment and effort to strengthen and grow such businesses in chronically jobless Cape Breton. The business is the Cape Breton Boatyard, created in 1937 to serve the fleet of yachts associated with the family of Alexander Graham Bell and their friends, and owned for the past several decades by Henry Fuller. Since the beginning, the main clientele of the boatyard has been visiting yachts...

06 September, 2013

In his rivalry with Thomas Edison, Graham Bell made many attempts to record sound using media that ran the gamut from metal, glass, and foil to paper, plaster, and cardboard. Many of Bell's discs survive, but the technologies used to record them are long forgotten. Researchers and scientists from the National Museum of American History and the Library of Congress in Washington, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, and the University of Indiana have collaborated on a project to catalog and decipher the primative recordings, using high-resolution digital scans to convert them to audio files. One wax-and-cardboard disc, recorded...

19 May, 2013

Less than an hour ago, from his perch aboard the International Space Station, Cmdr. Chris Hadfield posted this photo of Contrarian's Kempt Head, Boularderie Island, home. (Just incidentally, the photo also shows the ice of Baddeck Bay, from which Alexander Graham Bell's research team flew Canada's first powered aircraft, the Silver Dart, in 1909, a factoid Hadfield happened to mention.) For the geographically challenged, Boularderie Island is the slender finger of land extending in from the right edge of the photo. Kempt Head forms the island's southwestern tip, and is the name applied to the community that occupies the portion of the island...

04 April, 2013

Yesterday I posted a photo from National Geographic's new Tumblr feed showing Alexander Graham Bell leaning in to kiss a woman who was holding herself inside one of his iconic tetrahedral kite frames. Both the National Geographic and I identified the women as Bell's wife, Mabel Gardiner Hubbard. Not so, writes Contrarian reader Donna Johnson, who works at the Bell Museum* in Baddeck: This is one of my favourite photos. Also a favourite of the visitors, who are sometimes a bit disappointed when we point out that, contrary to popular opinion, this is actually Bell kissing his daughter Daisy, not Mabel. If you...

30 March, 2013

National Geographic has been publishing gorgeous photographs for 125 years, so starting a Tumblr feed seems a natural step for the dowdy journal. One of the first entries features Mabel Gardiner Hubbard Bell [See update below] inside a tetrahedral kite frame, while her husband, Alexander Graham Bell, leans in for a kiss. Doesn't it just make you wish you had known these two? Dated October 10 16, 1903, this photo surely must have been taken at Beinn Bhreagh. Click on the image to see the full-sized version. *UPDATE: It appears there is controversy about whether the woman in this photo is Mabel...

29 March, 2013

Anyone who saw Cirque du Soleil's recent shows in Halifax will have noticed the circular structure used to convey people and props between the stage and the upper reaches of the MetroCentre's girders. The shape of this trussed torus, and the way it hung in the air, reminded me of something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Then it hit me: Alexander Graham Bell's circular kite, two fabric-covered disks, conjoined by tetrahedral trusses, flying over Beinn Bhreagh. No larger point here — the structures aren't even all that similar in detail — just a striking confluence of shape, style, and scale across...

15 May, 2012

Little Shining Man, a kite sculpture created by Heather and Ivan Morrison, takes flight from a beach at St. Aubin's Bay, on the Bailiwick of Jersey. Videography by James O'Garra. H/T John Hugh Edwards....

12 January, 2012

[caption id="attachment_7540" align="alignright" width="200" caption="James Fallows"][/caption] Contrarian regulars know of my admiration for the eclectic James Fallows, who writes and blogs for The Atlantic. James is in China this winter, finishing up a book, and while he does that, rotating squads of unterbloggers are filling in for him. I'm in the rotation this week, and I've posted three items so far: A word about our sponsor Meet Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. Alexander Graham Bell Defends His Butler. My week of guest-blogging happens to fall amidst a crush of other work, so it's unlikely I'll get much posted here until things settle down. But...

17 March, 2011

TheAtlantic.com's tech columnist Alexis Madrigal marked the 135th anniversary of Alexander Graham Bell's US patent for the telephone by reproducing a doodle-like drawing of the device Bell submitted with his patent application: That's a fragment; see the whole diagram here. Madrigal found the image among Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers, which are stored at the Library of Congress and available online in a searchable database. Naturally, that set Contrarian searching for terms like "Telegraph House" (9 hits), "Beinn Bhreagh" (100), "Ross Ferry" and "Kempt Head" (zip and zip). A search for "Sydney" produced 47 hits, including this remarkable letter to...

09 March, 2011