2037 Gray, Charlotte. Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers. 468p. A Phyllis Bruce Book. photos. biblio. index. $36.95. ISBN 0-00-200676-6. CCIP. DDC 621.385092.

Alexander Graham Bell is commonly remembered as an elderly fellow with a full white beard, yet the “eureka moment” that led to his most famous invention happened in Brantford, Ontario, when he was 27, and the patent for his “speaking telegraph” was issued on his 29th birthday. Nearly five decades lay ahead for him, and they were as remarkable as those of his youth.
        This enjoyable and informative book, the author’s fourth biography, reads like a novel, yet all of its quotations and conversations come verbatim from diaries and letters in an “extraordinarily extensive collection of family correspondence.” These personal papers enable Gray to write not just the biography of an inventor, but a romance, beginning with Bell’s passionate pursuit of a deaf woman who first came to him as a teenaged student when he was a teacher of the deaf in Boston, and subsequently of “his incredible dependence on her.” Both are buried on Cape Breton Island, with which Bell fell in love in 1885, and their home there is an integral part of their story, for it was there that many of his inventions were born and it was to Nova Scotia that many celebrated figures of the time came to see him.
        Gray’s title refers to Bell’s reluctance to involve himself in the commercial side of his inventions. His family lived a life of wealth from the telephone because his father-in-law was “a skillful patent attorney and knowledgeable entrepreneur,” but Bell quickly lost interest in his invention and turned to other pursuits, often decades ahead of his time. His hydrofoils, common today, set speed records on water but were left to decay for lack of government interest. He used the phrase “greenhouse effect” to describe the results of atmospheric pollution, and urged the use of ethanol as “a beautifully clean and efficient fuel.” His early work on record players was taken up by the much more commercially aggressive Thomas Edison, and much of his decades-long pursuit of a flying machine was of more commercial benefit to others than to him. His indifference continually frustrated his wife and ensured “that he could never be the Bill Gates of the nineteenth century.”
        This is a rich biography, replete with clearly explained technical advances and moving accounts of work with the deaf, set in an age of enormous scientific progress and social change. But looming over all is a great love story, painstakingly researched and beautifully told.