Back to Nova Scotia

   Hi everyone. Happy weekend to you. Today I'm getting back to my Nova Scotia trip from last September. I have a few posts left, and even though that trip is starting to seem like it was a ways back, I still have a few things to share.

    In today's post we're spending our  last few hours out on Cape Breton Island. The main "goal" of the day was to drive to the Halifax area. (I felt like we couldn't drive around Nova Scotia and not at least check out the province's biggest city.) However, it wasn't going to take all day to drive to Halifax.  

    There was a highly rated museum only 15 minutes away from the Air B&B where we had been staying in St. Ann's. It was cloudy with some occasional showers as the day went on making it a good museum day. Also this museum was right along the way. How could we not stop there? This was the Park's Canada museum about Alexander Graham Bell, and it is located in the cute little town of Baddeck.

  I must say I didn't know what to expect from this museum, but it really surprised me. I actually never really thought much about Alexander Graham Bell, and I wasn't sure why there needed to be a museum about him. However, I learned he was quite an interesting person, and the museum ended up being a well timed and worthwhile stop. (In fact, if you read my last book post you'll know that I even picked up and then read a biography about the man and his wife.)

   The museum started with this great timeline of  Bell's life.  First and foremost, Bell was fascinated  by sound. His father had created a sign language (not the sign language used now) for deaf people, and Bell grew up learning and being pushed to teach that language. He always had a strong interest in deaf people, and at a time when many people thought deaf people had mental capacity issues, Bell was different. He actually started his career as being a teacher of the deaf in Massachusetts. He believed that he could get those people to communicate and have full and useful lives. He was actually quite a successful teacher too. 

   In his biography I learned that this was also the time that our modern sign language was coming into play. Bell's father's sign language and the one now use went through a feeling out period, with different people pushing for different kinds of sign language. Our modern one won out eventually. I found this very interesting since at one time my school had a lot of deaf students, and I had a lot in my classes. I worked with interpreters and even took a sign language class at one time.

  Because of Bell's interest in sound and the deaf, and because of his interest in scientific tinkering, he went on to play with the passage of sound through wires, which was how he invented the telephone.

    The telephone was such a hit internationally that Bell made a lot of money. Even though he went through several lawsuits about his invention, he won those cases. Because he had this money was was able to not have to keep a regular job. That allowed him to 1) tinker with other things during the rest of his life and 2)  live in a place that was more rural. He was able to buy land in Cape Breton and eventually build a home there. The home is still in his family possession, and it was his daughters who donated much of what you see in the museum to Parks Canada.

   That "free" time meant that Bell became more involved with his scientific tinkering. He became so involved that he would often work into the wee hours of the morning. One of the areas he became very interested in was flight. This was just at the time when other people were becoming interesting in it also, including the Wright Brothers. 

   Bell's plan was to create 3 dimensional kites that would work for wings. He was at first thinking more glider like forms, and then later, forms driven by engines.  Here's a model of one of his kites. These led to the development of his cygnet glider, which I do not have a photo of.

    From gliders, he went on to develop a plane. Here you see a life sized model of his plane, The Silver Dart.  

    The Silver Dart was not designed just by Bell, but by a group he had with him in Nova Scotia. This group was called AEA which stands for Aerial Experiment Association. It included not only Bell but others like Glenn Curtis from New York State, as well as John McCurdy and Casey Baldwin who were both engineering students from the University of Toronto.  I'll call it Bell's plane for simplicity. In fact, Bell's plane, although it did not beat the Wright Brother's for taking off the ground, was the first plane to fly in Canada and the British Empire.

   Bell's group then wanted to see about producing a plane that could take off and land on water. To do this, they built the world's first hydrofoil boat.  Here's a life sized model of that.

    All that is left of the original hydrofoil is this long cigar shaped structure that is in the far back of this photo.

    They named this boat the HD-4.

    The hope was the US military would be interested in this boat. At this time Bell was starting to slow down a bit, and Casey Baldwin was starting to take center stage of his group. (Glenn Curtis had left the group by this point.)

      It's also interesting how Bell never went for a ride in the hydrofoil, nor his plane. However his wife did go for a ride in the hydrofoil, and it's recorded that she loved the experience. 

    Besides his plane and hydrofoil, Bell puttered and made some other items. He also was able to travel to many places in the world. 

An early phone switchboard he developed

and his favorite jacket (he's wearing this in the second photo I shared in this post)

His secretary's typewriter-one of his granddaughters became his secretary later in his life.

and a dragon kite he brought back from a trip to China

And finally some of his shirt collars

   There were many other items I never took photos of 😢, and that I wished now that I had photos of.

   This museum mentions his wife Mabel and his 2 daughters. After reading Bell's biography, where Mabel and his daughters were included in a large way, I wish this museum mentioned more about them. However, they weren't exactly ignored.

  I hope you enjoyed this visit.  Next time I post about my journey we'll be in Halifax doing a couple of more museums.