BELL IN BADDECK
Alexander Graham Bell’s estate at Baddeck, N.S., still houses descendants, custodians of his multi-faceted work there
On the sprawling Cape Breton estate that is the final resting place of Alexander Graham Bell, Hugh Muller focuses on the crest of a hill that tumbles down to the Bras d’Or Lake and the waters that spill in from the Atlantic.
Mr. Muller, Bell’s greatgrandson, spent some of his childhood on the 400-acre private family estate that Bell nicknamed Beinn Bhreagh, and has retired here.
“I used to roll down the hill when I was a child — that was great fun,” says the octogenarian with a kind smile and a resemblance to the inventor.
Mr. Muller was born in Geneva, Switzerland, to one of Bell’s granddaughters. He worked for decades in Miami and elsewhere as a member of the u.S. National Park Service and then became an adjunct professor at the university of Michigan, where he gave seminars on park management.
In 2011, Mr. Muller — a scholar on his great-grandfather’s work — and his wife, Jeanne, became Canadian citizens shortly after they took up full-time residence in the estate, whose Gaelic name translates to “Beautiful Mountain.”
The estate is owned by Bell’s heirs and was divided into lots. The Mullers are Bell’s only descendants to live year round in the hilly complex of homes.
The Mullers have been so well received in the nearby town of Baddeck that they play Santa and Mrs. Claus during the community’s annual Christmas parade. In fact, it was the community that sponsored them for Canadian citizenship, because the couple, both u.S. citizens, were too elderly for qualification under Immigration Canada’s application process.
“I think the Mullers are just thoroughly enjoying being here and I think also they are keen to spread the word about Bell’s legacy. To let people know he was responsible for so much more than just the telephone,” says Mary Tulle, chief executive of destination Cape Breton, the island’s tourism board.
By the time he arrived in Baddeck, which Bell relied on for workers to help with his experiments, Bell had already invented the telephone and was sitting on a fortune. Born in Scotland, Bell spent his teenage years in Brantford, Ont. He chose to settle in Cape Breton in 1889 because of its Scottish heritage, sublime scenery, and proximity to Boston and Washington, d.C., where he often worked.
“The invention he was most proud of was the photophone,” Mr. Muller informs, recalling an 1880 creation that never found commercial success but was an ancestor to today’s cellular phones. Before he died 91 years ago, the inventor called it his greatest brainchild.
In Nova Scotia, he was keen to explore other ideas, taking advantage of the land and Beinn Bhreagh’s waterfront. Among the experiments were aviation projects that led to the Silver dart, Canada’s first airplane, a craft made of spruce, bamboo and canvas, and outfitted with a Curtiss engine. The wings of the Silver dart, and its prototypes, featured tetrahedron kites that were stitched together by women from Baddeck. Those parts were stored in a 1,000-square-foot building nicknamed the Kite House. It belongs to Mr. Muller’s line of the family and is now the couple’s home.
They’ve renovated it fully, keeping the original hardwood floors and making a cozy space for themselves and their two corgis up the dusty gravel road from the large woodframed house where Mr. Muller spent his childhood summers. Living among the belongings of one of the world’s foremost geniuses does have drawbacks, though. The Mullers possess 1,200 magazines dating to the early 20th century that Bell collected as he scoured the globe for information on his many interests.
“We can’t get rid of them,” Mr. Muller says as he hands me an edition of Nature from 1922, the year Bell died here of complications from diabetes. In it are articles about hydroplanes and transistors and aviation technology. “The parks department says they are all artifacts, so we must keep them.”
Mr. Muller is mostly joking. Bell’s two daughters, elsie May and Marian (nicknamed daisy), emptied the Kite House of the content “they felt was most relevant to the museum.” What was left over still may have value to the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site and researchers around the world, Mr. Muller says, so he is mindful about keeping items once touched by his celebrated ancestor.
Mr. Muller was born in 1932 and is one of Bell’s 16 greatgrandchildren. His grandmother, Marian Bell Fairchild, lived on the family estate for much of her youth, as her father spent most of his final 35 years of life on Beinn Bhreagh, working on his ideas.
“Bell was easily distracted. So he had different stations where he would force himself to focus on just one thing. In the Kite House, he would just work on the kites and the aviation projects he was interested in. Then there was an area up the hill on the estate with the sheep and chickens where he worked on genetics. Another area near the water was where he worked on the hydrofoil,” Mr. Muller says.
The couple makes frequent visits to the Bell historic site in Baddeck, a Parks Canada facility whose most recent addition is a replica of the Silver dart that hangs above a replica of the Hd-4 and that hydrofoil’s original wooden facade, in which Mr. Muller played as a child.
The Silver dart alone was a phenomenal achievement, rivalling what the Wright brothers accomplished in Kitty Hawk, N.C. It made more than 200 sustained flights, including an 800-metre trek through the air at 65 kilometres per hour on its first day of operation in Baddeck on Feb. 23, 1909. It is a Canadian icon that died after flipping upon a sandy runway in Petawawa, Ont., on Aug. 2, 1909. Bell and his business partner, Casey Baldwin, were trying to convince the Canadian military that airplanes would be a powerful component of the nation’s armed forces. “But Canada didn’t think airplanes would be used in war,” Mr. Muller says. “Then World War I happens and of course airplanes are part of the weaponry, but by then he had moved on to the hydrofoil.”
That watercraft, built with a renault engine, set a speed record of 114 kilometres per hour in 1919 that stood for two decades. The hydroplane, also co-manufactured with Baldwin’s help, was one of the many inventions where Bell and his wife, Mabel Gardiner Hubbard, were mutually entwined. Because of Hubbard’s lack of hearing, she was the pilot of the noisy watercraft on several occasions, driving it on the lake between the es- tate and the town, thrilling the residents of Baddeck each time.
“A lot of people don’t realize how integral the community was to the success of the experiments,” Ms. Muller says. “Bell had all of these wonderful ideas, but he needed the workers to make them reality. It was a very symbiotic relationship between Bell and the people of the town.”
Keen to maintain the family’s privacy while also connecting with Baddeck, the Mullers are among the many advocates in Cape Breton raising the profile of Bell’s achievements that are not as highly touted as the telephone.
Gesticulating toward the large rear window of the Point House, the largest of the 14 homes on the Beinn Bhreagh estate, Hugh Muller says, “That’s where he would do much of his work, a lot of his sketching and his thinking on ideas.” He goes on to tell how Bell fashioned a way to provide hot water for himself in the bedroom using copper wire so he could prepare a cup of tea while he toiled.
Passing the spot where the Hd-4 would be launched into the water, Mr. Muller recalls the hull of the hydroplane sitting on the property during his youth. Being a kid who had the run of the place, he did what kids do: interacted with the contraption while lollygagging through the property and its rolling hills.
“I would climb in there as a child,” Mr. Muller remembers of the venerated watercraft. He smiles again, indicating he’s quite aware of how innocent he was back then. “didn’t have much of an idea what it was at the time.”