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Exhibition Not an Ostrich: & Other Images from America's Library

Not an Ostrich: & Other Images from America's Library

UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER. Alexander Graham Bell and a kite he designed. Nova Scotia, 1908

[Alexander Graham Bell (right) and his assistants observing the progress of one of his tetrahedral kites]. July 7, 1908. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (06.00.00)
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UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER. Alexander Graham Bell and a kite he designed. Nova Scotia, 1908

Alexander Graham Bell, famous for the invention of the telephone in 1876 at the age of twenty-nine, might easily have been content with early monumental success, but his many laboratory notebooks demonstrate his genuine and rare intellectual curiosity to keep searching, striving, and wanting always to learn and to create. Bell explored the realm of communications and engaged in a great variety of scientific activities involving kites, airplanes, tetrahedral structures, sheep-breeding, artificial respiration, desalinization and water distillation, and hydrofoils.