Alexander Graham Bell is best remembered for inventing the telephone, but he was also a prolific inventor of many other devices, such as a large kite capable of carrying a human 100ft in the air in 1907, and the world’s fastest boat, a hydrofoil that set a marine speed record in 1919.
In an article written for National Geographic magazine in 1917, Bell also predicted a profound change in the world climate caused by pollution. At that time many scientists believed that the dirty air from burning coal and oil would block the sun’s rays and cool the Earth. Bell was ahead of his time when he warned that the burning of fossil fuels would do the opposite, “we would have some sort of greenhouse effect . . . The net result is that the greenhouse becomes a hot-house.”
Instead of burning coal and oil, he proposed using alcohol as a “clean, beautiful, and efficient fuel”, which is the basis of biofuels these days. Bell also suggested using rooftop devices for collecting solar energy. “We do not use the roofs of our buildings except to keep off the rain,” he wrote. “What wide expanses of roof are available in all our large cities for the utilization of the sun’s rays! Simple pipes laid up on the roof and containing oil or some other liquid would soon become heated by the sun’s rays.”
Bell hated working in the stifling summer heat of Washington DC, and invented an indoor air-cooling system. He put large blocks of ice covered with salt in a fridge in the attic of his house and channelled the cold air down through an insulated pipe into a room far below.
At that time American newspapers were describing another type of ice system installed in the White House to cool the president, Woodrow Wilson, keeping the temperature at 80F (27C) when outside it was 100F (38C). But as Bell remarked: “At this very time I enjoyed in my house a temperature of 65 degrees [18C] the ideal temperature, with a delicious feeling of freshness in the air.”
