Did You Know Alexander Graham Bell Studied Sheep Alongside His Inventions?
Alexander Graham Bell is remembered for the telephone, but archival records reveal another long-running interest: sheep breeding at Beinn Bhreagh, his Nova Scotia estate. Bell sought to increase twin and triplet births, kept detailed tables of ancestry and physical traits, and even copied a 1909 newspaper advertisement offering to buy sheep with six, seven or eight nipples. An 1898 letter to his wife, Mabel, shows him tracing the ancestry and wool of a promising black lamb. The evidence does not turn his hypothesis into a modern scientific conclusion, and Bell’s broader heredity thinking included discredited eugenic ideas. His lesser-known project offers a useful prompt for family history: preserve the interests, records, unfinished experiments and troubling convictions that reveal a whole person—not only the achievement for which someone became known....