National Geographic’s second president, scientist Alexander Graham Bell, had an estate on Cape Breton Island where he conducted experiments. Writer Catherine Dunlop Mackenzie remarked on the broad range of his research in a 1920 National Geographic article. Among his innovations: were a high-speed hydroplane boat (it went 70 miles/113 km an hour), an outlook tower composed of stacked tetrahedral cells, and special twin-bearing sheep stock.
But perhaps most remarkable, Mackenzie wrote, was Graham’s collection of huge, manbearing kite structures. Graham was an aviation pioneer, fascinated by the idea of mechanical flight since his boyhood. In 1907, he sent one of his giant kites 168 feet (51 m) aloft over Bras d’Or Lake on Cape Breton Island, with U.S. Army officer Lt. Thomas E. Selfridge attached. Though Selfridge survived that experiment, he died just months later in one of Orville Wright’s flying machines, earning him the grim distinction of modern aviation’s first fatality.
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