l ships,
tetrahedral construction, and Montessori education. The "decibel," the
standard scientific measure of sound intensity, was named after Bell.

Not all Bell's vaporware notions were inspired. He was fascinated by
human eugenics. He also spent many years developing a weird personal
system of astrophysics in which gravity did not exist.

Bell was a definite eccentric. He was something of a hypochondriac,
and throughout his life he habitually stayed up until four A.M.,
refusing to rise before noon. But Bell had accomplished a great feat;
he was an idol of millions and his influence, wealth, and great
personal charm, combined with his eccentricity, made him something of a
loose cannon on deck. Bell maintained a thriving scientific salon in
his winter mansion in Washington, D.C., which gave him considerable
backstage influence in governmental and scientific circles. He was a
major financial backer of the the magazines Science and National
Geographic, both still flourishing today as important organs of the
American scientific establishment.

Bell's companion Thomas Watson, similarly wealthy and similarly odd,
became the ardent political disciple of a 19th-century science-fiction
writer and would-be social reformer, Edward Bellamy. Watson also trod
the boards briefly as a Shakespearian actor.

There would never be another Alexander Graham Bell, but in years to
come there would be surprising numbers of people like him. Bell was a
prototype of the high-tech entrepreneur. High-tech entrepreneurs will
play a very prominent role in this book: not merely as technicians and
businessmen, but as pioneers of the technical frontier, who can carry
the power and prestige they derive from high-technology into the
political and social arena.

Like later entrepreneurs, Bell was fierce in defense of his own
technological territory. As the telephone began to flourish, Bell was
soon involved in violent lawsuits in the defense of his patents.
Bell's Boston lawyers were excellent, however, and Bell himself, as an
elocution teacher and gifted public speaker, was a devastatingly
effective legal witness. In the eighteen years of Bell's patents, the
Bell company was involved in six hundred separate lawsuits. The legal
records printed filled 149 volumes. The Bell Company won every single
suit.

After Bell's exclusive patents expired, rival telephone companies
sprang up all over America. Bell's company, American Bell Telepho