Alexander Graham Bell's Delightfully Weird Sketchbooks

I've always been a big fan of keeping a notebook around to sketch ideas, write down thoughts, etc.

There was a interesting couple of sketches in the slide show that highlight, "CABLE GUY" and "SELF PORTRAIT". What the journalist didn't "get" was that he was looking at Bell's conception of the 'cell' phone or portable phone.

In the "SELF PORTRAIT" we see a person speaking into an apparatus which no doubt modulates a current on the giant open air inductor slung over this poor chap's shoulder. By modulating a current in that inductor a field is created that has the sounds modulating it. In "CABLE GUY" we have another person carrying another giant inductor which is connected to a speaker. Presumably Bell was imagining that some how one would talk at a distance without wires but carrying around giant antenna equivalents :-). This was an area where Tesla was working and I don't doubt that Bell was thinking about ways to work this problem as well.

As far as I can tell the triangles in triangles shaped aircraft sketch predates Sierpinski's discovery. http://bit.ly/hhH779 - the sketch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpinski_triangle - "who described it in 1915"

Maybe Bell studied 13th-century Cosmati mosaics.