August 11th, 2015: Moffat Sheep Race

[glatt]

Sheep.

We went to the Alexander Graham Bell museum in Nova Scotia. It was somewhat interesting. We all know he gets credit for the telephone. What I didn't know was that he was a huge inventor just like Edison, and he and the other inventors of the time were all inventing the same stuff independent of each other and only finding out later that they weren't first and that credit for various inventions would go to various people.

Bell invented the phone, and the airplane, and hydrofoils, and a bunch of other stuff that I forgot. Massive kites and stuff. He only got credit for the phone though, and that required an epic legal battle. He gave the invention to his wife and she managed the considerable money for him. He had to go to her to ask for money whenever he wanted to do stuff.

But the reason I'm posting in this thread is the sheep. Bell was convinced that the more nipples a sheep had, the more offspring it would have. He spent much of his lifetime counting nipples on sheep and breeding them especially for their nipples. I have to give him credit though. When the evidence didn't support his theory about the number of nipples and the number of offspring, he gave up and accepted it. He didn't try to make the data fit his theory. He followed where the data led. I wish more people today would do that.