The scientist Faraday was self-educated. As a young man he was an apprentice to a bookbinder. He read many of the scientific works he bound. It is said that his notebooks were beautifully bound by him. I visited the Faraday museum in 2004 but the notebooks were only accessible to scholars and did not form part of the public display. I, too, have notebooks of my scientific work and because of this I have picked up little historical tidbits about the usefulness and devotion of scientist to their notebooks.

I am now reading The Telephone Gambit. At its center is an abrupt time gap in Alexander Graham Bell’s notebook just before his invention of the telephone. I have not finished the book yet. But the author makes a convincing case that Bell stole the idea from a patent by Elisha Gray.