Among other things, he invented the iron lung and experimented with telepathy. When President James A. Garfield was shot by a disgruntled lunatic in 1881, Bell was called in to see if he could help locate the bullet. He invented a metal detector, which worked beautifully in the laboratory but gave confused results at Garfield’s bedside. Not until much later was it realized that the device had been reading the presidential bedsprings. In between these pursuits Bell helped found the journal Science and the National Geographic Society, for whose magazine he wrote under the memorable nom de plume
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