Exactly 100 years ago today, one of the 20th century’s most iconic figures, inventor Alexander Graham Bell, wrote a letter of greeting to another celebrity of his day, author Helen Keller.

“My dear Helen,” Bell wrote, “It has given me great pleasure to receive your note and to know that you are now living nearer Washington. Mrs. Bell and I are still here at Beinn Bhreagh (Bell’s estate in Nova Scotia) in the midst of ice and snow.”

Bell continues: “We are devoting ourselves to the building of lifeboats and other life-saving apparatus and generally to work that will be of use during this time of war” — a reference to World War I and its very real threat of submarines and other maritime war operations along the Atlantic coast.

“I wish you and Teacher (Annie Sullivan) a happy New Year,” the letter concludes. “It will be some time yet before we return to Washington and I do hope that I may be able to have more frequent opportunities of meeting you.”

At the time the letter was written, Keller was a 36-year-old, well established author and activist. Bell, 69, a native of Scotland and naturalized American citizen, was living in Nova Scotia, where he built, among other things, lifeboats for the Royal Canadian Navy and accumulated vast wealth from his telephone and other patents.

Although Bell is more famous for his inventions, his first love and passion was elocution — the physiology of speech. Some regard him as a villain because he believed he could teach all deaf people to speak — his training methods included tying the hands of deaf children to keep them from signing and forcing them to use their vocal chords.

Bell’s defenders compare his “tough love” discipline to the practices of Keller’s famous teacher, Annie Sullivan, who is universally credited with Keller’s salvation from a dark, silent existence.

How would Bell and Keller’s friendship differ today? What would the inventor and author half his age have in common?

Would they even be Facebook friends?

Not likely.

Bell’s mother was deaf. As a child, he would communicate with her by speaking with his mouth against forehead — so she could “hear” the vibrations of his words.

In his later ears — in fact, by the time Bell wrote his letter to Keller, Bell himself was so deaf that when they attended the theater he relied on his wife to tap the lines in Morse code on his knee.

Keller was a brilliant child who had lost her hearing and eyesight to scarlet fever when she was 19 months old. Keller and Bell shared a deep interest in communication for individuals with special needs.

But today, Keller would have grown up free from the disease that stole her senses. She would have led a very different life and would not have been tutored by Sullivan. The remarkably intelligent woman would have none of the distinguishing characteristics or tribulations that qualified her for encounters with every U.S. president from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon Johnson — 13 presidents in all.

And Bell might just be another semi-retired Silicon Valley billionaire, a one-percenter with closets full of money and a secretary to print out hard copies of his e-mails.

Fame is the most fickle thing. Bell and Keller are remembered long after their passing; and yet, had they been born today we might never have heard of either of them.