Reluctant Genius (20 page)

Replicas of the liquid variable transmitter (left) and reed receiver (right) displayed at the Philadelphia Exhibition.

The exchange between Mabel and Alec as they stood on the station platform that hot June day encapsulates the nature of their relationship, and would become part of Bell family lore. According to an account that their daughter Elsie wrote years later, Mabel “burst into tears and said, ’I think you might do this just to please me. If you won’t do a little thing like this now, I won’t marry you.’” Then she turned her eyes away so she could not “hear” Alec’s objections. A frowning and extremely reluctant Scotsman climbed onto the train. He wrote to his mother from New York that, seeing “how pale and anxious [Mabel] was about it, I could not resist her and here I am… . What I am going to do in Philadelphia ... I cannot tell."

Alec’s black mood did not lift when he arrived in Philadelphia. He found he had to share a hot little room in the pretentiously named Grand Villa Hotel ("six or seven private dwellings united together") with Gardiner Hubbard’s brother James. He wrote a miserable letter to Mabel:

Oh! My poor classes! What shall I do about them! You don’t know what a horrid mean thing it is for me to leave them at this time… . Then there is the expense which I
cannot afford.
Travelling expenses, hotel, rent of room for classes, and in addition I have to pay Miss Locke
five
dollars for every day I am gone. You really don’t know what you do when you make me come here! ... I must confess I don’t see what good I can accomplish in Philadelphia unless I stay for a long time and as far as telegraphy is concerned, I shall be far happier and more honoured if I can send out a band of competent teachers of the deaf and dumb who will accomplish a good work, than I should be to receive all the telegraphic honours in the world.

Mabel had already learned that Alec often had to let off steam when he was unsettled before he could focus on the task in hand. By the time this grumpy letter reached her in Cambridge, he had begun to enjoy himself in Philadelphia. He was pleased to meet Sir William Thomson (it was a pleasure, he reported, to hear “a good broad Scotch accent") and other notable scientists. He still found the heat and the crowds insufferable, but he sent for Willie Hubbard, to help him demonstrate his telegraphic and telephonic apparatus on the crucial award day.

The atmosphere in the exhibition’s Machinery Hall was steamy on June 25. Because it was a Sunday, Fairmount Park was closed to the public. The sun blazed mercilessly through the glass roof of the echoing, cavernous building as a small, solemn party of judges slowly inspected the exhibits. Alec Bell and Willie Hubbard had been up since dawn, arranging the reed receiver in a gallery behind a huge Hood and Hastings Organ, to ensure the best reception. As usual, the delicate instruments required endless fiddling to get the desired effect. In the narrow gallery,” recalled Willie later, “the heat was intense … and there were no ventilators. We were obliged to work in the scantiest possible attire, and even then were dripping with perspiration.” Alec became even more sweaty and nervous when he heard the unsettling news that the judges would have examined both Edison’s and Gray’s devices before they reached him. As the tension mounted in lockstep with the temperature, Alec’s head began to throb. One of his debilitating headaches seemed inevitable. Then, with the sun overhead and the heat almost unbearable, came the really bad news. The judges announced that they were going to call it a day as soon as they had finished with the exhibit before his.

Had the judges quit then, Alec would have given up the fight and caught the next train to Boston. But nobody had reckoned with Dom Pedro, for whom tropical heat was no problem and who had been asked to help judge the electrical devices. Dom Pedro had taken a liking to the earnest young teacher on his visit to Boston’s School for the Deaf two weeks earlier. Catching sight of the lanky, wilting Scotsman in the Machinery Hall, he bustled over to find out what he was doing in Philadelphia. Once Alec began to explain his invention, Dom Pedro started bouncing up and down on his toes and repeating, “Ce n’est pas possible!” The jovial emperor’s excitement attracted Sir William Thomson; within minutes all of the judges were crowded around Alec. They were intrigued to hear that Alec, unlike his rivals, proposed to give an actual demonstration of the speaking telephone. Willie climbed up to the gallery behind the organ, where Alec had positioned the receiver, with Dom Pedro in perspiring pursuit. In the stifling heat, hidden by the organ casing, Willie and the emperor stripped to their undershirts as they prepared to listen to Alec. Willie checked the reception, then invited Dom Pedro to put his ear to the receiver. Out of sight below them, Alec cleared his throat, then began to talk into the mouthpiece that was connected to the cup of acidulated water. A storm of emotions crossed the Brazilian emperors face—uncertainty, amazement, elation. Lifting his head from the receiver (a small cylindrical device with a wooden base that rested on a table), he gave Willie a huge grin and said, “This thing speaks!"

Soon a steady stream of portly, middle-aged men were clambering into the gallery, stripping off their jackets, and bending their ears to the receiver. “For an hour or more,” Willie remembered, “all took turns in talking and listening, testing the line in every possible way, evidently looking for some trickery, or thinking that the sound was carried through the air.... It seemed to be nearly all too wonderful for belief.” Dom Pedro asked if this new machine could speak Portuguese, and was delighted to hear his own language over the wires.

Dr. Joseph Henry, who had been so impressed by Alec’s ideas when he had met him at the Smithsonian the previous year, was among the first to be convinced. In the
General Report of the Judges,
written for the Centennial Organizing Committee, Dr. Henry declared that Alec’s telephone was “the greatest marvel hitherto achieved by the telegraph.” His British colleague Sir William Thomson noted, “I was astonished and delighted.” As Alec’s was the only “speaking telegraph” that actually worked, the panel of judges agreed that young Mr. Bell had to receive the gold medal for electrical equipment, and asked him to do another demonstration the following day. At the same time, Alec heard he had also been awarded a gold medal for his Visible Speech display.

Alec’s chief reaction to the excitement was relief that it was all over. He and Willie Hubbard wearily made their way back to their room in the Grand Villa Hotel, stripped off their sweat-stained suits, donned their pajamas, and slumped on their beds. They were surprised when a bellboy appeared at their door, and even more surprised when they read the name on the business card he handed them: Elisha Gray. Alec asked the bellboy to show up the rival inventor, but he was assailed by doubts. He had examined Gray’s telephone in the Machinery Hall and realized that the main difference between his and Gray’s prototypes was that Gray had not found a way to strengthen the undulatory current. But Gray was a qualified electrician. Had Gray tracked him down now to pick his brains, so that he could rush back to his own equipment and make the adjustments required for it to function?

Gray, a middle-aged man with a serious but friendly manner, soon swept Alec’s doubts aside. As soon as he entered the room, he congratulated Alec on the glorious achievement of a vocal telegraph. He appeared to accept that Alec had won the telephone race: their conversation focused on the multiple telegraph and the advantage to each if they worked together. A couple of days later, Alec would write to his parents that he and Gray “explained away all matters in dispute, and have decided that it may be advantageous to both of us to unite our [multiple-telegraph] interests so as to control the Western Union Telegraph Company, if those associated with us can be brought to a mutual understanding.” In the end, the two inventors did not join forces, but the conversation convinced Alec that Gray was “an h onourable man.” This rosy opinion would come under heavy pressure in the years ahead.

After Gray had left, Alec picked up a letter from Mabel, mailed a couple of days earlier. She had written, “It was very hard to send you off so unwillingly but I am sure it was for the best and you will be glad of it by and by. Don’t get discouraged now. If you persevere, success must come… . How I miss you!” Alec barely drew breath before he was stuffing his sweaty clothes into a valise and heading toward the railroad station. So what if Sir William and Lady Thomson had requested a special demonstration the following day? Willie Hubbard could handle that. Alec had a train to catch, exam papers to mark, and a fiancée he could hardly wait to see.

Part 2

T
HE
S
TRUGGLE FOR
B
ALANCE
1876–1889

I have my periods of restlessness when my brain is crowded with ideas tingling to my fingertips when I am excited and cannot stop for anybody. Let me alone, let me work as I like even if I have to sit up all night or even for two nights. When you see me flagging, getting tired, discouraged … put your hands over my eyes so that I go to sleep and let me sleep as long as I like until I wake. Then I may hang around, read novels and be stupid without an idea in my head until I get rested and ready for another period of work. But oh, do not do as you often do, stop me in the midst of my work, my excitement with “Alec, Alec, aren’t you coming to bed? It’s one o’clock, do come.” Then I have to come feeling cross and ugly. Then you put your hands on my eyes and after a while I go to sleep, but the ideas are gone, the work is never done.

Alexander Graham Bell to Mabel Bell, March 1879

Chapter 9

R
ING FOR THE
F
UTURE
1876–1877

I
t was now seven months since Alec and Mabel had become officially engaged, and as the couple went through the Boston betrothal rituals—the at-homes, the polite calls on distant relatives, the interrogations about future plans—Hubbard friends and relatives slowly came to terms with Mabel’s intended. Maybe Alec was a little stiff and his sideburns often untrimmed, but everybody could see that he made his former pupil happy. There was a new glow in Mabel’s cheeks and a new spring in her step as she glided from one social event to another in the slender, ruched skirts that were so fashionable in this period. And Alec? Well, Alec protested at being displayed like a trophy, but Mabel’s sisters pointed out that he always acceded to her wishes. He bowed politely to the cousins and the aunts, and offered simplified explanations of what he was trying to do with his “talking telegraph.”

There was, however, one person who had
not
warmed to this shabby Scottish stranger. Soon after Alec returned to Boston from Philadelphia, Mabel accompanied Cousin Mary Blatchford to her Nantucket cottage for a few days. Mabel urged her fiancé to visit her there, but Mary stuck her nose in the air and did not look Alec in the eye when she issued a vague summons to “light suppers.” Alec had little stomach for Mary’s haughty manners and lingering disapproval. Mabel vented her frustration in a letter to her cousin Lina McCurdy: “I feel so cross, ill-tempered and out-of-sorts, I think I’ll inflict my crossness on you…. Alec hasn’t, unheard-of thing, been here since Thursday, and I don’t believe he’ll come today! Oh dear, I do hate the man’s ceremonious politeness!” Mabel chose to see Alec’s reluctance as cultural rather than social. “If he were an American he would be content with Cousin Mary’s general invitation, but being a Scotchman he will take care to come late tonight to avoid coming to supper!”

Mabel’s mother, Gertrude Hubbard, had none of Mary’s Brahmin snobbery. She welcomed her future son-in-law to 146 Brattle Street while Mabel was away, because she knew Alec’s heart was in the right place. At the same time, she was appalled at his volatility. “We have all of us our hands full with Alec,” she wrote to Gardiner. “He has not yet sent in his report to the [Philadelphia] Bureau of Awards [required before the Philadelphia Exhibition medals could be sent to him] & I can’t make him
do
it. He says that his brain won’t work & he cannot make it. Then he has had applications from two Lecture Bureaus … for lectures on Acoustics & Electricity. He wants to lecture because he enjoys it, & as a matter of dollars & cents.” Gertrude, the mother of four demure daughters, couldn’t resist giving her husband a staccato account of Alec’s frantic style. “He is crazy at the idea of Mabel’s going away … & wants to be married. Then he would give up V. S. [Visible Speech] or the Telegraph, he says he cannot & I believe he ought not to try and carry them on together. Which shall it be? … Then he ought to go to Portland to see … about starting a [public school for the deaf]…. Then he wants to stop at Toronto & see George Brown, and he must be in Brantford on Tuesday—& more than all he wants to talk with you…. Poor May will have a busy life if she attempts to keep him up to present duty.”