Reluctant Genius (21 page)

A few days after she mailed this letter, Gertrude gave a sigh of relief as Alec packed into his battered leather bags all his notebooks, electrical supplies, Visible Speech papers, and telephone equipment and left Boston for Brantford. Maybe he would calm down in Canada’s cooler climate.

Alec was distracted because his intellect was so deeply focused on his experiments. “There is a sort of telephonic undercurrent going on [in my mind] all the while,” he wrote to Mabel. He was certainly too preoccupied to pay much attention to travel arrangements. In Rochester he got into the wrong carriage of the northbound train, only to discover that his mistake meant he was headed for Buffalo while his baggage was en route to Canada via the Niagara Suspension Bridge. And when, at one o’clock in the morning, the train finally reached Paris, eight miles from Brantford, he charged off into the night rather than staying at a hotel until dawn. Arriving at his parents’ house in the small hours, he first had a snooze in the barn, then discovered that the window of his father’s study was unfastened and crawled through it. The following morning, a maid who had never met Alec walked into the study and was horrified to discover a large, disheveled young man, with bits of straw sticking to his coat, snoring on the couch. She ran out, calling for Mrs. Bell. “I was awakened by a kiss from my mother,” he explained to Mabel, “and found nearly the whole family congregated around me.”

That summer, with six hundred miles between them, Mabel and Alec wrote to each other two or three times a week. In Brantford, Alec labored over his letters, often making two or three drafts before carefully penning a final copy. (“The midnight hours I spent over letters that were copied
in a hurry
to impress you with my ability,” he admitted a few years later. “Oh! Cupid! Cupid! Cupid had succeeded in hitting me very hard.”) Letter-writing was such agony for Alec because he was now exploring his emotions for the first time in his life, and he struggled to express himself truthfully. For all the anguish of composition, however, they were suffused with spontaneity and ardor. “Do you know, Mabel,” he wrote on July 27,

separation from you renders me as nervous and miserable as can well be imagined. I fear—I know not what…. Distance somehow seems to throw a veil between us and hides you from my sight. I long to be near you—to have you all to myself again—if only for a moment, to feel your dear little head nestling upon my shoulder and know that your affection for me is not all a dream, a myth, a creation of my own fancy, but that there is something tangible and real about it all. Oh! Mabel dear, I love you far more than you can ever know or than I can ever tell. Don’t let anybody or anything take you from me now. I am jealous of the distance that separates us and shall not be happy till I have you in my arms once more.

There! You see what a goose I am—but I can’t help it! Read my letter through, laugh at it as much as you like, and then—as you value the reputation of your staid [?] and learned [?] “professor”—tear it up and destroy it, so that no prying eye may put together the scattered fragments and find out what a foolish lovesick individual I am.

The days in Brantford dragged by for lovesick Alec. He wrote to “My darling May” every two or three days. “My thoughts are flying Cambridgewards this morning,” he told his fiancée on August 13,

[a]nd I long to be with you. I only wish the intervening space between us would vanish “like the baseless fabric of a dream and leave not a wrack behind[.]” But facts are stubborn things, and space persists. Railroads and steamboats may cut it down by half, telegraphers may ignore it altogether, but alas to flesh and blood it still remains a hard impenetrable fact—dark and opaque…. Imagination must bridge the gap … and I can only say that I shall be very glad to get back to you once more and tell you the old old thing that you know so well—that I love you far more than I can possibly tell you.

Mabel’s letters are equally loving, but they reveal a rapidly maturing young woman anxious to balance passion and pragmatism. Ardor alone would not get them to the altar: Mabel recognized that until her fiancé started making some money from the telephone, her parents would not permit them to start making wedding plans. She wrote, “I long so much to have you back again…. All I want you to do is to work away at electricity steadily at present, and do your utmost to induce some one to take up your foreign patents…. Having to support me will give you an object, and will help to give you that stability and perseverance that you lack.”

Meanwhile, there was plenty to keep Alec busy in Brantford. For the first time in his life, he met his mother’s brother, Edward Symonds, and Edward’s three daughters, who had all arrived from Australia. He attended the wedding of one of his Bell cousins. (“Grace Church was filled with people…. I can’t say that I like so much display about a wedding. I think it so much nicer to have the ceremony performed at home in the midst of one’s own family and friends.”) He visited his friends on the Six Nations Reserve. Chief George Johnson allowed him to be photographed wearing the young chief’s ceremonial buckskin coat, covered with silver trade brooches, and a hat of eagle and ostrich feathers that Alec had always admired. Alec could not resist a bit of Wild West theatrics: “Dressed in full costume and with a tomahawk in my hand I stalked majestically into the room, frightening my mother nearly out of her senses.”

But most important, Alec followed Mabel’s advice and “worked away at electricity steadily.” He began by testing his telephone equipment between the house and the barn at Tutelo Heights. To the amusement of neighbors, Alec was seen walking backward through the grass away from the house, unwinding coils of stovepipe wire as he went. (He exasperated his mother by winding the extra wire around the newel posts of the house’s staircase, gouging spirals into the wood in the process.) Once he was satisfied with these experiments, he took his telephone apparatus and yet more stovepipe wire to the little village of Mount Pleasant, five miles from Brantford, and set it up in Wallis Ellis’s general store, which was also the local office of the Dominion Telegraph Company. At an agreed time, his uncle David Bell declaimed Shakespeare into the membrane transmitter that was attached to the Dominion Telegraph Company’s line in Brantford. Alec, perched on sacks of dried beans and with his ear pressed to the receiver he had exhibited at Philadelphia, was able to make out a few words. Triumphantly, he noted, “My undulatory current can be used on telegraph lines.”

On August 4, demonstrations of Alec’s telephone equipment constituted the main entertainment at a party Melville gave for his brother-in-law Edward Symonds at Tutelo Heights. The guests included the frock-coated elite of Brantford: two members of parliament, the principal of the Ontario Institute for the Blind, two bank managers, and three doctors. After a hearty dinner and many toasts, the guests assembled on the front porch, where they smoked their cigars and listened to Alec explain his theories. Once again, at an agreed time, Uncle David Bell, in Brantford, began declaiming “To be or not to be” into the metal mouthpiece of the battery-powered transmitter containing acidulated water. Two miles away, on the porch of Tutelo Heights, the Bells’ guests took turns with the receiver, a small cylindrical device containing the diaphragm that converted the signal back into sound, so that they could listen to Hamlet’s soliloquy. This was followed by a greeting in the Mohawk tongue from Chief George Johnson, then by a selection of hymns sung by Uncle David’s daughter, Lily. The guests marveled at Alec’s equipment.

Melville was pleased with his son’s success, noting in his diary, “Gentlemen’s supper. 23 guests. Telephone to Brantford.” But the
Brantford Expositor
was more interested in the presence of Brantford’s haute bourgeoisie than in the telephone test. Toronto’s
Globe
took a week to catch up with events, perhaps because its owner, George Brown, was not present. Halfway down page 3, on August 11, 1876, there was a brief item: “At a party at the residence of Professor A. Melville Bell, on Friday evening, a rare treat was afforded to the guests in the experimental explanations made by Prof. A. Graham Bell, of the new system of telephone invented lately by that gentleman.”

Lack of publicity did not deter Alec. He was much more interested in science than in salesmanship. Within days of the party, he was busy planning his most ambitious Canadian telephone test between Brantford and Paris. This time, the apparatus would be tried in oneway communication over a much longer distance, powered by much stronger batteries, and it would use regulation telegraph wires, rather than stovepipe wire.

On August 10, Alec climbed into the Bells’ buggy and drove to Paris with the cylindrical metal receiving device. Uncle David was left in the Dominion Telegraph Office in Brantford with an assortment of young relatives eager to sing into the transmitter. Alec set up his equipment in the Paris telegraph office, which occupied a corner of Robert White’s boot and shoe shop on Grand River Street. The Bells’ old friend Reverend Thomas Henderson, with whom they had stayed when they first arrived in Canada, arrived to watch the fun, and was soon followed by Paris’s mayor, the Grand Trunk Railway agent, and several local factory owners. By 8 p.m., most of Paris was hovering around the shoe shop, smoking and gossiping as darkness fell, and speculating on whether a telegraph could really be expected to talk. At the agreed time, Alec put the receiver to his ear and was horrified to hear “perfectly deafening noises proceeding from the instrument.” In the notes he wrote next day, he described how “explosive sounds like the discharge of distant artillery were mixed with a continuous crackling noise of an indescribable character.” The crackling almost drowned the sounds of his cousins’ patriotic chorus of “The Maple Leaf Forever.”

Alec realized right away that the telegraph signal was too weak: it needed a stronger battery. Since communication on the telephone was still only one-way, he had to telegraph new instructions to Brantford, eight miles away, asking the operator to switch from low-resistance to high-resistance coils on the transmitter electromagnets. As he noted the following day, “The vocal sounds then came out clearly and strongly, and the crackling sounds were not nearly so annoying.” Alec recognized various voices, including that of his Uncle David as the latter did a recitation, this time from
Macbeth.
But then there was a pause, and a different voice began, “To be or not to be….” Alec was taken aback: he knew that his father had had an appointment in Hamilton, twenty miles away. He telegraphed to Brantford, “Change has improved transmission greatly. Whose voice did we hear speaking Hamlet’s soliloquy? Was it my father’s? Important.” Pressing his ear to the receiver, he heard his father admit that he had found it impossible to tear himself away from the telephony experiment and keep his Hamilton appointment. Yes, it was he who had launched himself into Hamlet’s speech.

By the time various excited citizens of Paris had taken their turn at the receiver, Uncle David was almost hoarse. The Brantford singers had exhausted their repertoire of popular songs such as “The Little Round Hat,” “Maggie May,” and “Oh, Wouldn’t You Like to Know,” and the clock had struck eleven. But as Alec wearily drove home in his buggy through the warm summer night, he could congratulate himself on having obeyed Mabel’s instruction to “work away at electricity.”

In late August, Mabel and Alec were at last reunited in Boston. In one of her summer letters Mabel had told her fiancé, “I am in rather a hurry to be trying to do something to help you.” Soon she was spending each afternoon in his boardinghouse, replying to letters from strangers asking about the telephone apparatus. Meanwhile, Alec and Tom Watson were refining the equipment, and Alec was lecturing regularly on his invention. On October 13, at Boston University, he delivered “the best lecture I ever gave.” But he still hadn’t completed the report to the Philadelphia Bureau of Awards that would allow his name to appear in the list of Exhibition medalists, and a reproach from Mabel triggered an uncharacteristic flare-up. “The real reward of labour such as mine is
success,
and medals and certificates of merit only lower it to a vulgar level,” Alec shot back. “However disappointed you may be in me, don’t think my failure to answer those questions and to secure a medal arose from lack of love for you or from slight disrespect for your wishes.”

During the long months of their engagement, these two individuals from very different backgrounds learned to accommodate not only each other’s characters but also each other’s beliefs. Mabel Hubbard was a conventional Boston Presbyterian who naively assumed that her fiancé shared her religious beliefs. When she was staying with Hartford friends where the father was Protestant and the mother Roman Catholic, she confided to Alec, “I am so glad we are of the same religion. I cannot understand how there can be perfect confidence and oneness between two people holding such different opinions on such deep and important matters.” Alec, a skeptical Scot whose family never attended church, gently informed her that he believed “[m]en should be judged not by their religious beliefs but by their lives.” He respected Mabel’s beliefs, but he himself couldn’t accept the notion of life after death: “Concerning Death and Immortality, Salvation, Faith and all the other points of theoretical religion, I know absolutely nothing and can frame no beliefs whatsoever.” Mabel quietly accepted Alec’s agnosticism, although she firmly informed him, “It is so glorious and comforting to know there is something after this—that everything does not end with this world.”

Alec’s views on another issue, Mabel discovered, were equally unorthodox. When she raised the issues of women’s rights (a topic frequently discussed in the best Beacon Hill drawing rooms), Alec proved to be unusually progressive on property issues. He agreed with her that, contrary to the laws of the period, married women were
not
their husbands’ property. They should be allowed to keep their own capital, he believed, and a couple should share their income equally. However, the extremes of late-nineteenth-century feminism appealed to neither of them. In Philadelphia the previous July, Susan B. Anthony, president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, had led a counter-Centennial demonstration outside Independence Hall to demand the right to vote. “We ask justice,” the well-dressed and compelling Mrs. Anthony declared from her soapbox to a crowd of enthusiastic followers. “We ask equality, we ask that all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever.” Such a demand was a little too strong for both Alec and, especially, Mabel, who wrote to her fiancé, “I…would not have the public sentiment that forbids women to appear in public life, or to assume duties hitherto belonging exclusively to men, outraged if it could be helped.”