Reluctant Genius (24 page)

Mabel flourished on board ship—she was immune to seasickness, thanks to her damaged middle ear. Alec temporarily developed a form of sciatica in his leg that Mabel fussed over. “Please don’t let Cousin Mary know,” she wrote to Cambridge, “or she would think she was right in thinking I have married a ‘broken-down invalid’ which is by no means the case!” Alec was soon well enough to sit for Mabel while she sketched his portrait. Alec recorded his indignation in their journal: “She represented me as a bald-headed man with very round shoulders and most uninteresting physique.”

Chapter 10

L
ONDON
L
IFE
1877-1878

M
abel Bell clung to the rail as the
Anchoria
steamed up the Clyde River to Greenock, Glasgow’s port, in the early hours of an August morning. The pre-dawn breeze chilled her face and tugged at the tendrils of hair she had hastily swept up into an untidy chignon. She smiled with excitement as she made out the shapes of buildings and hills on the shore and the flocks of seagulls swooping overhead. As the sun slowly rose, she could see the Clydeside shipyards, where one-fifth of the world’s ships were being built, extending for miles along each riverbank.

She turned when she felt a gentle tap on her arm. Her smile widened as she realized that the prospect of landfall had triggered a small miracle: her husband had risen before noon and was already shaved and dressed. As first-class travelers, the Bells would be the first passengers permitted ashore. Alec could barely wait to set foot in what he called, in an assumed Scottish accent that made Mabel laugh as she struggled to read his lips, his “ain countri.” He listened to the fierce screaming of the gulls, but he was oblivious to the oilystench drifting across the water, which made Mabel wrinkle her nose.

Once the ship docked, the Bells quickly passed through customs and found a hansom cab to take them through the cobbled streets to the Queens Hotel. Mabel was at first appalled by her surroundings. “A blacker, smokier, foggier place I never wish to see,” she confided in a letter to her mother. Smokestacks, brick factories, and fiery, glowing iron and steel foundries ringed the city, which during these years was the industrial workshop of the British Empire. The elegant remnants of eighteenth-century Glasgow, an intellectual and mercantile center, were hidden behind squalid tenements, home to the poorly paid Irish workers who had flooded into the city over the previous seventy years. The air was thick with pollution, and the once-creamy stone of Glasgow’s churches, City Chambers, and railroad station was encrusted with soot and grime. Through the cab windows, Mabel saw shabbily dressed women and barefoot children hurrying through narrow streets toward textile mills.

But Alec was jubilant. Just seven years earlier he had reluctantly left Britain, bound for “the backwoods of Canada” in the hope of regaining his health. Now he was a robust and happy man, returning with a new wife and a growing reputation as an inventor. As soon as he and Mabel had eaten breakfast, he disappeared to find some childhood friends and visit the local telegraph office. Mabel unpacked their bags and found her pen so she could write home. As she settled herself at the writing table, she realized she could either spoil her husbands homecoming with grumbles or find a silver lining to Glasgow’s clouds of soot. She took a deep breath, then dipped her pen in the ink. “The buildings are all solid, handsome edifices,” she informed her mother, who, alongside her husband and three remaining daughters, had recently moved to Washington, D.C. “Their very blackness is a rest and delight after the shiny, showy newness of America.”

Mabel had more reason to be positive later the same day, after a trip up one of the hills overlooking the city for a tour of the University of Glasgow. She admired the “huge and heavy, ponderously gothic” buildings, assuming they predated anything she knew in the New World. She couldn’t have been more wrong. In fact, the ancient university had left its original cramped facilities and relocated only seven years earlier, onto a splendid campus designed by the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott. But the stonework was already encrusted with the filth that coated the city.

Alec was too busy being “wild over the wonders of science shown to him” to notice his surroundings. Having struggled and failed to complete a university education himself, he was entranced with the university’s state-of-the-art laboratories, which made his little Boston workshop look like a child’s science set. He had barely examined the apparatus before he was dragged away by the postmaster and superintendent of telegraphs to give demonstrations of the telephone. The following day, he gave a further demonstration to a larger audience, which included Glasgow’s business and civic leaders and reporters from the local newspaper. “He said before the experiment the gentlemen were very polite to him, but after it they treated him with veneration, one gentleman said after this he would believe anything he heard from America no matter how wonderful or incredible it might seem,” Mabel told her mother.

Alexander Graham Bell and his “talking telegraph” were soon all the rage, and the Bells were swept along on the wave of celebrity. Alec planned to spend three or four months in Britain, working with his partner William Reynolds, the Rhode Island cotton broker who had purchased a part-interest in the English patent, to set up a British Bell Telephone Company, so the publicity was invaluable: it made finding investors and agents much easier. Nevertheless, inundated by invitations to speak, Alec was torn between his desire to be with his new wife and his obligation to his invention. Mabel was dazzled by the attention from titled grandees (“Alec says I will be Lady Bell yet”) but frequently found herself alone in the Glasgow hotel, watching the rain fall on the statues of Queen Victoria and Sir Walter Scott in the square outside her window.

When Sir William Thomson, who had been a judge at the Philadelphia Exhibition the previous year, asked Alec to attend the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in the English coastal town of Plymouth, Lady Thomson invited Mabel to sit with her. The normally self-possessed nineteen-year-old suffered a momentary loss of confidence: “I am so frightened to think how ill I can act my part as ‘Graham Bells’ wife… . O I wish I were safe at home. I’d give up all hopes of being Lady Bell and all the glories of being the wife of a successful inventor, everything, but being Alec’s wife to come home to quiet humbleness.”

Alec himself was beginning to show signs of nervous strain: the sciatic pain in his right leg returned, and he complained of headaches. But his appearance at Plymouth was a triumph. The butterstamp telephones performed beautifully, and Sir William gave his opinion that this was one of the most important inventions he had ever seen. Up until now, most British scientists had regarded the telephone as “a scientific toy of no commercial value,” Alec later recalled, “but when Sir William Thomson spoke, the world believed.” The
Exeter and Plymouth Gazette
reported that “[t]he telephone is beyond all measure the lion of the Association meeting.”

Alec had written to his mother from the
Anchoria,
“I cannot tell you what a longing I have to see again the places I remember so well, London, Bath, Edinburgh and Elgin.” At the end of September, he disentangled himself from telephone business and headed north with his wife. They visited the house on Edinburgh’s Charlotte Square in which Alec had grown up, then traveled to northeast Scotland so that Mabel could see Elgin, the little market town where a sixteen-year-old Alec had spent a happy eighteen months teaching music and elocution at Weston House.

Alec had also planned a second honeymoon on the Moray coast, with Mabel and himself “roughing it” in a seaside cottage and living off fish they caught themselves. Mabel had some reservations about her husband’s romantic fantasy. “Neither one of us ever saw a fish cooked much less ever did it ourselves,” she told her mother. “Alec appears to think it a very simple operation but I have an idea that the fish has to be opened and cleaned, and a part of its inside taken out first—Is it so?” But Alec was unstoppable. Undeterred by the sharp autumn wind, he found a pony cart to take them to the tiny village of Covesea, six miles north of Elgin. When they arrived at the straggle of stone cottages perched on the cliff top, he persuaded a surprised local woman, Mrs. Cameron, to rent them a room in her house. Mrs. Cameron watched indulgently as her newlywed American guests proved hopeless housekeepers. Neither of them could get a kettle to boil on the open fire, and the smoke from the fireplace induced a migraine in Alec. Alec’s idea of a weeks provisions had consisted of only one loaf of bread, half a pound of sugar, and a pound of butter. Their landlady took pity on these American ingenues. “To my great joy,” Mabel wrote home, “Mrs. Cameron now boils our eggs, tea and potatoes for us.” Mrs. Cameron’s “lassie” walked to the next village of Lossiemouth to restock.

The fish-and-oatmeal diet was monotonous, and the bed was too short for Alec, but the young couple were determined to enjoy themselves. Each day they walked along the wonderful, firm sands of the Moray coast, or over the red sandstone cliffs, until they found a spot where Mabel could sit, sketch, and read while Alec wandered off. Sometimes he collected rocks: other times he took a pistol, to shoot rabbits. One day, back in the cottage, he used up the whole week’s supply of sugar lumps by investigating whether it was the sugar itself or the air in the sugar lump that caused air bubbles to rise to the cup’s surface as hot tea caused the lump to melt. “What a man my husband is,” Mabel wrote fondly. “I am perfectly bewildered at the number and size of the ideas with which his head is crammed. I give you a list: Flying machines to which telephones and torpedoes are to be attached occupy the first place just now from observations of sea gulls. Practicability of attaching telephones to the wire fence. His mind is full of these two…. Then he goes climbing about the rocks and forming theories on the origins of cliffs and caves….”

In the evenings, Alec sprawled in the only comfortable chair, absorbed in Sir Walter Scott’s novel
Fair Maid of Perth
and oblivious to drafts, discomforts, or his wife’s gaze. Mabel used Scott’s
The Marquis of Lossie
as a writing desk on which to write long letters home. She would occasionally look up to smile at Alec or stare at the forbidding picture of Queen Victoria that hung over the fireplace. They spent the last day on the beach, Alec “wild and full of fun, though rather ashamed that the inventor of the telephone should go wading.” Mabel persuaded him that “he should not be the slave of his own position.” By week’s end, Mabel’s skirts were torn and even Alec had had enough smoked herring. But happy memories of Covesea’s stiff breezes, panoramic views, and isolation remained with both Bells, shaping their ideas of the ideal retreat from the world.

The second honeymoon was a welcome interlude before the Bells’ next plunge into the universe of telephones. During their first four months in Britain, Alec gave at least twelve telephone lectures and demonstrations in England and Scotland, drawing crowds as large, on a couple of occasions, as two thousand people. So many people turned up to hear his talk to the London Society of Arts and Manufactures that it had to be repeated a few days later. He also gave many private demonstrations, including one from the depths of a Newcastle coal mine to the surface, and one in London between divers in the Thames.

Alec was, however, finding it far harder to set up a British Bell Telephone Company than he had anticipated. He faced a thicket of regulations, plus challenges to his patent. The telephones that Tom Watson had made for him to take across the Atlantic were subject to breakages, and there was no one with Tom’s skills available to fix them or to manufacture new ones. There were rumors that the telephone might carry diseases as well as messages, and that others on the line could eavesdrop on private conversations. Alec’s partner, William Reynolds, was not proving to be much good at getting the business on its feet. Various British instrument makers were infringing Alec’s British patent, and now an emissary from Thomas Edison, Alec’s nemesis, had arrived from the United States and was both promoting an Edison telephone and trying to lure Reynolds away from the Bell model. Mabel told her parents that her husband yearned to return to America “but he thinks he can be of much more use here.”

There was an additional reason to keep the Bells in Britain longer than expected. “My darling, darling, sweet, little, wee Mother,” Mabel wrote to Gertrude Hubbard, in a letter marked
Private,
“O Mamma darling, if I only could put my arms tight around you and ask you if it may really, really be true what Alec and I are just beginning to hope may be.” A month before the Covesea adventure, Mabel had started complaining of feeling ill in the mornings, and had then gone on a shopping spree for “little flannel wrappers.” In mid-October, Alec insisted that Mabel consult a doctor as to whether a transatlantic voyage was appropriate for a woman in what everybody euphemistically described as “a delicate condition.” After the medical consultation, Mabel told Alec that he himself must break the sad news to his own parents that it would be several months before they would see their beloved only son. Alec dutifully wrote to “My own dear Papa and Mama”: “I long for one look at your dear faces and for the sound of your voices again. But…I write specifically to explain our sudden change of plan.” The doctor had said the voyage did involve some risk to Mabel, so “we shall take a furnished house for six months with the privilege of remaining for a year if advisable.”

For all her matter-of-fact tone, Mabel was apprehensive. The prospect of giving birth in an unfamiliar country would have intimidated any young woman in the late nineteenth century, when women often died in childbirth from septicemia and when babies often didn’t see their first birthdays. It was even more challenging for Mabel, far from her family and still struggling to lip-read a wild assortment of different accents (“bath” was pronounced differently everywhere she stayed). Since husbands never attended doctor’s appointments or delivery rooms, who would accompany Mabel through pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing, or even help her outfit herself with a new wardrobe during her pregnancy and prepare a layette for a baby? In addition, the Bells now had to find a home and establish their own household in London. A middle-class couple like them would be expected to live in one of London’s better neighborhoods (Kensington or Regents Park were Mabels preferences) and to have at least two servants. Alec believed that it was important, in status-conscious England, “to make as good a show as possible.” Her own helplessness in the face of all these challenges, particularly when Alec repeatedly disappeared to spread the telephone gospel, allowed a note of despair to creep into Mabels letters home. “Alec is at Birmingham,” reads one note, “and I feel so stupid with nothing to do but write of which I am dead tired having done nothing else. If only I had some sewing. …”