Reluctant Genius (26 page)

Outwardly, Alec was every inch the respectful subject. But he did not allow the monarch’s almost tangible regality to color his impression of her. “The Queen was humpy, stumpy, dumpy,” he later told Mabel, who sent on the report to her mother. “Her ungloved hand looked like a washerwoman’s so red and coarse and fat, and her face was fat and a bit reddish.” Alec was quietly amused at the way that Her Majesty asked her gentleman-in-waiting to ask Professor Bell various questions, which the courtier then repeated to him “as though he were an Indian and couldn’t understand.” Yet, despite the problem in Cowes and the general hoity-toityness, the demonstration went well. Soon the royal party was chatting into the transmitters to the Biddulphs in Osborne Cottage and nodding enthusiastically as they heard the replies. At one point, Alec crashed through royal protocol by touching the queen’s hand in order to get her attention. This was the way he always caught his wife’s attentions, but the courtiers were appalled. However, Her Majesty was prepared to overlook the faux pas from this clever, albeit uncouth, “American.”

After the royal party left the Council Room, Alec received a request from the queen that he demonstrate his invention to her “upper servants.” That night, Victoria wrote in her journal that the telephone was “extraordinary,” but added, doubtfully, “it is rather faint, and one must hold the tube close to one’s ear.” The following day,
The Times
carried a long account of the demonstration, under the heading “The Telephone at Court,” and reported that “Her Majesty … and the entire Royal Household evinced the greatest interest.” Sir Thomas Biddulph asked Alec if the queen could purchase the telephones. Alec had always intended to present them to her. “The story of Alec’s touching the Queen,” Mabel told her mother, “has grown until the latest version is that he took hold of her
arm and pulled,
and she sweetly smiled.”

The queen’s well-reported interest spurred William Reynolds to issue a prospectus for the proposed telephone company, with an ambitious projected capitalization of £500,000 (several million pounds in today’s currency). It was none too soon, in Mabel’s view. “Wherever you go, on newsstands, at news stores, stationers, photographers, toy shops, fancy goods shops, you see the eternal little black box with red face, and the word ‘Telephone’ in large black letters,” she told Alec’s mother. “Advertisements say that 700,000 have been sold in a few weeks.” These “Domestic Telephones” were simply toys. More seriously, unscrupulous British manufacturers were now selling assemble-it-yourself copies of Alec’s invention: each purchaser bought a box containing the magnet, iron plate, coil, wooden handle, and mouthpiece in it, with instructions on how to put it together in five minutes. Alec was sick with outrage at this infringement of his British patent. His partner, Reynolds, threatened legal action.

There were further pitfalls. Reynolds’s proposed company ran into difficulties because various of Alec’s rivals contested his British patents via both the courts and letters to
The Times.
Moreover, the scientists at Plymouth may have been convinced of the telephone’s value, but the great British public was resistant. Since the nation boasted both the best mail service in the world and an extensive and efficient telegraph system, why did it need a speaking machine? “In America,” commented
The Times,
“with long lengths of single wire, and a fine dry climate, the telephone may perhaps come into use practically. But in England, with most of the telegraph wires already overweighed, it is hardly likely to become more than an electrical toy, or a drawing-room telegraph, or at most a kind of electrical speaking tube.” In the end, Reynolds raised only £20,000 through the sale of shares, and the company limped along, badly managed and undercapitalized.

By now Alec was realizing how little he liked the commercial side of invention. He far preferred developing a new call-bell system, or improving telephone reception. And the less attention he paid to the British Bell Telephone Company, the less confidence his fellow directors placed in him. At the same time, he failed to apply for a German patent, and he nearly lost the French patent. Meanwhile, Thomas Edison had devised a new kind of receiver, using carbon instead of acidulated water, that did not infringe Alec’s patent and that worked better than the Bell model. Edison started selling Edison telephones in England. Alec grew steadily more depressed. “Business,” he wrote to his father-in-law, “is hateful to me at all times.” As the months in England dragged on and his hopes of cashing in on his invention slipped away, business became even more odious.

There was, however, one new role in which Alec delighted. “My dear Mama,” he wrote to his mother, in Brantford, on May 10, 1878. “Our little baby has at last come into this world—unlike its Papa and Mama, punctual … such a funny black little thing it is! Perfectly formed, with a full crop of dark hair, bluish eyes, and a complexion so swarthy that Mabel declares she has given birth to a
red Indian!
… I can’t say much about good looks … but she is our own baby and that is enough for us.” Gertrude Hubbard had arrived in West Cromwell Road a few weeks earlier, along with Sister, to help Mabel with her confinement. Everything had gone smoothly, although “poor Mabel had a fearful time, and even begged to be killed, but…the pain and anguish have been quite forgotten in the happiness of the mother in the possession of her child.” The baby was named Elsie May—Elsie (a Scottish variant of Eliza) after Alec’s mother, and May for both Mabel and her own birth month.

Mabel quickly adapted to motherhood. Gertrude Hubbard was impressed by her daughters domestic competence. “Mabel superintends her household,” she wrote to Alec’s mother, “as quickly and with as much ease and self-reliance as though she had been mistress of a house for years.” Mabel kept Elsie in a pillow-lined drawer on her bed so the vibrations of the baby’s movements at night easily woke her. And Alec privately assuaged his own unspoken fears about his firstborn child. A few days after his daughter’s birth, he stole into Mabel’s room, and standing behind the canopied bed, he blew a loud blast on a trumpet. He later told a friend that “Mabel never moved, but the little one flung out its arms and legs and shrieked in terror.”

Sadly, financial anxiety undermined the domestic bliss. Both Alec and Mabel recognized they were spending money faster than Alec was earning it. Public interest in telephone lectures was dwindling, and the British Bell Telephone Company had still not been launched. In the late summer of 1878, Alec was angered to hear that both Elisha Gray and Thomas Edison were publicly challenging his telephone patent in Washington. Moreover, the unscrupulous William Orton had decided to ignore Bell’s patent and manufacture a telephone that incorporated the inventions of Thomas Edison, Elisha Gray, and another Boston-area inventor, Amos E. Dolbear. Western Union was now illegally selling these telephones, which used the company’s extensive network of telegraph lines throughout the United States. The American Bell Telephone Company, with Gardiner Hubbard at the controls, launched a suit against Western Union, accusing the company of infringing Bell’s patent. It was a wildly uneven battle—an underfinanced, sickly David against a mighty, well-capitalized Goliath.

Mabel was outraged by these developments. “The more I think of it,” she wrote of the accusations and the infringements of her husbands patent (he was giving telephone demonstrations in Ireland at the time), “the more it seems like a deliberate attempt not only to rob you of all credit in your own discovery, but also to convey the impression that you are a thief….” At first, Alec tried to brush off the accusations, assuring his wife that “Truth and Justice will triumph in the end.” But he gradually realized that his competitors were seriously damaging his reputation. By the spring, his father-in-law was suggesting to him that he should return to the United States to fight for his patent. Later that summer, Gardiner Hubbard’s suggestion had become as close to a command as he dared to make it.

Predictably, Gardiner’s manner and Alec’s own dread of conflict and paperwork triggered a volcanic explosion. “I am sick of the telephone,” he announced to Mabel, “and have done with it altogether, excepting as a plaything to amuse my leisure moments.” Instead, he told her, he was going to return to his first love: teaching the deaf. Asked by a school in Greenock, Scotland, to find a Visible Speech teacher for the deaf, the celebrated inventor rushed north and installed himself into the dusty, unfurnished classroom as teacher for three young girls. “I have been absolutely rusting from inaction—hoping that my services might be wanted somewhere,” he tried to explain to Mabel. Escape from telephone trials made him giddy and melodramatic.

Now I am needed and needed here. I am not going to forsake my little school just when it is struggling for existence—though the telephone should go to ruin—and though my wife and child should return to America and leave me here to work alone.

Let me go back to the work I love if I can find support for us both. Don’t let me be fettered to an unwelcome task. I shall always work at Telephony, but let it be from a love of science, and from a wish to help on the advancement of knowledge. Don’t let me be bound hand and soul to the Telephone, I don’t want to make it my sole means of support. The position of Inventor is a hard and thankless one. The more fame a man gets for an invention, the more does he become a target for the world to shoot at—while no one seems to think the inventor deserving of pecuniary assistance.

Alec’s pen scratched on as he worked himself into a fever of self-sacrifice. “Of one thing I am determined and that is to waste no more time and money on the telephone…. Let others endure the worry, the anxiety and expense. I will have none of it. … A feverish anxious life like that I have been leading since our marriage would soon change my whole nature. Already it has begun injuring me and I feel myself growing irritable, feverish and disgusted with life.” Once a permanent teacher had arrived at the Greenock school, he loftily informed his wife, they would return to Brantford and he would find a teaching job in Ontario. One of his final engagements in England would be a series of lectures that he agreed to give in Oxford on “Speech.”

Mabel must have been momentarily floored by this outburst, but she knew her husband well by now. A mollified Alec reappeared in London three weeks later to help her and Mary Home pack up their household. Mabel bit her tongue when Alec booked a passage for his family on October 31, 1878, aboard the steamship
Sardinian
to Quebec instead of Boston or New York, as her father was expecting, so that he could travel straight to Brantford without calling at the Bell Telephone Company headquarters in Boston. Once at sea, Alec’s temper improved as he watched their fellow passengers fuss over Elsie May. He noted that Elsie’s daily bath in the Ladies’ Cabin was “a feature of attraction to all the ladies on board.” Their fellow passenger the Hon. Edward Blake, a prominent Canadian politician, “was so fond of her that he would take her in his arms and trot up and down the saloon with her many times every day.”

From a business point of view, the Bells’ year in Britain had not been a success. Despite Alec’s lectures and the demonstration for Queen Victoria, the telephone was still regarded by the general public as a toy and by his rivals as an invention to be pirated. Moreover, the British post office was eager to protect its monopoly on telegraphtraffic, and downplayed the advantages of voice-to-voice communication. Then there was the class issue. Those who, in Britain, could afford a telephone usually had servants to run errands and deliver notes for them, and were reluctant to absorb this newfangled, democratic American invention into the elaborate etiquette of the late Victorian years. In any household with aristocratic pretensions, nobody wanted to deal with a crucial question: If a telephone bell rang, should master or servant answer it?

The following year, Gardiner Hubbard would travel to London to rescue the faltering British Bell Telephone Company. He reorganized and recapitalized it, and found London lawyers to protect its patents. It was soon thriving, although Britain would long lag behind other Western nations in the spread of the telephone. But in the fall of 1878, Alexander Graham Bell’s smooth passage across the Atlantic was a mere ten-day period of calm before the storm—a vicious and protracted legal battle in the United States.

Chapter 11

L
ITIGATION
B
ATTLES
1878-1880

I
n
early November 1878, the
Sardinian
steamed up the mighty St. Lawrence River, docking at Quebec City on November 10. Alec and Mabel, along with Mary Home, Annie (the English nursemaid who accompanied them to Canada), and her charge, five-month-old Elsie, gathered at the top of the gangplank, staring up at the cliff above them and at the cramped streets, gray stone houses, and slender-steepled churches that clung to it. Alec, his woolen coat flapping in the wind, was happy to be home. All of a sudden, his attention was caught by the sound of a familiar voice yelling his name above the babble of porters, sailors, and reunited families. Searching the crowd, he picked out the boyish face and unruly dark hair of Thomas Watson, his Boston assistant. Sixteen months earlier, Watson had been named superintendent of the Bell Telephone Company, as well as one of its five shareholders. Alec’s spontaneous smile of recognition was soon replaced by an angry frown. He knew why Watson was here.

Watson elbowed his way through the crowd toward the Bells as they disembarked. The young machinist was struck by how a year in Europe had changed the thirty-one-year-old inventor. Alec’s thick wavy hair was still inky black, but the once-bushy whiskers were now neatly trimmed, his frock coat had a stylish cut, and his greater girth gave him a gravitas he had previously lacked. There was a new confidence about Mabel too, as she directed Mary to help find their bags and checked that Elsie was still asleep in Annie’s arms. But Watson could see, from Alec’s furrowed brow and the grim set of his mouth, that this would be a difficult encounter.