Reluctant Genius (27 page)

With a one-tenth interest in all of Alec’s patents, Tom Watson had a considerable stake in the Bell Company’s future—as did Alec’s two major business partners, Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders. Desperately needing Alec’s testimony for their suit against Western Union, they had agreed that Watson should intercept Alec in Quebec City and bring him to Boston. The Patent Office required a preliminary statement by each claimant, setting forth his claim to the invention: the dates when he had conceived the idea and when he had first constructed a working instrument. Hubbard, Sanders, and Watson had filed supporting statements, but Alec was the inventor, so his evidence was pivotal. The Patent Office had already extended the deadline for Alec’s statement several times; if he did not file it by late November, the suit would die and Western Union would be able to ride roughshod over Bell’s patent claims. Gardiner Hubbard knew, however, that Alec had told Mabel he was determined “to waste no more time and money on the telephone…. Let others endure the worry, the anxiety and expense.” This horrified his business partners, who faced bankruptcy unless he got involved. Thomas Sanders had already invested $110,000 (well over $2 million in today’s currency) in Alec Bell’s invention and had still not seen a cent in return.

“I found Bell even more dissatisfied with the telephone business than his letters indicated,” Watson recalled in his autobiography. “He told me he wasn’t going to have anything more to do with it.” Standing quietly in the chilly November air, Watson listened to Alec rant that he hated the world of commerce and the slurs on his integrity. Why should he waste time with greedy lawyers when he could do far more good helping deaf people? He was an honest inventor, not a businessman; if the other shareholders were so keen on this business, why couldn’t they deal with all of this?

When Alec had finally blown off all his steam, Watson assured him that the telephone business was going much better in the United States than in Britain, that it had a great future, and that everybody stood to make a lot of money if only he would come to Boston now. Alec’s black eyes flashed with exasperation as he turned his gaze on his wife. Mabel remained silent as she watched his lips, but her husband knew that she agreed wholeheartedly with Watson. He could feel her quietly willing him to join her father in the fight to save their company—the company that bore his name. Alec gave a sigh, then agreed to go to Boston, but only after he had delivered Mabel, Elsie, Mary, and Annie to Brantford. “I went with him,” noted Watson, “because I didn’t want to run the risk of losing him.”

Throughout the voyage on the
Sardinian,
Alec had looked forward to seeing his parents. Knowing how much his mother still mourned the loss of two sons and a grandson, he longed to see her face when he presented her with her first granddaughter. He had been imagining her face for weeks, and now Gardiner Hubbard was spoiling his homecoming. Would the chilly Boston lawyer never leave him alone? Would he never acknowledge that Alec had obligations to his own family, as well as to his wife’s? Paperphobic to the last, Alec’s heart sank as he thought about the laborious task of writing out the whole history of his telephone experiments. There were two other matters on his mind, too. He had virtually no money left: he insisted Watson send a telegram to Hubbard asking, “Will company pay Bell’s expenses incurred in its services to Boston and back?” (The reply, “Yes,” arrived the same day.) And he was suffering acute stomach pains. The following day, during the long railroad journey to Montreal and on to Toronto, he had two shivering fits and nearly fainted several times.

Mabel anxiously watched her husband, white-faced and preoccupied, as the train steamed through the monotonous forests of dark evergreens punctuated by fields of bare earth or of dried cornstalks. Was his illness brought on by stress, or was it something more serious? When the Bells finally arrived in Brantford, Alec’s mother was so perturbed by her son’s obvious discomfort that she barely looked at baby Elsie before she sent for the local doctor. He announced that two abscesses were the cause of Alec’s pain and fever; he lanced one, but could do nothing for the second. The following day, Mabel reported to her mother, Alec was better, but still “very weak and looks so dreadful I am frightened.” Yet Thomas Watson was pacing the porch at Tutelo Heights, and Mabel knew her father might be ruined if her husband didn’t get on the train to Boston immediately. After a tearful farewell, she watched Melville Bell drive Alec and Watson off in the pony cart to Brantford Station. She could see Alec wince every time a wheel hit a stone.

A terrible sense of anticlimax descended on Tutelo Heights once the pony cart was out of sight. Both Mabel and Eliza Bell had tears in their eyes, but each was too shy to share her misery. They still barely knew each other, and they were shackled by their difficulties of communication. After staring helplessly into each other’s face, they retreated in different directions. Eliza went into the kitchen to look after dinner. Mabel checked that Elsie was safe with Annie, then wearily climbed the stair to her bedroom and poured out her anxieties to her own mother in a penciled scrawl: “O Mama I feel so unhappy to let him go alone,” she wrote. But Alec had insisted she remain in Brantford, to allow his mother to enjoy Elsie, “so I can say nothing.… O I want so much to be with you, see your little house in Washington.”

Mabel and her mother-in-law were right to worry about Alec’s health. His condition deteriorated during his journey, and as soon as he arrived in Boston he went straight to Massachusetts General Hospital to have the second abscess lanced. When this news reached Brantford, Mabel insisted on leaving Canada with Elsie and Annie, and rushing to his side. At the hospital in Boston, she found Alec close to panic. He was in great pain, but he had refused to face the risk of surgery, during which ether would be administered, until she was with him. Happily, once the surgery was performed, his condition and spirits improved rapidly. “He likes his nurses extremely and threatens not to come back to me at all,” Mabel told her mother-in-law. “He is very glad he came on, it was the most fortunate thing because in Brantford he could not have had the skill and care he had here.” He recovered enough to dictate to Watson from his hospital bed the preliminary statement that his business partners had been so impatient for him to file with the Patent Office. It arrived in Washington just before the final extension to the deadline expired.

Alec left hospital on Monday, November 31, and joined his wife and daughter in Mary Blatchfords house in Cambridge. At first, Cousin Mary was snappy with the invalid: despite his fame and success, her lip continued to curl at his pedigree. But her icy snobbery melted as she discovered she and Alec had two things in common: insomnia and a love of literature. And Alec was
awfully
good at recitation: you could almost
see
the characters he was portraying. While Mabel slept on the sofa, Alec read to Mary with all the passion and intensity that had made his father such a successful public performer. Mary always picked up her needlework when he began, but she was soon far too mesmerized to ply her needle. It would be hours before Alec might start to yawn, and Mary would look at the clock and realize it was almost dawn and they
must
go to bed. But Alec’s convalescence was brief and the demands of the court case pressing. “Alec has been hard at work,” Mabel reported to Eliza Bell in December, “at [rewriting and expanding] his preliminary statement for the Patent Office, looking over old models and letters.”

The clash between the Bell Telephone Company and the Western Union Telegraph Company had turned very nasty, because demand for telephones had exploded. When the Bells had sailed off to Glasgow a year earlier, there had been about 1,100 telephones, the majority rented from Bell, in use in North America. A year later, there were several thousand telephones in all parts of the United States. Western Union, with more than $40 million in capitalization and $3 million a year in net profits, had set up the American Speaking Telephone Company. This subsidiary was outselling the Bell Company, with telephones that incorporated Edison’s patented carbon transmitter, which made reception much clearer. Western Union crews responsible for new lines had the huge advantage of being able to piggyback onto the telegraph network already in place—they could easily string telephone wires to the existing telegraph poles. Bell crews had to work around the clock, erecting new poles as well as stringing new wires. Western Union employed all the ruthless tactics of a company bent on a monopoly. It cut telephone rates (and, it was rumored, Bell Company telephone wires) and assured its customers that they would be reimbursed in the unlikely event that the Bell Telephone Company would win the patent suit. By the time the Bells sailed home, most major U.S. cities had two competing telephone systems in use.

Meanwhile, the Bell Telephone Company was in a serious cash crunch. Gardiner Hubbard, an entrepreneur and promoter who always operated on a wing and a prayer, had been blithely ordering telephones from Williams’s shop before he had customers ready to rent them. Thomas Sanders, who had deep pockets, was getting nervous. While Alec was still in England, Sanders wrote to Gardiner Hubbard, “How on earth do you expect me to meet a draft of two hundred and seventy five dollars without a dollar in the treasury and with a debt of thirty thousand dollars staring at us in the face?” Bell Company employees had not been paid for weeks, and were lending each other carfare and sharing their lunch-buckets. Williams and other suppliers were all pressing for payments owed to them. Before Alec and Mabel had returned to North America, Sanders had managed to persuade Hubbard to reorganize the company and sell some stock, in order to stave off collapse, but it was still touch-and-go. The Bell Telephone Company’s future depended on victory in the suit against Western Union.

Soon after Christmas, Alec joined his father-in-law first in Boston and then in Washington for endless meetings with the company lawyers. At first he was facetious about events. “My darling little wife,” he wrote to Mabel, who was with her grandfather in New York City, in January 1879. “Telephonically a storm is brewing! Thermometer ever so far below zero—and Bradley [an investor], Sanders, Vail [the company’s general manager] etc. shivering over the ashes of the Bell Telephone Company!” But his good humor evaporated as he realized that Gardiner Hubbard’s rather slippery reputation was injuring the confidence of some of the other investors. “My sweet darling wife,” he wrote a week later. “I am troubled and anxious and don’t know what to do.”

Mabel rushed to reassure him: “My darling I long for you so much you dear big black fellow (take care that the worry and excitement now doesn’t turn your hair gray!).” Gardiner Hubbard, with Alec’s support, managed to stare down his challengers, but he was forced to play a less public role in the company. And soon Mabel was finding frequent separations as painful as Alec, and realizing that she simply didn’t care if he was the untidiest person she had ever met—she wanted him and his mess back. In March she wrote, “I miss you dreadfully every moment, but manage to get along until I think that you are gone for a long time and not for a few days and then my heart and courage go down into my boots.… I am writing in your study now, such a frightfully good order as it is in, swept and varnished as if you were dead and buried. I hate the sight of it and wish I had left it as it was this morning.”

Alec’s spirits were not improved by Western Union’s attacks on the Bell Company. Articles started appearing in newspapers that suggested that Bell had stolen the telephone from Gray, and that he was not a sufficiently skilled electrician to have made the scientific breakthrough. Alec was outraged: “I can’t bear to hear that even my friends should think that I stumbled upon an invention and that there is no more good in me.” There were even whispers that the U.S. Patent Office had shared information illegally with Bell, making his patents invalid. Bell Telephone stock prices crept downward.

The Bell Company’s suit for patent infringement against Western Unions telephone subsidiary opened on January 25, 1879. Western Union had built its case, in the words of Bell biographer Robert V. Bruce, “around the proposition that undulatory currents were not new with Bell and that Dolbear, for example, had preceded him in consciously achieving that effect.” But the Bell Company lawyer, a canny old bird named Chauncey Smith, had decided to base his strategy not on Bell’s focus on undulatory currents but on the whole principle of using electricity for transmitting speech, as exemplified by the instruments described in the 1876 patents. “Smith’s strategy,” notes Bruce, “was to be of fundamental significance in the outcome. Through it the Bell interests would win control of the basic principle of telephony, not merely of some particular devices in it.”

First, however, each side had to amass and present its evidence. Mabel enlisted the help of Cousin Mary to go through the accumulation of her husband’s notebooks and papers in the Hubbards’ home on Brattle Street. Thomas Watson spent days preparing models of the original telephones. Alec hunkered down in a Boston library, hunting up references to earlier experiments. The lawsuit was particularly irksome for him because he already had another invention in mind. “Oh! That those lawsuits were ended!” he wrote despondently in March. “I am afraid to make more inventions, for fear of being dragged into an interminable business connection with the Company.”

In Boston, Mabel realized that if the Bell patent was successfully defended, it would be thanks to her father’s efforts with lawyers and evidence rather than to her husband. A letter from her mother, in Washington, gave her a sense of the hysteria surrounding the case. “We hear Mr. Edison is working indefatigably,” Gertrude wrote. “He now has twenty-five different kinds of telephones, the last a water telephone, a marvel of loudness and distinctness. The W. U. [Western Union] have engaged all his time and efforts for five years and pay him a weekly sum beside furnishing him unlimited means for electrical instruments, chemical collections of minerals and whatever can aid him. He has a stenographer at his side taking down every new idea or experiment. The W. U. are bent upon improving Alec’s patents, or making a telephone which shall wholly supplant his. Alec cannot afford to be an agent, he needs his mind free to meet and overcome a most powerful and unscrupulous foe.” But Gertrude concluded her letter on a reassuring note: “Papa has no anxiety as to the final issue.”