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Authors: Charlotte Gray

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Along with his brothers, Alec embraced the exciting new medium of photography. The technology was still in its earliest stages, and the boys laboriously coated glass plates with collodion, dunked them into a pan of silver nitrate, exposed them to the desired image, then developed them. The process took hours and the results were often disappointing, but Alec would always persevere. This was the kind of learning he liked: hands-on discovery. And he could lose himself in music. He would sit at the piano, sight-reading sheet music with extraordinary ease. He would play so intensely, with such concentration, for so long that he would end up with a splitting headache.

A studio photograph of Alec at fifteen, taken in 1862, a few months after he left the Royal High School, shows a skinny, clean-shaven young man with a prominent nose, thick, dark hair swept back from a broad brow, and an intense gaze. The debonair young gentleman in this portrait looks closer to twenty than his real age, particularly as he is holding a top hat so shiny it could have belonged to an undertaker. This young cosmopolite is a dramatic contrast to the unkempt youngster who appears in the blurred family photos of earlier years. The studio photograph was taken during the year Alec lived with his widowed grandfather in London. The older Alexander Bell had taken his grandson in hand in no uncertain terms, insisting that the young man spend more time on his studies, practice the piano more regularly, and dress like an English gentleman rather than a Scottish farm boy. He had made Alec exchange his comfortable, shabby tweeds for an Eton jacket. However, the photograph suggests that Alec didn’t enjoy this enforced transformation: he holds his top hat awkwardly, and looks distinctly uncomfortable. Throughout his life, he resisted attempts to dress him up or pin him down for studio photos—Alexander Graham Bell always hated “ceremony.” Nevertheless, his year in London, away from home, gave him a taste for freedom from paternal pressure. His year with his grandfather, he would write, “converted me from a boy somewhat prematurely into a man.”

By now, young Alec had sensed that he needed more education, even if his high school record was dismal. Because money was tight in the Bell household, he and Melly made a deal: one would stay home in Edinburgh and attend university for a year or two while the other earned the money to pay for it, then they would trade places. So when Alec was sixteen, he left home to teach for a year at Weston House, a boys’ boarding school in the handsome old market town of Elgin on the Moray coast, in the northeast corner of Scotland. In return for teaching piano and elocution, he received board, ten pounds, and further instruction in Latin and Greek. In the meantime, Melly attended the University of Edinburgh. Between August 1863 and early 1866, everything went roughly according to plan. Alec spent a total of eighteen months in this period in Elgin, where his students were so impressed by his serious demeanor and London manners that they never realized that several of them were older than he was. He reveled in his independence, and in the dramatic landscape: “I spent many happy hours lying among the heather on the Scottish hills, breathing in the scenery around me with a quiet delight that is even now pleasant for me to remember.”

But two developments ensured that Melly and Alec’s plan would never be completed.

The first was their father’s obsession with his universal phonetic system. By now, Melville Bell had nearly perfected Visible Speech, and he decided that before he published it he should drum up public support in the hope of getting a government subsidy for the book. After Alec’s return from Elgin in the summer of 1864, Melville drilled the three brothers in his elaborate system of notation. Then he took his boys on the road. In Edinburgh, Glasgow, and London, various speech experts dictated words to Professor Bell in different accents, dialects, and languages, including Hindi, Persian, and Urdu. While his sons remained outside the room, Professor Bell transcribed them onto a blackboard in Visible Speech symbols. Then he invited one of his sons into the room. Reading the carefully transcribed lines of horseshoes, lines, hooks, and crossbars, Alec or one of his brothers would reproduce the sounds perfectly. In one packed theater, Alec was summoned on stage by his father to reproduce sounds that, it seemed to him, could have no meaning to anybody. The symbol that Melville had written on the blackboard required him to blow a puff of air while the tip of his tongue touched the roof of his mouth. When he performed this act of lingual gymnastics, the audience burst into applause. Alec had reproduced one of the most obscure sounds in the universe: the Sanskrit cerebral T, described by a linguistics professor in the audience as almost impossible for an English-speaking person to pronounce. “The professor expressed surprise,” Alec later noted, “that Mr. Bell’s son should have given it correctly at the very first trial, without ever having heard the sound at all.”

Alec enjoyed doing the demonstrations—they weren’t so different from the parlor games at family parties—but they diverted him from his goal of a university education. They didn’t even elicit the hoped-for government subsidy. However, the demonstrations did spur Alec toward experiments of his own into the production of sounds. He started playing around with a set of tuning forks, to investigate the composition of vowel sounds. His keen ear had allowed him to detect that certain vowel sequences were composed of both ascending and descending musical scales. He also devised instruments with stretched membranes, to measure the vibrations in air created by human speech—instruments that were a crucial step toward what would become his greatest invention.

The second development that sabotaged Alec’s hopes for a decent education was his brother Edward’s deteriorating health. By now, Alec’s grandfather had died and Melville and Eliza Bell had moved to London, where they established themselves in his house in Harrington Square, just behind Euston Station. Melville was convinced that he would be able to lobby officials for recognition of the Visible Speech system more easily from here. But his youngest son, Edward, known as Ted, had begun to lose weight, to cough, and to struggle for breath. The Bells watched with sinking hearts: these were the warning symptoms of tuberculosis, the contagious lung disease that flourished in the dank, sooty atmosphere of nineteenth-century cities. Tuberculosis—variously known as TB, consumption, or the Great White Plague—was as much a scourge and a stigma as AIDS today. A diagnosis of tuberculosis spelled the end of a young man’s hopes for a glittering career, or a young woman’s hopes of a good marriage. There was no cure. The only remedy that sometimes worked was prolonged rest in a sanatorium somewhere far from polluted industrial cities like Edinburgh and London. But the Bells could not afford to send Ted away. Instead, the young man lay on the couch in the drawing room, in the largest, dirtiest city in the world, growing paler and weaker by the day.

With money even tighter now, Alec’s parents wanted their boys close in this family crisis, so Alec moved to England. But he firmly resisted his father’s demand that he move back into the family home. Instead, he struggled to make a living from teaching in a school in Bath, on the edge of the English Cotswolds, and tried to enroll in a university degree course. For a young man sensitive to family duty but eager to carve out his own path, this was a grim time. Alec was now taller than his father, which only seemed to make Melville even more pugnacious in argument. Jutting out his bushy beard as if it were a weapon, Melville would vociferously oppose his son’s plans to combine teaching and studies, insisting that Alec’s health would suffer. Alec’s health certainly seems to have been unreliable: he complained of headaches, depression, and sleeplessness. Perhaps this wasn’t surprising considering the undisciplined intensity of his work habits. In a pattern that would last a lifetime, he would sit up all night reading by the yellow glow of gas lamps or working obsessively on sound experiments. He stumbled toward his bed only when he saw the pale light of dawn seeping through the curtains. His health problems and his careless disregard for them drove his mother into a fever of overprotectiveness (“Keep clear of pickles … take a dose of Cammomilla on going to bed, and one of Belladonna on getting up … wear your flannel shirts … surrender yourself to Papa’s judgment”).

The pressure to live at home was relentless. His parents yearned for his company: “We would not like to be without one of you at home,” his mother wrote. Then, in 1867, the dreaded blow fell. Edward, aged only eighteen, passed away. “Sorrow we can never cease to feel for the loss of our darling Edward,” his heartbroken mother wrote, “but it must be a sorrow chastened by submission to the will of God. He was a dear good boy and our way will be dark without him.” With Ted gone, twenty-year-old Alec could no longer keep his distance from his father. He reluctantly sacrificed his hard-won autonomy and joined his bereaved parents in London. Melville and Eliza were immensely relieved, because, like most parents, they firmly believed that they knew better than their son what was good for him. “Young birds are very prone to try the strength of their wings too soon,” Eliza added. “The parent birds know best the proper time for independent flying.”

Residence in Harrington Square had its advantages. Alec had more opportunity to play around with the kind of sound experiments he loved, and Trouve, the family’s good-natured Skye terrier, was a willing accomplice. Alec would fill a bowl with scraps of meat, then set to work on the family pet. With a judicious mix of treats and jaw adjustments, he taught Trouve to talk. The terrier was more versatile than the speaking machine of Edinburgh days. “The fame of the dog spread,” Alec later recalled. “Many were the visitors who came to the house to see this dog sit up on his hind legs, and with a little assistance from my hand growl forth the words, ‘How are you Grandmama?’” (Trouve’s repertoire consisted of “Ow,” “ah,” “oo,” “ga,” and “ma.”)

Alec also had the chance to mingle with his father’s colleagues and former students from Edinburgh days. Among the latter was James Murray, who had moved from Edinburgh to London after the death of his wife and child, to work as a bank clerk. Alec’s father decided to take this enthusiastic amateur dialectician along to a meeting of the Philological Society, at which scholars stroked their beards and discussed with enthusiastic pedantry the origin, pronunciation, and meaning of words. Murray would devote his life to the society’s most famous project: the definitive English dictionary, eventually published as the
Oxford English Dictionary.
But in the late 1860s, both James Murray and Alec Bell had other pursuits in mind. In the summer of 1867, Alec was best man at Murray’s second marriage. Alec himself was courting Marie Eccleston, a young trainee teacher from Lancashire who often called at the Bells’ Harrington Square home. Eliza Bell liked this cheerful, rather forceful young woman: “He will not find many like Marie in strength of character,” she wrote to a friend.

Alec was busy these days: he attended physiology and anatomy classes at the University of London and taught deaf children at a private school in Kensington. He and his father were successfully using Visible Speech to teach deaf children to pronounce words correctly, by learning how to shape their mouths. But when Melville Bell traveled to Canada and the United States in 1868 to promote Visible Speech, Alec also had to keep an eye on his father’s pupils and publications in London. He barely slept as he tried to continue his sound experiments despite the added teaching load. When Melville Bell returned from his travels, he found Alec looking skinny, unkempt, and exhausted. This, of course, confirmed Melville’s self-serving view that his son was far too irresponsible to be independent. Alec was “a perfect baby,” Melville wrote to a friend in Canada, “and needs to be told when to wrap up in going out, when to change boots or wet clothes etc. etc.”

Yet the Bells had every reason to worry about their children’s health. In 1868, their eldest son, Melly, who had married a pretty young woman called Carrie Ottoway and had set up a speech therapy practice in Edinburgh, became the proud father of a son, Edward. Before the child reached his second birthday, he died of an unidentified disease that was probably tuberculosis. Alec knew that Melly’s health was also uncertain. Then one day James Murray and his new wife called at the house in Harrington Square. A troubled Alec met them at the door and drew them conspiratorially into the drawing room. Running an agitated hand through his long, lank black hair, he confided to them, “I don’t know how to tell Father, but Melville is bringing up blood again.” Within a few weeks, in late May 1870, the Great White Plague had taken the life of twenty-five-year-old Melly. He was buried next to his grandfather and youngest brother in London’s Highgate Cemetery.

It is hard to imagine the heartbreak in the Bell household. Black crepe was draped over the Harrington Square windows; Eliza retired weeping to bed for days; Melville could barely bring himself to mention his dead sons. For twenty-three-year-old Alec, both the sorrow and the pressure were intense. A few years earlier, he and his brothers had been lively young mischief-makers, tearing up and down the stairs of their Charlotte Street house, terrorizing neighbors and cousins. Death had been treated as a distant joke—as boys, he and Melly had even made a pact that whoever died first would try to contact the other from the afterlife. Now Alec found himself the only surviving brother, missing the easy companionship he had once taken for granted and bearing the impossible weight of his parents’ grief. His home felt like a morgue, and yet he knew that now he could never leave.

Eliza Bell worried incessantly about Alec’s health, and what she called his “head-achey fits.” Melville Bell paced around his London study for hours, his brow knit with frustration. Pain at his loss and anxiety about his remaining son were compounded by the dismay he felt that his precious Visible Speech was going nowhere, despite praise in learned journals. In an effort to make the system more accessible, he had published a simplified version in 1868, in a sixteen-page pamphlet entitled
English Visible Speech for the Million.
But “the Million” chose to ignore it. Only the most ardent philologists understood the point of an extremely complicated system that recorded strange sounds without regard to their meaning.

BOOK: Reluctant Genius
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