Reluctant Genius (30 page)

Alec’s excitement over his new experiments almost overwhelmed another event in the Bells’ life. In late February Mabel wrote to her mother-in-law, “I am on the sofa for the first time this morning, and must try and give you some account of my little one, as I fear Alec has been far too busy with his baby to talk or write much about mine.” On February 15, after only a couple of hours’ labor, Mabel had given birth to a second daughter, who weighed six and a half pounds. “Only think!” Alec wrote gleefully. “Two babies in one week! Mabel’s baby was light enough at birth, but mine was LIGHT ITSELF! Mabel’s baby screamed inarticulately but mine spoke with distinct enunciation from the first!” Mabel managed to dissuade her husband from naming the baby either Electra or Photophone. Instead, the child was given a much more prosaic name—Marian Hubbard, after Mabel’s little sister who had died. She would always be known as Daisy.

Cocooned in the gush of telephone revenues, both Alec and Mabel assumed that there would be more profitable inventions and healthy babies in their future. But their comfortable assumptions would soon be shaken.

Chapter 12

S
AD
L
OSSES
, F
AILED
H
OPES
1880-1885

A
lexander Graham Bell was only thirty-three, and already world-famous. In five short years, he had made both his name and his fortune. The success with the photophone experiments reassured him that there were more adventures ahead in the laboratory. “Can Imagination picture what the future of this invention is to be!” he wrote to his father. No novelist describing a brave new world or poet describing the movement of the planets could have been more prescient or lyrical than Alec as he spoke of his discovery’s potential.

Some of the practical results to be obtained I clearly foresee. When Electric Photophony is practiced in warfare the electric communications of an army could neither be cut nor tapped. On the ocean, communication may be carried on by word of mouth between persons in different vessels when great distances apart—and lighthouses may be identified by the sound of their lights. In general science discoveries will be made by the Photophone that are undreamed of just now. Every variation of a light will produce a sound. The twinkling stars may yet be recognized by characteristic sounds, and storms and sun-spots be detected in the sun.

Alec needed this boost because, like many early achievers, he had been assailed by self-doubt. Would he ever achieve another great invention? Was his brilliant future behind him? The endless litigation battles over his patents gnawed away at his spirits, particularly when his opponents continued to whisper that it was pure luck that a professor of elocution had won the race to invent the talking telegraph. “Oh Mabel dear,” he had earlier written in one downhearted missive. “Please, please, make me describe and publish my ideas that I may at least obtain credit for them and that people may know that I am still alive and thinking.” He wondered whether he should temporarily abandon inventions and instead write a book detailing his telephone research.

Now, however, he was riding high, his confidence restored. At first, the photophone received a much warmer welcome than the telephone had in its early days. The
Times,
in London, congratulated its inventor“ on having made an addition to our scientific knowledge and discovered another possible application of science to practical purpose.” Alec told Mabel, she confided in her mother in July, that he was the “most lucky fellow alive as he has but to hold out his hand and discoveries drop into it.” He immediately sold the photophone prototype and patents to the new president of the National Bell Telephone Company, a cautious Boston financier called William H. Forbes.

Alec’s elation was not dented by whispers that the photophone, in the words of the scientific journal
Nature,
might not have a “widely extended future of usefulness.” He ignored Forbes’s lukewarm welcome for a discovery that he suggested might have less “practical importance” than the telephone. He even shrugged off a nasty little item in the
New York Times
ridiculing an invention that appeared to require “a line of sunbeams hung on telegraph posts.” For once, he seemed to take criticism in his stride. Living in his imagination rather than in the realm of what today we call “mission-driven research,” he gave barely a backward glance when the National Bell Telephone Company allowed the photophone to wilt on the vine. He was too fired up by yet another invention: the spectrophone. Fascinated by what he had already discovered about light, he developed an instrument that could detect by sound the invisible colors of the spectrum. He acknowledged that his instrument was a supplement to, rather than a substitute for, the spectroscope, which had been around since the early 1800s.“Of course, the ear cannot compete with the eye in the examination of the visible part of the spectrum,” he told the Philosophical Society in Washington in April 1881, “but in the invisible part beyond the red, where the eye is useless, the ear is invaluable.” Like the photophone, the spectrophone had no immediate practical application and was soon gathering dust in Alec’s workshop.

Mabel, now an attractive and graceful twenty-three-year-old, was enjoying the newfound stability and solidarity of the Hubbard-Bell clan in the early 1880s. She was no longer the only Hubbard daughter to be married. In January 1880, Mabel’s oldest sister, Gertrude, had married an ebullient Hungarian actor, Maurice Grossman. Gertrude, in Mabel’s words, was “just the daintiest, most fastidious little creature imaginable, the last word in two centuries of New England gentility,” so the Hubbard clan were even less impressed with her choice of husband than they had been with Mabel’s shabby Scotsman. Maurice, Mabel recalled years later, was “so big and rough and unpolished … he wore little gold spectacles and such little sticks of legs supported his huge fat body that I could hardly help laughing.” But Gardiner Hubbard gritted his teeth and welcomed his exotic new son-in-law, even though he had no visible means of support, because his beloved eldest daughter was in love. He had to accept that, at thirty-one, Sister probably knew her own mind—and there were no other suitors on the horizon. Gardiner even found Maurice a job, as president of the International Telephone Company, which Gardiner had recently founded in Germany. This breathtaking piece of nepotism did not faze any of the family. “Maurice had of course little acquaintance with the business details of the organization of companies,” Mabel wrote to Alec’s mother, Eliza, “but he has many influential friends in the chief European capitals and … is very much interested in the telephone.”

Within weeks of Sister’s wedding, Mabel’s youngest sister, nineteen-year-old Roberta, started showing an unusual interest in Alec Bell’s cousin Charlie Bell. Charlie, son of Melville’s brother David, had arrived in Washington to act as Alec’s secretary until he too could be slotted into the family business. Mabel warmed to this young man, who had the black hair and dark eyes of all the Bells and who always laughed at her husbands jokes. In her opinion, Charlie was “a good kind gentle boy,” while her spirited sister Berta was an incorrigible flirt. Nevertheless, as Mabel noted in the journal she kept after Daisy’s birth, the two young people “took advantage of my confinement to fall in love with one another.” Gardiner Hubbard, who had had a tough time coming to terms with the idea of an impoverished Hungarian actor marrying his favorite daughter, hit the roof when he heard that a second penniless Bell was wooing another of his daughters. As he peremptorily ordered the young man out of his house, Mabel must have recollected her father’s behavior toward Alec only five years earlier. The whole drama played out exactly as it had for Alec and Mabel. Gertrude Hubbard took the young couple’s side and calmed her husband down; after much grumbling, Gardiner agreed that he would take Charlie seriously once he had the means of supporting a wife. And once again, nepotism came in handy. With much gentle cajoling from his wife and daughters, Gardiner decided that Charlie should join the Grossmans in Europe in order to promote Bell telephone sales there. Alec assured Mabel, she told her father, that as soon as he was working full-time in his laboratory, he would have “something that will provide work on this side of the ocean for Maurice and Charlie.” Soon, wedding plans were being made for Berta to become another Mrs. Bell.

One further event during these years reinforced Mabel’s and Alec’s sense of being settled in Washington. Alec’s parents were now relatively well off, thanks to Alec’s gift of the Canadian telephone rights. Melville remained feisty and argumentative, eager to break into a recitation of Robbie Burns or Shakespeare whether or not anyone wanted to listen. But his wife, ten years older, had now lost almost all her hearing (she smiled serenely through her husband’s recitations) and ached to spend her final years closer to her only son. The arrival of a second granddaughter reinforced her yearning. So in 1881, after eleven years at Tutelo Heights, Melville and Eliza prepared to leave Canada. Alec went north to help them. “My father has sold off everything,” he reported to Mabel, “and the only thing left here is poor Willie the dog. A most forlorn and disreputable beast, but full of love for his master and foreboding for the future.” Alec’s parents (but not poor Willie) were soon installed in an elegant four-story home at 1527 Thirty-Fifth Street, in Georgetown, a mile away from Alec and Mabel across Rock Creek. The following year, Melville’s brother David and his wife and daughter moved into the redbrick house next door to Melville and Eliza, on the pretty street, lined with oak trees, that still retained a village atmosphere. The Bells had cut their ties with Canada and regrouped around their most famous relative.

Phone lines buzzed between all the Bell and Hubbard households. Mabel reveled in the frequent visits from her sisters to admire her babies, her mother’s advice on servant problems, and the Washington social engagements she attended with Grace, the only sister still single. (“She is an accomplished caller,” Mabel noted. “When she sits up so straight with such cold dignity, I feel quite afraid of her!”) Alec’s morale was further raised when he heard that the French government had decided to award the prestigious Volta Prize to the inventor of the telephone. Established in 1801 by Napoleon Bonaparte to honor the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, the prize had been awarded only twice before.

In September 1880, Alec arrived in Paris with his wife, daughters, and cousin Charlie to collect the gold medal and the 50,000-franc ($10,000) prize money that went with it. He was thrilled with the honor, but not with the soft Parisian light. He had hoped to demonstrate his photophone to French scientists, but the misty atmosphere of the French capital prevented him from demonstrating selenium’s potential to translate light beams into sound. From Paris, he traveled alone to London for business discussions about the International Telephone Company and for meetings with various scientists. His packed program included experiments at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, several lectures in London and Leeds, visits with eminent scientists (including Charles Darwin), and demonstrations of both the photophone and Visible Speech.

Separated from Mabel on the anniversary of their betrothal, and resentful of business obligations, Alec’s spirits sagged and his old hypochondria reasserted itself. “I have been in the blues all day—bad headache,” he wrote to Mabel from London. He had a “general feeling of despondence at the lecture engagements I have entered into.” He worried that he wouldn’t be able to speak without notes at his forthcoming lecture at the Society of Arts, especially because he had an ugly red sore on his eyelid. “I dread having to appear with a blinder over one eye!” He was homesick for America, and he begged Mabel to join him in London so they could all sail home as soon as possible.

Mabel remained in Paris with Charlie Bell, who had fallen ill. She knew her husband too well to be too upset by his complaints. And sure enough, once Alec walked onto the stage for his first lecture, he “dived deep into the middle of my subject, forgot my audience, and went on swimmingly to the end.” His experiments at the Royal Institution were received even more enthusiastically. The eminent Irish scientist John Tyndall, who numbered Michael Faraday, Thomas Carlyle, and Alfred Lord Tennyson among his friends, was currently working there on transmission of sound and the diffusion of light in the atmosphere. A tall, thin, jovial man who loved encouraging younger researchers and explaining science (his lecture on the atmosphere was entitled, “Why the Sky Is Blue”), Tyndall welcomed Alec warmly. “It was delightful,” Alec told Mabel, “to see another man get excited over my experiments.” Tyndall’s support persuaded him to use his Volta Prize money to establish a small private laboratory in Washington, in which he and others might pursue research. On the Bells’ return to the United States, Alec bought a modest two-story brick former stable, half-hidden among trees, at 1221 Connecticut Avenue. He named it the Volta Laboratory and fitted it with workbenches and gas lighting (although the smell of horse manure and the saddle posts on the walls revealed its original purpose). Alec seemed all set for more lucrative inventions ahead.

In July 1881, Washington sweltered in a heat wave—the kind of heat wave that brought a warm malarial wind from the undrained Potomac swamps into the city, and drove most Washingtonians away. The Bells had already moved their ménage to the Hubbards’ Brattle Street home in Cambridge to escape the oppressive temperatures in the capital. On July 2, President James A. Garfield took a carriage to the station of the Baltimore and Potomac railroad, intending to catch a train to Williamstown, Massachusetts, in order to attend commencement exercises at Williams College. He had been in office barely four months, but in Washington, that was more than enough time to make enemies. As the president, a vigorous fifty-year-old veteran of the Civil War, strode across the waiting room, two shots rang out. A lawyer named Charles Guiteau, angry that his application to be the U.S. ambassador to France had been denied, had followed the president to the station and pulled out a pearl-handled revolver that had cost him fifteen dollars. The broad-browed, stocky Garfield fell in a heap on the waiting room’s tiled floor. One bullet merely grazed his arm, but the second lodged in his lower back, only inches from the spine. A crimson pool of blood spread across the pink tiles.