Reluctant Genius (43 page)

In Washington, Alec caught up with his other projects: work with the U.S. Census Bureau, papers on deaf education, correspondence with Helen Keller, the shaky finances of
Science
magazine, his Wednesday soirees. There was
so much
to do, in addition to the social calls that eminent Washingtonians were expected to make. But after the weeks of relaxation in Baddeck, some of the exuberance of earlier years was back in his marriage. One afternoon, Mabel reminded him that he was expected for a formal tea party at Twin Oaks, the home of the Hubbards. She described in a letter to Elsie the fun that followed:

He tried flatly refusing to go, begging off, appealing to my sympathies, and finally [he] ran away. I chased him downstairs through the parlor and dining room and up the stairs again to the bathroom which he gained first. There he locked himself in. Finding [that] rattling the door knob and calls [were] of no avail, Beckie [Mabel’s terrier] and I went to the study, and with the long Mississippi mule whip I commenced striking the bathroom window through the study window much to the edification I doubt not of our neighbors. After a while I tired of this amusement and just then I observed Beckie making for the door, I followed her, opened the entry door just in time to see a pair of boots disappearing upstairs. I gave chase, but no Papa was to be seen through the third story, so I came back, found the bathroom door still locked. Again I rattled the door knob and poured forth such a series of commands and entreaties and promises as I was sure must have brought Papa from his retreat if he had heard me. As however he gave no sign, I decided that he could not be there, so I started on another game of hide and seek, and this time went upstairs to the attic where I finally found Papa crouching behind rolls of carpet! I got him out, helped him dress and carried him in triumph to Twin Oaks. By that time he was in a very penitent mood, ready to promise to be very nice to the people. Of course we had been in fun all along.

But Alec’s heart was in Cape Breton: he insisted on getting back for lambing season. So within months, he was again climbing over Beinn Bhreagh’s hillside in his knickerbockers, supervising his shepherds, sleeping in a tent right in the middle of Sheepville, and constantly being woken by sixty newborn lambs “calling out for their Maaa at all hours of the night and morning.” Mabel worried about her forty-four-year-old husband “living in tents while the bay is full of ice,” but she knew he was happier there. So she let him be and accepted the fact that, to all intents and purposes, she was a single parent; she alone must ensure her children’s social success. Elsie had finally been discharged by Dr. Mitchell, so Mabel decided to give her daughters, now thirteen and eleven, the kind of European experiences that she had enjoyed when she was their age, and that were now de rigueur for well-to-do American families.

Managing a Grand Tour was challenge enough—to have done so alone, when she was deaf, demonstrates Mabel’s pluck. She packed up her trunks and booked passage across the Atlantic for herself and her girls. Her husband’s contribution was to allow her to take Charles Thompson, the Bells’ major-domo in both Washington and Baddeck, with her. On the transatlantic crossing, Charles had to sleep in steerage while Mabel relied on her daughters to help her navigate through the finer points of first-class travel. “Daisy is a nice little one to translate between me and the Captain and to keep me informed as well as she can of what is being said at table,” she assured Alec. “Elsie is a great relief and manages far better than I dared hope.” Once in Europe, however, Charles took all the responsibility for seeing that the Bells’ tickets were in order and that the mountain of steamer trunks was conveyed from hotel to hotel. In Rome, Mabel noted wryly, “Charles, my colored serving man, [is] learning faster and profiting more by this journey than my children.”

In Baddeck, Alec missed his family, but his imagination worked overtime. He had announced to Mabel in 1887 that he found it hard to explore his scientific pursuits in Washington, a city geared to politics rather than technology. “The fact is that Washington is no place in which to carry out inventions,” he wrote. “In a small workshop with one workman, it takes forever to have the slightest thing done and ideas cool before anything is accomplished.” Baddeck’s distance from other scientific men did not seem to bother him, and he was able to work much more easily on Beinn Bhreagh than in Georgetown. Just below the Lodge, he built a little wooden shed, grandly named “the laboratory.” Here, he installed Arthur McCurdy and a wiry middle-aged mechanic he had brought from Washington, William Ellis, and began exploring some new ideas. Some of his brainwaves (all of which were carefully recorded in his “Lab. Notes”) went nowhere. He had high hopes of a plan to take a printing impression from photographs using a ceramic material that he called “agate cement.” “Here at last is a subject at which we can work together,” he wrote Mabel. “This invention … will bring us together in a common interest…. The first print will be of Jacob’s Dream, a stairway to heaven and angels passing up and down.” But the scheme was abandoned because the materials were too expensive. He then returned to fiddling with the phonograph, thinking to make cylinders on which sound could be recorded in a mineral wax called ozokerite. But the cylinders were always pockmarked with air bubbles when taken out of the mold, so this idea was also dropped.

Failure in some experiments didn’t dampen Alec’s enthusiastic efforts in other directions. He developed an apparatus for heating water using an electrical filament in a glass tube of sperm whale oil. “Grand success,” he recorded. “Just as Electric Lighting must gradually take the place of gas, so I believe Electric Heating will take the place of dirty coal.” And his more general musings were extraordinarily prescient. “Thought,” he jotted in his notebook in December 1891, while bemoaning the fact that letters from Mabel in Italy took so long to arrive. “Correspondence between distant places will in future be carried on electrically instead of by mail.”

At one level, this was Alexander Graham Bell the polymath, whose brilliant mind roamed unfettered across the scientific landscape. This, of course, was the essence of his genius: he could make surprising and original connections between unrelated fields, as when he tried to save President Garfield’s life by combining the telephone receiver, then regarded as the latest development in telegraphy, with an induction balance he had designed for the mining industry. But at another level—the level that exasperated Mabel—his approach seems hopelessly scattered, with wild enthusiasms adopted and abandoned. And during the early years at Beinn Bhreagh, before he had a specific project, his attention seems particularly fragmented. His bedtime reading was the
Encyclopaedia Britannica:
“I have read tonight articles on Fog-signals, Force, Fortification, Fort Sumter, Fossil foot prints…,” he told Mabel in one letter. His letters were usually written after midnight, and sometimes he was so tired he could do little more than list the subjects he wanted to cover. A catalog he compiled one evening, as he sat in his study with an oil lamp illuminating the thick sheet of paper on his desk, indicates the range of his interests: “Wild flowers of Canada. Mrs. Hobart has a baby … Argon and helium … Lambs all in. 24 (four-nippled) 2 (three-nippled) 0 (2-nippled). Sir Francis Galton’s enquiry. Centre of gravity experiments. With same rotations greater mass gives greater lift…Spherical telescope—dome floating on water. Meteoric ring of Saturn. Identity of level of Baltic, Black and Azore seas … Oysters and typhoid. Artificial wood for British men of war … Have no time to expand these topics.”

In Mabel’s absence, Alec’s appearance became even more eccentric; his bushy hair and shaggy beard remained uncombed and untrimmed, and his baggy tweeds became even shabbier. He could have been mistaken for Leo Tolstoy in pre-revolutionary Russia, as he organized his rural fiefdom and galvanized the locals into unfamiliar activities. Yet a momentous new project was gradually emerging from all the different experiments that he, McCurdy, and Ellis were performing in the little wooden laboratory below the Lodge. Though he did not abandon his sheep or his frequent trips to schools for the deaf, a new pursuit had begun to preoccupy him—an idea far beyond the imaginations of most of the stolid citizens of Cape Breton.

As the century neared its close, the pace of invention had accelerated. Rudolf Diesel would patent his engine in 1892; Henry Ford would build his first car in 1893, and Guglielmo Marconi was already playing around with radio telegraphy. With the widespread availability of electricity, a new torrent of products, including domestic lighting and appliances such as primitive vacuum cleaners, was transforming the lives of ordinary citizens. The first steel-skeleton skyscraper had been erected in New York City in 1889; the might of Niagara Falls would be harnessed to provide power for Buffalo’s electric streetcars in 1895. As astonishing as the torrent of innovations was people’s capacity to absorb them. There was, however, one particular dream that was common to many of the era’s inventors, even as most people ridiculed it as fantasy: the dream of flight. And Alexander Graham Bell had begun to suffer, as he put it to Mabel, from “a bad attack of flying machines.”

Inventors from the beginning of time had been fascinated by the idea of flying machines; the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci contain numerous designs for machines modeled on avian anatomy. When Alec began thinking seriously about powered flight, such machines seemed more possible thanks to the nineteenth century’s advances in both steam power and electricity. The conquest of the skies had already begun: as early as 1783, the French Montgolfier brothers had sent a man aloft in the basket of a silk and paper hot air balloon and launched a ballooning craze throughout Europe and North America. Balloons, however, were entirely dependent on the weather and offered their “aeronauts” little chance of controlling the direction in which they wafted. In 1875, a balloon launched from Toronto dumped its hapless crew and passengers into Lake Ontario. Serious inventors were already thinking that if man was to take to the air, he needed wings.

Bell’s ability to tackle challenges from unexpected angles led him into creative ways of thinking about how to achieve flight. Most of the other scientists building prototypes for flying machines were preoccupied with achieving speed and lift in the air. As Alec walked around Beinn Bhreagh, checking his sheep and stopping to watch bald eagles soaring effortlessly in the updrafts created by the cliffs, he decided that those prototypes would be horribly dangerous for the test pilots at liftoff and landing. So he began his new enthusiasm by constructing helicopter-like devices. One day that winter, he made his way down to the laboratory and explained to William Ellis that he had designed a miniature tin boiler that they were going to try to get airborne. Ellis set to work to construct the boiler, which was no wider than a man’s hand and weighed less than a pound. Alec’s idea was to heat water in this boiler, to which a two-bladed cloth propeller would be attached, and then release the steam so that the propeller would rotate. The theory, as Alec explained in a letter to Mabel, was “that an upright tubular boiler could be made to lift itself in the air—fuel and all—by fan wheel arrangement worked by a simple jet of steam.”

The temperature in the little hut steadily rose on January 6, 1892, as the two men labored over their contraption. While Alec held the boiler steady, Ellis carefully soldered a vertical pipe into it. It was fiddly work; Ellis regularly straightened up, adjusted his cloth cap, then bent to the task again. Once the two men had completed the device, Alec began a series of experiments, using different mixes of water and alcohol in the boiler, then measuring how fast the propeller over the steam outlet revolved. Over the next few days, frustration mounted. It was difficult to build enough pressure in the boiler. When he did achieve sufficient pressure, the solder on the boiler’s seams burst. The propeller’s wings were inclined to catch fire. But at one point, the steam-powered helicopter took flight—when steam started escaping from two pinholes, it “shot over to the other side of the laboratory,” an excited Alec wrote to Mabel.

The machine may have belly flopped, but Alec’s imagination took wing. “I have the feeling,” he wrote to Mabel a few days later, “that this machine may possibly be the father of a long line of vigorous descendants that will plough the air from Beinn Bhreagh to Washington! And perhaps revolutionize the world! Who can tell? Think of the telephone!”

Days after Alec had completed this series of experiments, he joined his family in Italy. Within months, however, he, his wife, and their daughters had all returned to Baddeck. By now, Alec had finally purchased the remaining parcels of land on the headland, and the dream that both he and Mabel had nursed for years was about to be realized. They were going to watch the foundations laid for the magnificent mansion that still stands on the end of headland, with water on three sides of it and a wooded hillside on the fourth. A firm of Boston architects had drawn up the plans, and a Nova Scotia contractor had been hired to construct the building.

At a time when most Baddeck cottages changed hands for a couple of hundred dollars, the cost of the new Bell home was reportedly $22,000 (construction costs today would be well over $2 million). And the Bells were not the only wealthy people who had succumbed to the charms of Atlantic Canada. The portly railroad baron Sir William Van Horne, president of the Canadian Pacific Railway, was busy constructing a lavish summer cottage called Covenhoven, near St. Andrew’s, New Brunswick. A few years later, Alexander McDonald, John D. Rockefeller’s partner in Standard Oil, bought a large piece of seashore in Prince Edward Island and built an elaborate mansion called Dalvay, rumored to cost $50,000. Neither of these plutocrats, however, took as great a personal interest in their properties as the Bells. According to family tradition, Alec and Mabel had chosen not only the exact location for their dream home but also the outlook for each room by traveling in a hay wagon to the end of the headland and then clambering up a rickety two-story structure erected on the wagon so they could assess the view. As a result, the prospect from every window that faces the lake is extraordinary.