Reluctant Genius (44 page)

Beinn Bhreagh Point, completed in 1893, was “the finest mansion in Eastern Canada.”

From the sunporch, the dining room, and most of the bedrooms, the Bells and their guests could gaze out at Boularderie Island to the east, Baddeck to the west, or the Washabuck lighthouse straight ahead. From the kitchen window, the cook could see right down St. Andrew Channel to Grand Narrows, where the local steamer picked up passengers who were arriving on the Cape Breton railroad. (She could also keep an eye on any boat that was carrying guests to the Beinn Bhreagh wharf, and gauge when it was time to heat the soup.) After the house had been completed in November 1893, the
Halifax Chronicle
announced, “The Bell Palace at Baddeck … Said to be the Finest Mansion in Eastern Canada.”

Beinn Bhreagh Point (to give it its full name) might be a mansion, but architecturally it is a mishmash of styles. There are elements of a French chateau (two cone-roofed towers and a steep cedar-shingle roof), but bulky chimneys, dormer windows, and balconies spoil the roofline. To the right of the main frontage there is a domestic wing at an awkward angle, and the main entrance is through a dark porch at the back of the house. Moreover, Mabel soon faced a major design fault. “The house would be about perfect but for two things,” she wrote to her mother in January 1894. “The great smoky fireplace and the horrid furnaces, and the soft coal which makes my pretty clean new house in the clean country as dirty and sooted as the dirtiest sootiest house in the City of London. There’s something radically wrong with the furnaces, the smoke leaks through into the heat pipes and fills the whole house with smoke and gas.” These heating problems, in which Alec took no interest at all, took several months to solve.

Nevertheless, for the first time in their lives, Alec and Mabel Bell had a home that truly reflected their different personalities and suited most of their needs. In Washington, Mabel was often lonely while her world-famous husband traveled to distant cities to attend meetings, speak at conferences, or pursue research. She once wrote wistfully, “My dear Alec, I miss you very much, the house feels very quiet and lonely without you. You cannot realize it, but you are the pivot around which the household revolves.” In Cape Breton, Alec was always home, and his rhythms dominated the rambling, hospitable two-story mansion. It could sleep up to twenty-six people, and its large living room often resounded with hymns, spirituals, and Scottish songs when Alec sat down at the grand piano. A portrait of the Scottish poet Robbie Burns hung over the fireplace of Alec’s ground-floor library, while upstairs, next to her bedroom, Mabel had her own pretty little study, in which she kept the household accounts and tracked their investments. The kitchen, where there were always a cook and at least two maids, was large and practical, with a wood-burning stove and a scrubbed wooden table at which the children drew pictures, made models with candle wax, and ate most of their meals. Alec’s study was on the second floor, because, as Mabel explained in a letter to her father, “it must be as inaccessible as possible as the trouble now is that servants will go to him in any difficulty—consequently driving him from the house as the slightest interruption will upset him for hours.” His bed, which was housed on the open porch above the main entrance, was encircled by tightly woven curtains that would block all light from reaching his sensitive eyes.

Mabel took far more pleasure in supervising the decor of the Point than that of their residence on Connecticut Avenue, in style-conscious Washington. In Cape Breton, her originality was given full rein. She bought curtains “embroidered in the Norwegian fashion” from a local sewing woman, and she commissioned a frieze for one of the bedrooms that consisted of mussel shells arranged in an attractive design and embedded in white plaster. Cousin Mary Blatchford was quite captivated. “There are two thousand and seven shells, for I counted them,” she wrote to a friend. “The delicate color of the inside of the shells makes a charming decoration.” Family festivities became even more elaborate once the Point was complete. In 1894, Chinese lanterns glowed from the trees and bonfires crackled as Alec celebrated his parents’ golden wedding anniversary. For Melville and Eliza Bell, who had once feared that all three of their sons would predecease them, it was a magic moment. Melville nearly burst with pride at his son’s achievements, and now that there was a comfortable house tostay in, he would become a regular visitor to Cape Breton. That night, local farmers and fishermen were mesmerized by the brilliance of the electric light that blazed out of the mansion’s huge windows and by the military band music that drifted down the lake. Two years later, Gardiner and Gertrude Hubbard enjoyed the same gala treatment when they too celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary.

BEINN BHREAGH

It was almost impossible to dislodge Alec from his scientific pursuits in Cape Breton, so a pattern was established: once family ties had been strengthened by the exuberant summer months in Baddeck, Mabel attended to her daughters’ needs. These included both extended trips to Europe, for more of the continental polish Mabel wanted them to acquire, and appearances at fashionable events in Washington. The annual routine also allowed Mabel to spend time with her beloved parents and sister. Alec stretched out his Beinn Bhreagh sojourns as long as he could, rarely leaving before December and rushing back as early as April to resume his sheep-breeding and flying experiments.

The spring of 1895 was typical. Mabel, Elsie, and Daisy had once again set off without Alec to Europe. In Paris, the three Bells installed themselves in a convent on the Rue Nitot, which had a girls’ school attached. Each morning, Elsie, now seventeen, and Daisy, now fifteen, donned the blue tunics that were the uniform for the
mademoiselles
enrolled in the elite school, and disappeared to their classrooms. Each afternoon, the two young American heiresses, demurely dressed in straw hats, white gloves, and ankle-length dresses with tightly corseted waists, set off with their mother to explore the Paris of La Belle Epoque. They admired the newly erected Eiffel Tower (“hardly noticeable after the first shock of surprise”) and stared at the “bicycle women” who paraded up and down the Champs Elysees in tight white veils and brown bloomers (“a deplorable sight”).

One of Mabel’s greatest pleasures in Paris was to settle at the table in her little parlor, clad in her pale blue silk
robe de chambre,
after the girls had disappeared to their lessons. She would open the overstuffed envelopes that arrived from across the Atlantic, and unfold the sheets of paper covered with Alec’s spidery black handwriting. A typical letter from this period reads,

I think I explained to you the construction of the new fanwinged machine, a sort of fan made of strips of tin. Having found that it seemed to propel my whirling-table, I determined to try it in the air with three wings. Wings made of strips of tin¼ inch wide—angle at tip 20°—at centre 90°. When we came to try this with our rotator pulled by hand, it rose so readily that we could not get a good pull. I had to lengthen the pins of the rotator to make it stay on long enough to get any sort of spin… . Today we tried it again with a heavy ring of solid brass on the ends of the wings. Weight 460 grammes more than one pound.
The addition of weight made it go higher.
Don’t know how high it went—certainly over 250 feet.

At first, Mabel appreciated the regular bulletins on helicopter experiments from Beinn Bhreagh. In June 1895 she replied, “I hope that you have succeeded in definitely fixing the centers of gravity in the arms and in determining whether putting the center of gravity further out on the arms by means of weights you do increase the velocity per second, and thereby cause a greater lift. ... I do so want your name associated with successful experiments in flying machines. ... I wish I could be in two places at the same time, with you at Beinn Bhreagh and here with the children … You have always been very good to me, my husband, and I love you.”

But as the weeks passed, Mabel began to worry. The letters read more like lab reports. Alec’s missives became increasingly staccato—he cataloged his activities and forgot to ask about her well-being. Flying-machine experiments were taking over Alec’s life: he was sleeping in the laboratory, working round the clock, and grabbing something toeat only when he remembered. In June, Mabel reproached him, “No one can stand such irregularity of life very long. You know you came to me nearly wrecked by just such living some eighteen years ago and if you could not stand it then you certainly can’t now.” Memories of the haggard young man who had chased her all the way to Nantucket and poured out his hysterical distress in note after note flooded back. By July, the tone of her letters had changed: “I am very much interested in your water experiments and in the center of gravity load shifting, but I am much distressed to think of the lonely solitary life you have been leading. Please darling make an effort to be more sociable and go to see people... . The very nuns here are not leading as solitary narrow a life as you. Please try and come out of your hermit cell.”

Alec did manage to extract himself from his work long enough to join Mabel, Elsie, and Daisy in France that August. He chafed to return to Cape Breton, but the break did him good. He allowed Mabel to impose some regularity on his life, and to cut his hair and trim his beard. But by the fall, they were all back in Cape Breton. After feeling unable for so many years to find a focus for his inventive mind, Alec was now consumed by the race to build a heavier-than-air flying machine—and he was determined to do it in Baddeck. His pursuit of this goal would consume him—and a great deal of Mabel’s money—for much of the next two decades.

Chapter 17

M
ONSTER
K
ITES
1895–1900

T
he two portly, bearded men puffed their cigars in companionable silence as they sat on the deck of
Mabel of Beinn Bhreagh,
the Bell houseboat. The August sun was hot, and they were both dressed in flannel shirts, tweed trousers, and black leather boots. But a canvas awning shaded them from the glaring rays, and a lake breeze cooled them.

There was the occasional grunt as each man studied the seagulls soaring over the water. Finally, one of them grabbed the cigar out of his mouth, shook his head, and barked, “Isn’t that maddening!”

“What’s maddening?” asked his host, Alexander Graham Bell.

Dr. Samuel Pierpont Langley, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a regular participant at Alec’s Wednesday-evening get-togethers in Washington, replied sharply, “The gulls.”

Alec chuckled. “I was thinking they were very beautiful.”

Each eyed the other for a moment, recalled the Bells’ manservant Charles Thompson years later, then both burst into roars of laughter. But the exchange caught the character of each man. They had much in common: both were self-taught scientists who had never graduated from university (Langley, from an old-money Massachusetts background, had read omnivorously in the Boston Public Library in his youth, and emerged a hugely knowledgeable astronomer). Each had chalked up a momentous scientific achievement. In 1878, two years after Alec had invented the telephone, Langley had invented the bolometer, a highly sensitive instrument for measuring solar radiation. The two men even looked alike, with their bushy white beards and jovial expressions. But unlike Alec Bell, Samuel Pierpont Langley’s invention was not so lucrative that it had liberated him from the need to work for his living. He was firmly embedded in the American scientific establishment: as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, he held the most prestigious and influential scientific position in the United States. Before his appointment to the big brownstone building in 1887, he had been director of the Allegheny Observatory and professor of physics and astronomy at the Western University of Pennsylvania for twenty years, and had received countless honorary degrees and international awards. Despite his affable expression, he had an abrasive and competitive nature. Based year-round in Washington, the confirmed bachelor followed the scientific literature on aeronautics with hawklike attention, undistracted by family or competing interests.