Reluctant Genius (5 page)

By the time that Alec had moved to Brantford, the second wave of the Industrial Revolution had begun, as scientists and inventors scrambled to produce technological, electrical, and chemical inventions rather than purely mechanical innovations. The big breakthrough in electricity had come at the end of the eighteenth century, when Italian physicist Alessandro Volta had built the first electric battery. Although weak and primitive compared to modern batteries, Volta’s invention was a major advance since it could produce a continuous flow of electricity along a wire. Before this breakthrough, researchers could produce only short bursts of current with little control over the voltage. Electrical pioneers in Germany, England, and America quickly grasped that if electricity could be carried through a wire, the same current might be used to carry a message. Ten years before Alec was born, in 1837, American artist Samuel F. B. Morse demonstrated an electrical telegraph that used pulses of electric current to send messages over a wire. Morse and his collaborator Alfred Vail devised the famous code of dots and dashes to represent letters, numbers, and basic punctuation. In their receiver, an electromagnet moved a stylus so that it marked long and short strokes onto a moving paper tape. Over the next decade, Morse and Vail made numerous improvements to their original design. They developed relays (a switch operated by an electromagnet) so that messages could be sent over great distances, and they invented the telegraph key, a switch that could be operated at the touch of a finger, so that telegraph operators could send messages more quickly. In 1843, President John Tyler signed a congressional appropriation to Morse to build the first telegraph line, from Baltimore to Washington. The first message was sent over the line on May 24,1844. Morse, son of a Congregational minister, tapped out the exclamation of the prophet Balaam in Numbers 23:23: “What hath God wrought?”

Either Morse or God had wrought a revolution. Previously, the fastest way a message could travel was along lines of signal poles or towers. These semaphore telegraphs required an operator at each station and could work only in clear weather. Most messages, however, were transmitted by pony express over land, or by schooner over water. When Lucrece Morse, Samuel Morse’s first wife, had died in New Haven in 1825, her husband had been busy painting portraits in Washington. He did not hear the tragic news of her death until several days later—too late even to attend her funeral. Now, thanks to his invention, the message could outrun the messenger and he might have heard the same day. The potential of this extraordinary invention was immediately recognized by American power brokers. Within a week of Morse’s inaugural message, the telegraph was used to transmit to Washington the results of the vote at the Democratic Convention in Baltimore on the next presidential candidate. The convention had been deadlocked between Martin Van Buren and Lewis Cass. After the ninth ballot, a staccato message came down the wire: “Polk is unanimously nom.” The convention had picked a dark-horse candidate: James K. Polk of Tennessee.

By the time Alec arrived in Canada, Samuel Morse’s “electro-magnetic telegraph” had been in use for more than twenty years and Morse was enjoying fame as the Lightning Man. (Lightning was the only electrical manifestation that most people understood. When Morse had tried to explain to members of the U.S. Congress how his invention actually worked, they looked, according to one witness, as blank as if he “had spoken in Hebrew.” Only a successful demonstration convinced them of the telegraph’s potential.) In 1870, the length of the telegraph wire, strung between an army of wooden telegraph poles and thrumming across the continent, approached 250,000 miles. Massachusetts was linked to California, Ottawa to Montreal, and every city and town in between either was or hoped to be connected to the expanding web of wire. The telegraph was part of an emerging commercial infrastructure that was producing and distributing wealth at record speeds. Newspapers, insurance companies, and political parties had all leaped to exploit it. Businesses in New York City could communicate directly with their offices in Boston, Toronto, New Orleans, or San Francisco. The Western Union Telegraph Company, incorporated in 1857, was busy buying up local telegraph companies and was well on its way to the goal of every nineteenth-century American industry— a complete monopoly. Outside the United States, Morse’s telegraph wires linked Berlin to Aachen and Hamburg in Prussia, Stockholm to Uppsala in Sweden, London to every major industrial city in England. In India, Calcutta was connected to Bombay and Madras; Sydney and Adelaide were linked in Australia.

Even more remarkable, the New World was now connected to the Old World by thousands of miles of undersea cables. When the first attempt to lay a 1,700-mile-long transatlantic telegraph cable was made in 1856, from the island of Valentia off the southwest corner of Ireland to Newfoundland, the American press had exploded with excitement. “T
HE
G
REAT
W
ORK
O
F
T
HE
A
GE
” read one newspaper headline, and the
New York Tribune
asked, “Where in the annals of the world have we the evidence of a stride the one-millionth part as sublime as this in its immensity?” A decade later, when the cable-laying was successfully completed by the 700-foot-long steamship the
Great Eastern,
euphoria rolled across the ocean. Queen Victoria and President James Buchanan exchanged telegraphed congratulations, and toasts to “England and America United” were heard at banquets on both continents. New York City, noted its chronicler George Templeton Strong, threw itself into an “orgasm of glorification.”

It is hardly surprising, then, that the electrical telegraph caught Alec Bell’s imagination, given his lifelong interest in communications. While he was still teaching in Bath, he had hooked up a primitive telegraph system, powered by homemade electrical batteries, between neighboring houses. Now, in Brantford, temporarily freed from the obligation to earn his living, he allowed his mind to grapple with the complexity of telegraph technology. As his health improved, he decided to convert the workroom behind the conservatory into a makeshift laboratory. He returned to the book that had absorbed him during his transatlantic voyage—Helmholtz’s
On the Sensations of Tone.
Helmholtz had managed to synthesize vowel sounds by keeping several tuning forks in simultaneous and continuous vibration. Soon Alec had put together a construction that held upright a series of tuning forks, with which he tried to replicate Helmholtz’s work. But it wasn’t just sound that fascinated Alec: he was also intrigued by electricity and its new uses for communication.

A single issue now preoccupied him: Could Helmholtz’s theories on the nature of sound have any application for the electric telegraph? In particular, could they solve a puzzle with which amateur engineers all over the United States were grappling? Nearly thirty years after its first commercial application, the telegraph system was still limited to sending one message at a time. The race was on to increase its capacity, by figuring out a way first to send two messages over one wire simultaneously in opposite directions and then to transmit several messages in the same direction simultaneously. Alec was determined to join this race. He had only a sketchy understanding of the nature of electricity, but he did understand how human beings produced sound—a knowledge that none of the other competitors in the race could boast. As the skinny, pale young man lay in the garden at Tutelo Heights, feeling the late summer sunshine bring new color to his face, he dreamed about a multiple telegraph that would marry Helmholtz’s acoustical theories with Morse’s system of electrical impulses. His goal was a “harmonic telegraph,” which would employ sympathetic vibration to send several messages on a single wire at the same time.

In 1844, Samuel Morse had catapulted the world into a new era when he vastly accelerated the speed of communications. Alexander Graham Bell would invent something far more sophisticated than the Lightning Man’s electrical telegraph. The young Scotsman would make instant communication accessible to everybody, and change the world forever. But he would achieve this only after several false starts, and only because he found the right people to help him.

Chapter 3

B
OSTON
B
OUND
1871–1874

B
y the end of August 1870, Alec’s health was starting to improve and his energies began to return. His gaunt cheeks and lanky frame filled out; his black eyes, deep-set and intense, lost their feverish look; he grew impatient with the inactivity of his routine. When the apples in the orchard ripened during the warm fall days, he helped the hired man pick them. Once the temperature dropped and the leaves began to turn, he started playing the piano again in the parlor while Carrie and his mother sewed thick woolen petticoats in preparation for their first harsh Canadian winter. He explored the countryside around Tutelo Heights and discovered the Six Nations Reserve a few miles down “a most
awful
road.”

This was home to the Iroquois Loyalists who had left the Mohawk Valley of upper New York State after the American Revolution and had traveled north into what was then British North America. The six different Indian bands living there still spoke their own languages: Mohawk, Tuscarora, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. The Six Nations Reserve was an exotic little subculture amid the sea of stifling conformity and materialism that was English Canada. Alec struck up a particular friendship with George Johnson, an attractive young Mohawk chief with an English-born wife. Alec was fascinated to meet a genuine North American Indian and to learn about wampum belts, peace pipes, and beadwork. George allowed him to record the Mohawk language in Visible Speech and to dress up in the fur hat and fringed jacket that he wore for ceremonial occasions on the reserve. The most permanent memento of this friendship was the Mohawk war dance that the chief taught the immigrant. In the coming years, at moments of triumph in his life, Alec would raise his arms and, with a gleeful whoop, break into the dance. It never failed to startle observers.

Otherwise, life in small-town Canada was stultifying for the young Scotsman, eager to pursue his own interests in education and scientific experiments. He dreaded being a financial burden on his parents. The proceeds from the sale of their London effects and the income from
The Standard Elocutionist
were not enough to keep all the Bells in style at Tutelo Heights. Moreover, Brantford’s numerous factories were not doing so well during these years: the Canadian economy was in a slump, and the American market was largely closed to Canadian goods. Alec’s father was frustrated by both the depression of his neighbors and the shortage of openings in Brantford for a highly qualified elocution teacher. His only local sources of income were public elocutionary performances, of a type he had come to regard as below him in Scotland. In August 1871, the
Brantford Courier
reported that at a concert commemorating Sir Walter Scott, “Prof. Melville Bell s great elocutionary powers were brought into requisition, and all who heard his reading will bear us out in the assertion that he literally caused many of the
dramatis personae
of Scott’s works to pass in review before the admiring eyes of his audience.” This would have been fine praise for an actor, but “Professor” Melville Bell considered himself a cut above that kind of thing. It made for a difficult atmosphere in the Bell home: Alec knew that they were in Canada only for his sake, and nobody was really enjoying the experience. Only Eliza, relieved by the improvement in her beloved son’s health, maintained a sunny optimism. Every sigh and grunt that Melville uttered sounded, to Alec, like a reproach.

Melville Bell looked south for business to boost his battered ego and strained finances. Once his family was settled, he caught the train to Buffalo and then on to New England, on a money-making lecture tour that featured readings from Shakespeare interspersed with promotional talks about Visible Speech. His portly figure, resplendent in frock coat and muttonchop whiskers, took to the stage in venues across the northeastern United States. In Boston he renewed the acquaintance he had struck up two years earlier with Miss Sarah Fuller, principal of the newly established Boston School for Deaf Mutes, where lip-reading and speech were taught. He was invited to give a further series of lectures on using Visible Speech in the education of deaf children. Eager to get home, he declined the offer but mentioned that his son Alec might be interested in traveling down to Boston. When Alec heard what his father had done, he saw his chance to leave home. “I should not personally object to teaching Visible Speech in some well-known institution,” he wrote his father, “if you would get an appointment—even if it was not remunerative.” Melville spoke to the Massachusetts Board of Education, then telegraphed his son that there was a possibility of various teaching stints, including a month at Miss Fuller’s school in Boston and another month at Miss Rogers’s Clarke Institution for Deaf Mutes at Northampton, which also taught the “oral method” (lip-reading) of communication to deaf children. Miss Fuller and Miss Rogers, two formidable pioneer educators, were keen to know more about Visible Speech.

A couple of times a week, Eliza would send Alec into Brantford to collect the mail. Eliza, like so many immigrants, longed for letters that would connect her with the Old Country. She missed the network of cousins scattered through the British Isles; she would inquire wistfully why they didn’t follow the Bells’ example and move to the colony. So Alec would dutifully ride off in the ponycart, down Mount Pleasant Road to Brantford, often accompanied by his widowed sister-in-law. Like Alec, Carrie was blossoming in the Canadian air; her cheeks glowed with health, and she enjoyed Brantford’s church socials and tea parties. The two attractive newcomers waved at neighbors and acquaintances as their vehicle bounced along the rutted track.