Reluctant Genius (58 page)

At the same time, when he wasn’t redesigning the angle of hydrofoils, he was exploring other ideas in his notebooks. He returned to the work begun in 1901 on the challenge of condensing drinking water from the sea. His earlier invention consisted of wave-powered bellows pumping fog through sea-cooled bottles, but now he had a new idea: a shallow box holding seawater, with a sloping glass lid on which moisture might condense and then trickle into a container. He began to muse about alternative energy sources, since “coal and oil… are strictly limited in quantity,” he observed. He urged engineering students to start thinking about ethanol, “a beautifully clean and efficient fuel, which can be produced from vegetable matter of almost any kind.” He challenged the orthodoxy of the time, which suggested that atmospheric pollution would mean a cooling climate as the sun’s warming rays would be blocked by smog. He even used the phrase “greenhouse effect,” as he described how, in his view, a layer of smog would prevent the escape of heat from the earth’s surface, just as “a white-washed glass house … prevents the escape of heat from the interior.” No wonder that a reporter who visited him in December 1921 wrote, “The most remarkable thing about Doctor Bell is that he is younger, in mind, than most men of half his age. Mentally, he seems to have discovered a Fountain of Youth, which keeps him perennially alert and vigorous.”

In October 1920, Alec announced he wanted to make a final visit to the land of his birth. The Bells left New York on a White Star liner, accompanied by Catherine Mackenzie and their fifteen-year-old granddaughter Mabel Grosvenor. In Edinburgh, Alec spent afternoons in the city library, checking dusty old city registries for his forebears. So much had changed: tramcars and automobiles had replaced the horse-drawn vehicles of his youth, roads had been widened, a new North Bridge now connected the Old and New Towns, and Princes Street was lined with elaborate new department stores. But there were some familiar landmarks, besides the monument to Sir Walter Scott. Alec took his granddaughter to see the house on Charlotte Street where he was raised, and on the way back, they passed a baker who displayed in his window the kind of mutton pies Alec had enjoyed in his childhood. He gleefully bought a couple for his granddaughter and Catherine and, when the two young women politely declined them, he surreptitiously wolfed them himself.

The 1920 trip was not an entirely happy affair. Although Alec had never been keen on ceremony, he was disappointed, Mabel realized, that there was “no one there to greet him.” Old friends were dead and gone. The Bell party drove up to Covesea, where Alec and Mabel had been so happy in 1878. But the wind blew a chilly drizzle in from the North Sea, and the stone cottages on the cliff top were in ruins. At a point in his life when he was ready to be swept by nostalgia, he was instead suffused with a sense of his own irrelevance. On his return to Edinburgh, Alec was accosted by a reporter who asked him about his feelings toward the land of his birth. Alec’s spirits were unusually low. He said he felt like a stranger in Scotland. His advice to those tempted to revisit their homeland was, “Don’t.” Even the sight of a man speaking into a public telephone at the train station couldn’t cheer him. The Bell party returned to the Hotel Victoria in London, to catch the next steamer across the Atlantic. He told a reporter from the
Daily Mail,
who was hellbent on a story about the Father of Telephony, that “the telephone has been like the pupil who outgrew his teacher; 35 years ago I realized that my invention was growing too fast for me and abandoned my active work in connection with it. Nobody views each new invention added to it with more amazement than I. [They] make me feel my years.”

But then things turned around. The city fathers decided to offer the freedom of Edinburgh to its distinguished native son. Alec immediately recovered his usual exuberance. He personally rebooked the party onto a later sailing, and they took the train north again to Edinburgh. First he spoke at his old school, the Royal High School, and announced that the boys could take the afternoon off. Then he stood in front of seventy-two scarlet-robed councilors in the City Chambers, against a backcloth of sumptuous tapestries and splendid oil paintings, and received a silver casket from the Lord Provost. “I have received many honours in the course of my life,” he replied, his voice gruff with emotion, “but none that has so touched my heart as this gift of the freedom of my native city, Edinburgh…. I can assure you that I shall always look back upon this scene as the most memorable event in my life.” Better still, the following day the
Royal Scotsman
declared that not even Sir Walter Scott had brought more honor to the city.

The following winter, Alec and Mabel Bell toured the Caribbean. In the Bahamas, Alec insisted on being lowered into the ocean in a ’Photosphere,” an underwater observation tube. In Washington, in the spring of 1922, he acquired one of the latest scientific wonders—a radio. Listeners in Alec’s day had to use headphones to hear what was then known as “the wireless set,” so he speculated about possible improvements that would allow the wireless set to be heard without earpieces.

But Mabel Bell knew that her husband’s physical strength was ebbing away, even as his mind continued to ferment with new ideas. They both returned to their beloved Beinn Bhreagh in June and embarked on all the usual summer routines. Alec made note of the lambs born that year to “Mrs. Bell’s Multi-Nippled Twin-Bearing Stock.” He watched a new hydrofoil craft developed by Casey Baldwin—a naval towing target with a tetrahedral superstructure—being tested on Bras d’Or Lake’s placid waters. But he took more naps than in previous years, and he was white and increasingly listless. He often took a carriage from the Point to his laboratory office a mile away rather than walking. Nevertheless, he would rally to read the newspapers or listen to his nine-year-old granddaughter Nancy Bell Fairchild play the piano. And he entertained his grandchildren by wiggling his toes, even though he had lost sensation in them. None of his family realized that the loss of sensation was an indication that he had pernicious anemia.

The end came fast—too fast for anybody to be ready. Elsie Grosvenor had left for a trip to Rio de Janeiro on National Geographic Society business with her husband, Gilbert. On July 30, the Fairchilds arrived for a prearranged visit to Nova Scotia and were shocked to find a severely diminished Alec, barely able to stir from the chaise lounge on the sunporch to greet them. He rallied at the sight of “dear Daisums” and began to talk about his condition with David Fairchild. David softly suggested that his debility might be electrical in character, and asked his father-in-law if life might not have an electrical basis. “Je ne sais pas, Monsieur,” shrugged an exhausted Alec. “Je ne sais pas.” The local doctor from Baddeck confirmed that the diabetes had now affected Alec’s liver and pancreas.

By the next day, Alec lay breathing heavily in his sleeping porch off his second-floor study. He had no energy to turn his head on his pillow to see Beinn Bhreagh, his beautiful mountain, through the shades. On August 1, he opened his eyes and called for Catherine Mackenzie to take dictation. “Don’t hurry,” Catherine said, and the old man smiled. “I have to,” he replied. Then he laboriously dictated: “I want to say that … Mrs. Bell and I have both had a very happy life together, and we couldn’t have better daughters than Elsie and Daisy or better sons-in-law than Bert and David, and we couldn’t have had finer grandchildren.” He mentioned his concern that, since Mabel had legal title to his worldly assets, he had made no financial provisions for his daughters.

Speaking was a supreme effort. Alexander Graham Bell paused, closed his eyes, winced, then continued: “We want to stand by Casey as he has stood by us … want to look upon Casey and his wife Kathleen as sort of children …”

He could manage no more: he sank into semiconsciousness. Daisy found herself standing at her father’s bedside, watching him struggle for breath. “Daddysan is still here,” she wrote to Elsie, in Brazil. “But I have the strange feeling … that his spirit is struggling to get loose and is only held to his body by slender cords.”

That night, Mabel, Daisy, David Fairchild, Casey, and the doctor clustered around Alec’s bed. The sleeping porch was filled with the familiar smells they all loved so dearly—rough soap, tobacco, the rich leathery aroma from the bindings of his
Encyclopaedia Brittanica
(9th edition), the earthy tang of his tweeds, the strong tea he had always loved to sip through his glass tubes. Alec was breathing heavily, lapsing in and out of consciousness and occasionally shifting his weight on the unforgiving horsehair mattress. It was too dark to see his face well; David Fairchild held a flashlight on the dying man’s face so that Mabel could watch his lips. Now and again, Alec squeezed Mabel’s hand, occasionally opening his eyes and smiling at her.

At midnight, Mabel gently disengaged her hand and went to rest on a sofa in the study; David took her place. But in the early hours of August 2, David felt Alec’s pulse slowing. He summoned his mother-in-law, and she was instantly by her husband’s side, holding his hand. As she watched Alec’s life ebb away, she was suddenly suffused with overwhelming grief. “Don’t leave me,” she implored, as tears sprang to her eyes. Alec was beyond speech but he managed to spell out “no” into her palm. The intervals between each breath came longer and longer. She held his wrist, willing the pulse to continue. Soon it was imperceptible—yet she could feel his fingers still fluttering weakly as he tried to communicate. Then the fingers were quiet, and he was gone.

“At last,” wrote David Fairchild to Bert Grosvenor, “we waited in vain for him to breathe and he didn’t…. Oh Bert, it was a wonderful going and so perfectly in keeping with the simplicity with which the great soul always surrounded himself. The simple sleeping porch, the lamps, his study, the stars shining in, the stillness of the night…. There was no confusion, no noise, but his breathing and [then] the sobs of those around him.”

Mabel bowed her head as she took in the enormity of her loss. The man around whom her whole life had revolved since she was seventeen was no longer there. The man who had conquered solitude and brought sound out of silence was now silent himself.

Mabel sat quiet for several minutes, still holding Alec’s lifeless hand. Dawn was breaking outside, and daylight seeped through the blinds around Alec’s bed. Alec’s family quietly wiped away their tears as they waited for his widow to speak. Finally, Mabel took a deep breath. With the fortitude she had displayed all her life, she began to think of what had to be done next. She announced that Alec would be buried on his beloved Beinn Bhreagh, and that the family need not go into mourning. Recalling how Alec had always disliked black, she remarked that if once she started wearing it, she could never bear to put it aside. She began to plan the funeral, allocating responsibilities to all the family and employees. “She goes on just as usual,” Daisy wrote to her sister, “makes all the motions, laughs and talks but you never forget for a moment that the heart of everything had gone out of life for her forever.”

Within the next few days, a grave was blasted out of the solid rock underneath the tetrahedral tower. The coffin was constructed in the Beinn Bhreagh workshop from local pine, and lined with airplane linen. Alec’s body, dressed in his familiar gray jacket and knickerbockers and woolen socks, was placed in the coffin, and his grandchildren gathered balsam branches to lay on it. Meanwhile, the Baddeck telephone switchboard was flooded with messages from all over the world. The telegram from Warren G. Harding, twenty-ninth president of the United States, was especially poignant for Mabel, since she knew how much Alec would have been delighted by Harding’s tribute. It spoke of more than the telephone.

The announcement of your eminent husband’s death comes as a great shock to me. In common with all of his countrymen, I have learned to revere him as one of the great benefactors of the race, and one of the foremost Americans of all generations. He will be mourned and honored by humankind everywhere as one who served it greatly, untiringly and usefully.

Even Thomas Edison, in West Orange, New Jersey, stepped apart from a lifetime of rivalry with his fellow inventor and acknowledged the contrast between them, as he told the
New York Times
how he had “always regarded [Alexander Graham Bell] very highly, especially his extreme modesty.”

Friday, August 4, 1922, dawned damp and gray—the kind of cool, Scottish weather that Alec had always loved. The burial was scheduled for sunset. In the late afternoon, a procession wound its way up the mountain. In front were twenty or thirty bareheaded Baddeck men, next came the coffin on a buckboard wagon, and last came four cars with the immediate family. At the top of the mountain, Mabel Bell, dressed in white, joined the small crowd in the hymn “Bringing in the Sheaves.” Next, a local Cape Breton girl sang the first verse of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem”:

Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

She was followed, at Mabel’s request, by the local Presbyterian minister, who read some verses from Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life”—the same poem that, thirty years earlier, twelve-year-old Helen Keller had recited at one of Alec s Wednesday evenings:

Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.

At the end of the little ceremony on Beinn Bhreagh, Daisy’s son Sandy and Casey Baldwin’s son Bobby raised British and American flags to half-mast on temporary poles.

While Mabel bid her husband farewell, flags stood at half-mast on all Bell buildings in North America. Every AT&T telephone on the continent was silent for one minute to honor the passing of Alexander Graham Bell.

In the next few months, Mabel Bell, who was Alec’s sole heir, kept herself busy as she set about completing her husband’s projects. She insisted that the whole family should remain at Beinn Bhreagh. She made the necessary financial provisions for Casey Baldwin to continue the hydrofoil research. She kept an eye on the sheep. She urged her children to stay connected with the work on behalf of the deaf that both their father and their Grandfather Hubbard had pursued. She began discussions with Bert Grosvenor on finding someone to write a biography of her husband, but discouraged him from commissioning Lytton Strachey, renowned for his recent biography of Queen Victoria, because she wanted a biographer who would write “from his own feeling of fascination.” And she wanted the biography to capture Alexander Graham Bell in all his complexity: “You must see that the biography does not picture Father as a perfect man. He was a very clever man and a good man, but he had his faults, just like every other human being. And I loved him for his faults…. I want people to realize that he was a human being and no saint. I don’t mean that he ever did anything morally wrong. Sometimes he was very inconsiderate of me, but I loved him for it.”