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Authors: Charlotte Gray

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Throughout the fall of 1873, fifteen-year-old Mabel pined for her family. “It is so sad,” she wrote, “… that we should go on living like this with no settled home, our family divided, part in New York, Papa in Washington and I here.” Mabel hated seeing most of the windows at 146 Brattle Street unlit in the evenings, the pears in the pear orchard lying rotting in the grass, and the herbaceous borders in the garden going to seed. She frequently wandered into the library or the sitting room and, suffused with nostalgia for happier years, quietly lifted the dustcovers in the hope of catching the lingering scent of her mother’s eau de toilette or her father’s hair pomade. She told her mother in a letter, “Our house, that sweet home where we were born and passed our childhoods’ first years still remains to us, but a large placard distinctly visible announces that ‘this estate is for sale.’’ It seems sometimes as if it were almost better to have it sold than to see it looking so lonely & desolate & uninhabited.”

However, Mabel was not by nature prone to depression. After the months in Austria, she was used to separation from her family, and she kept herself busy. She visited neighbors, including Edith and Annie Longfellow, daughters of the great poet Henry Longfellow. She learned to navigate around Boston without an escort, despite her deafness and her balance problems. “I expect to go to church this afternoon, I must go alone and it’s dreadful to me, I am always frightened at going out alone,” she wrote. “However I’m too big to be so babyish and I will go to try and conquer it.” She read voraciously and wrote long letters to “My precious Mamma.” As the weeks passed, the lessons with Miss Locke and Mr. Bell occupied an increasing amount of space in the lengthy scrawls to her mother. In December she wrote, “Mr. Bell informed me the other day he never had a pupil who improved so—not slowly but—
rapidly.
There’s for you Ma Chère!”

In February of the following year, she was so eager not to miss a lesson that she braved a huge snowstorm in order to catch the streetcar into Boston—“Both Miss Locke and Mr. Bell were surprised to see me.” After her lesson, Alec insisted on escorting her back to the streetcar stop, since the snow was by then knee-high. As they stepped into the street, they were almost blinded by the whirling snowflakes and found themselves slipping and sliding into each other. Alec held a protective hand out to his pupil since she could not hear his warnings about patches of ice; she grasped it gratefully and gave him a wide smile. Soon the two of them were running downhill, arm in arm and shrieking with laughter. For Alec, it was a sudden reminder that he was, after all, still a young man—and that it wasn’t so long since he had enjoyed such adventures in Edinburgh winters with his long-lost brothers. For Mabel, who described their “grand time” in a letter to her mother, it put her fascinating but usually unsmiling teacher in a new light. Mabel’s pleas to be reunited with her family in New York petered out: “I enjoy my lessons very much and am glad you want me to stay. Everyone says it would be such a pity to go away just as I am really trying to improve.” In this particular letter, Mabel signed her name in Visible Speech symbols.

It remained a teacher-pupil relationship. Mabel went on thinking that Professor Bell was nearly twenty years older than she was. But she enjoyed his company and the way he treated her as an adult. His opinions were so thrillingly different from those that held sway on Brattle Street; she didn’t know whether to take him seriously when he insisted, for example, “that America was the refuge for the ruffians of the whole world.” For his part, Alec was gratified by the rapid improvement in her speech: he had almost managed to smooth the strange “honk” out of Mabel’s voice and to teach her how to modulate its volume. Close attention to her enunciation had made him notice other features—the uncommon clarity of her eyes, the sweetness of her smile, and the infectious nature of her laugh. In a postscript to one letter to her mother, Mabel noted, “What do you think, I have been told I am beautiful!” But Mabel was still very young, and Alec’s intellect was engaged elsewhere. As Mabel would recall in later years, “His mind was too full of telegraph ideas for much else.”

Alec continued to live at Salem, helping George Sanders each evening, then working far into the night on his own ideas for a multiple telegraph. The mountain of electromagnets, vibrating steel rods, and wire circuits on his worktable grew alongside his conviction that two messages could be sent simultaneously on the same wire if they used two different tones. But every time he solved one puzzle, another emerged. His keen “ear” helped detect vibrations in the rods, but he was hampered by his ignorance of electricity. He filled notebook after notebook and his letters home with sketches of harmonic telegraph devices. He read in the
New York Times
and heard from colleagues at Boston University that other inventors were on the same track as he was. As early as 1861, a German physicist called Philipp Reis had transmitted various sounds (but nothing so complex as speech) on an interrupted electric current over a distance, and called his invention a “telefon.” Within the previous couple of years, a professional electrician and inventor from Ohio named Elisha Gray, employed by the Western Electric Company in Chicago, had successfully transmitted music over telegraph wires. In Newark, New Jersey, Thomas Edison was already bragging that he was close to introducing the “quadruplex telegraph,” which he claimed might carry two Morse code messages simultaneously in each direction. The competition unnerved Alec, and once again his health began to suffer. By late May, Mabel told her mother that her instructor was “quite sick, having overworked himself.”

In June 1874, the discouraged twenty-seven-year-old packed up his instruments and his notebooks, said goodbye to his students, and wearily climbed on the train for another summer in Brantford with his parents. His obsession with telegraphy now overshadowed his commitment to deaf education. As the locomotive steamed toward Buffalo and Canada, Alec sat on the scratchy horsehair seat of the second-class train car staring out at the waving cornfields and rolling meadows of New England. By late afternoon, the train was passing through upper New York State. Slanting light gilded the thick forests and painted the ponds and marshes with yellow gleams—but Alec was too preoccupied to notice. He was thinking about his summer plans, and a new acquisition. A few weeks earlier, he had mentioned to his friend Dr. Clarence Blake, a Boston ear specialist, that he was trying to replicate mechanically the action of the delicate bones and membrane of the human ear. Dr. Blake had asked him why he was trying to reinvent the wheel: why didn’t he just use a human ear? Days later, Alec received a little box in the mail from his friend; in it were the anvil, hammer, and stirrup bones and the membrane of an ear taken from a corpse at the medical school where Dr. Blake taught. Now the macabre package was in his travel bag, on the luggage rack above his head.

Alec developed the phonautograph, which incorporated human ear bones, to help the deaf “see” how words should sound.

Once in Brantford, Alec walked the three miles from the station and appeared unannounced through the French doors of his parents’ parlor, with a cry of, “Hoy Hoy! So what’s happening?”—his usual style of entry at Tutelo Heights. Eliza jumped up from her seat with delight, sent a servant to find Melville, and immediately began fussing about her son’s pallor and thinness. Melville appeared, his face wreathed in smiles as he looked up at his son. Soon the two men were deep in conversation about Alec’s telegraph experiments. The following day, Alec and Melville were busy in the laboratory that Alec had established behind the conservatory, Alec working on an apparatus incorporating the human ear that Dr. Blake had sent him. He called this contraption his “ear phonautograph,” or sound writer. When Alec spoke into the ear, a pen that was attached to one of the bones behind the membrane moved in sympathy with the membrane’s vibrations and traced a wavy line on a piece of smoked glass. Initially, Alec’s intention was to produce an instrument that would allow the hearing-impaired to “see” how words should sound. He hoped that his deaf students would be able to compare the lines their own voices made with those of correctly pronounced words so that they could adjust their own pronunciation. But the phonautograph soon took Alec in a different direction. He was struck by the way that sound vibrations acting on a tiny membrane could move relatively heavy bones. Melville’s terse diary entry for July 26, 1874, read, “Electric speech (?)”

On August 10, after a morning spent with the phonautograph, Alec strolled out of the house toward the bluff overlooking the Grand River. A large tree had blown down here, creating a natural and completely private belvedere, which Alec had dubbed his “dreaming place.” Slouched on a wicker chair, his hands in his pockets, he stared unseeing at the swiftly flowing river below him. Far from the bustle of Boston and the pressure of competition from other eager inventors, he mulled over everything he had discovered about sound. His experiments had demonstrated that vibrating tuning forks produced sound waves, a pattern of compressions and rarefactions that moved at a steady speed away from the source of vibration. Alec understood that sound waves travel through air in the same way that energy moves through the coils of a spring when a section of the spring is compressed and released. He now began to wonder whether electric currents could be made to mimic a sound’s pattern of compressions and rarefactions. If they could, any sound could be transmitted electrically.

Alec’s knowledge of sound, and his acute ear, meant that he was aware of two other aspects of sound waves. First, he knew that rapidly vibrating objects have a higher frequency than less rapidly vibrating ones—they go through their cycle of vibration more times each second. A sound’s frequency determines its pitch: how high or low it seems to a listener. Second, he understood the concept of sympathetic vibration. Such vibrations are set up when sound waves from one vibrating object cause another object of the same natural frequency to vibrate.

The phonautograph apparatus mimicked the action of the human ear. In the process of hearing, sound waves pass through the ear canal and hit the eardrum or membrane, which begins to vibrate. The vibrations move the tiny bones connecting the membrane to the inner ear, and these movements cause waves in a fluid in the inner ear. The fluid then pushes against another membrane, which is covered with thousands of hair cells. These in turn are attached to nerve fibers, which, as the hair-covered membrane moves, send signals to the brain. These signals are interpreted as sounds.

Alec had understood how sound was produced in the human larynx ever since he and Melly had built their speaking machine, all those years ago in Edinburgh. Now he understood how sound was received in the human ear. The next step would be to reproduce the action of the ear membrane and design an instrument to translate the vibrations into sounds. Suddenly the idea struck him that it might be possible to create an undulating electric current that could carry sound along a telegraph wire in the same way that air carried sound waves from the speaker to the hearer. The telephone receiver, pressed to a human ear, could act like an electrical mouth. Current flowing through an electromagnet would cause the receivers membrane to vibrate. The vibrations, reasoned Alec, would then hit the listeners eardrum, making it vibrate too. The listener’s ear would interpret these vibrations as the sounds spoken by the person at the other end of the wire.

This was the “eureka” moment for Alexander Graham Bell—his flash of genius. In his dreaming place overlooking the swirling waters of the Grand River, he had grasped the principle on which the telephone would operate.

Years later, when Alec was defending his patent application, he would describe the moment when “the conception of a membrane speaking telephone became complete in my mind; for I saw that a similar instrument to that used as a transmitter could also be employed as a receiver.” This extraordinary leap of the imagination is what put Alec ahead of the pack of inventors scrambling to advance the technology of communication. No one else knew enough about the human ear. His imaginative breakthrough is also what makes Alexander Graham Bell the quintessential inventor of the nineteenth century—the era when an untrained individual working alone could dream up such a crucial scientific advance.

But in that summer of 1874, Alec ran headlong into his own limitations. He was an intuitive inventor, not a trained scientist. He lacked the technical expertise and the knowledge of electricity, let alone the funds, to construct the apparatus required. That would have to wait until he returned to Boston. Moreover, the telephone and the phonautograph were diversions from his main preoccupation: the multiple telegraph, which would simultaneously transmit several Morse code messages rather than a single human voice, and for which there was already a market. This seemed the best bet for making him some money. So for the time being, he abandoned his idea of inducing continuous undulatory currents and returned to the challenge of creating a battery-induced intermittent current with simple, steady frequency. As he fiddled with his electromagnets in the Tutelo Heights laboratory, Melville Bell looked on with impatient disapproval. What did this have to do with Visible Speech? “Alec full of schemes,” Melville jotted in his diary on September 7.

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