Reluctant Genius (12 page)

The cherries in the Bells’ orchard ripened, and summer slipped by. Eliza redoubled her efforts to ensure that her son was well fed and well rested before he returned to a life that she knew was full of “nervous work” and headaches. All too soon, however, Alec was climbing into the Bells’ buggy to catch the train. Eliza waved a sad goodbye. She was now in her sixties—gray-haired, losing what little hearing she had, and acutely conscious of the passing years. She wished Alec were more settled, preferably somewhere she could see him more often.

Back in Boston, Alec resumed where he had left off—living in Salem and lecturing at the School of Oratory. Mabel Hubbard re-enrolled as a private student. Her home life was happier now: her mother and sisters had returned to the house on Brattle Street at the start of summer. Once again, the parlor was filled with flowers, afternoon tea was served in a pretty imported tea service, and, on cool evenings, a log fire crackled in the hearth.

But there was a shadow over the Hubbard household: Gardiner Hubbard’s business dealings were not going well. Mabel Hubbard’s father had been trying to play Jack the Giant Killer, challenging the Western Union Telegraph Company, recently renamed the Western Union Corporation. The Western Union Corporation was one of the first truly national companies in the United States. It had gobbled up most of its competitors in the telegraph field and now administered over two thousand telegraph stations. Hubbard and his allies denounced this near-monopoly and charged that Western Union rates were far too high. They pointed out that telegraph rates were lower in Britain, where the service was provided by the post office. Arguing that cheaper rates would give business a big boost, Hubbard had proposed a competitor for Western Union: a private corporation, the United States Postal Telegraph Company, which would be responsible for the transmission of telegrams. Reception and distribution, argued Hubbard, could then be handled by the U.S. Post Office, which could treat telegrams like letters and charge them the same rates.

Gardiner Hubbard had spent the previous two years in Washington, lobbying Congress to charter his proposed private corporation. If the “Hubbard bill,” as the legislation was known, were to pass, the Western Union monopoly would splinter and Hubbard would make a great deal of money. But he faced a formidable opponent in William Orton, the tall, distinguished, and powerful president of Western Union, and a man who fit the plutocratic, cigar-chomping robber-baron stereotype to a tee. Up and down the country, Orton thumped the table and made speeches defending free enterprise and attacking Hubbard’s scheme as “government interference.” Orton was determined to protect his monopoly, crush Gardiner Hubbard’s scheme, and secure his company’s technical advantage over any competitors, present or future. He had already taken the precaution of acquiring rights to any multiple telegraph that Thomas Edison, the pushiest young inventor on the scene, might complete.

While Orton ranted, Gardiner Hubbard’s other business interests suffered. He was forced to borrow capital from his father-in-law, Robert McCurdy, and to fend off his creditors. His wife struggled to keep up appearances: “When am I to get the wherewithal to pay for bread and butter,” she wrote to her husband, “not to mention cake and ice creams … butchers and school and carpet women and dressmakers and butter and eggs and servants’ wages and all daily expenses?” But Hubbard was damned if he was going to buckle before Western Union and its bully president. He recognized that the entrepreneur or corporation that could market the first multiple telegraph would have the edge in the marketplace. One reason for his return to Boston that summer was the hope that he might find, within Boston’s cadre of brainy young telegraph enthusiasts, an inventor who was closer to a breakthrough than William Orton’s protégé. If Hubbard could be the first to unveil a way of sending several messages along telegraph wires simultaneously, Congress might be more inclined to pass his bill.

This was the background to a pivotal tea party in Cambridge in the fall of 1874. Gertrude Hubbard had invited her daughter’s elocution teacher to visit 146 Brattle Street on a Sunday afternoon. Alec, dressed in his shiny black coat and worn dress shoes, looked distinctly uncomfortable as he was introduced to Mabel’s sisters. The drawing room was so opulent, with its crimson damask curtains and heavy gilt valances, and the Hubbard girls were so dainty and gracious in their muslin tea gowns and carefully curled hair. They were unfamiliar company for a young man who spent most of his evenings with a small boy, an elderly lady, and a tangle of copper wiring. His large hands, with their thick fingers and their nails bitten to the quick, seemed particularly clumsy as they held a fragile bone china cup of tea. Unpracticed in small talk, Alec was tongue-tied. Mabel’s sisters found the shabbily dressed, nervous Scotsman rather a bore.

But then Gertrude Hubbard invited the visitor to play the grand piano. The chatter in the rest of the room soon died down as the Hubbards all realized that they had a gifted musician in their midst. At the same time, the rich notes of a well-tuned piano reawakened the Edinburgh boy who had entertained his cousins with sound games—and who understood the principle of sympathetic vibration. Alec could not resist demonstrating one of his party tricks to his hosts. Did they know, he asked, that the strings of a piano would repeat a note sung into them? He lifted the lid of the Hubbards’ piano, and in a resonant baritone sang into its strings. The strings began to vibrate and to echo Alec’s note. Alec explained to his host that the piano would also respond to a telegraphic impulse having the same frequency. Gardiner Hubbard began to get very interested. Did this phenomenon have any value for communication? Alec gave an abrupt laugh as he blurted out his theory: the phenomenon
should
mean that a single telegraph wire could carry several messages at once, if they were all vibrating at a different frequency.

Inventor and Yankee entrepreneur had found one another. Alec was unaware that Mabel’s father was on the hunt for a multiple telegraph device; Gardiner Hubbard had no idea that his daughter’s teacher spent his nights crouched over a table covered with electromagnets and lengths of wire, or that George Sanders’s father, owner of a successful leather business, had already offered to underwrite some of his expenses. Alec had the ideas that Hubbard needed; Hubbard, along with Sanders, had the access to capital to finance them. The Boston lawyer also had the professional qualification to secure patents for any breakthroughs that Alec made.

Soon Gardiner Hubbard was drafting a partnership agreement between Alec, Thomas Sanders, and himself. Gardiner was well aware of the exhaustive and competitive process involved in patent applications, so on November 24 he made a vital suggestion to Alec: “Whenever you recall any fact connected with your invention jot it down on paper as time will be essential to us, and the more things actually performed by you at an earlier date the better for our case. You must not neglect an instant in your work, so that we may file the application for a patent as soon as possible.”

The October tea party marked the start of a tumultuous year for Alec. He was determined to fulfill his commitments to the university and his students while pushing ahead with his invention. This meant working all hours of the day and night, causing endless worry to his parents. Melville Bell continued to demand that Alec focus on Visible Speech. Eliza fretted that her son would drive himself to financial ruin: “Does your partnership with these gentlemen bind you to share their expenses in case of failure?” Eliza didn’t understand the lure of telegraphy and tried to redirect her son’s attention back to what he had always insisted was his vocation: “If the theory of vibration should lead to any clue as to the cause and proper treatment of deafness, it would indeed be a valuable discovery.”

When Alec told his parents that he had applied for American citizenship so he could patent his work, he unleashed further anxiety in Tutelo Heights. The Civil War was still fresh in most people’s memories, and Eliza fretted that Alec might be summoned for military service. “We do not mind your adopting as your own a country that has sprung from your own,” she wrote, “but we shrink from your being compelled to obey the arbitrary laws of that country, even to the sacrifice of your life.” Melville Bell asked yet again what this had to do with his own life’s work. Alec tried to assuage him: “Should I be able to make any money out of the idea, we shall have Visible Speech put before the world on a more permanent form.”

But Alec was now obsessed with winning the race to find a way to send several messages at once by telegraph. The partnership agreement that he had signed with Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders specified that the two businessmen would put up the money to pay Alec’s expenses, including wages for an assistant, and Alec would provide the inventions. They made no provision for additional income for Alec, who was expected to continue supporting himself on his university and teaching income. Alec was too naive to negotiate a better deal. He knew that both Elisha Gray and Thomas Edison were close to unveiling their multiple telegraph prototypes, and that Gray was already playing around with a gadget that employed a metal diaphragm to transmit simple chords. Alec was in a frenzy. “It is a neck and neck race between Mr. Gray and myself who shall complete our apparatus first,” he wrote to his parents in November. “He has the advantage over me in being a practical electrician—but I have reason to believe that I am better acquainted with the phenomena of sound than he is—so that I have an advantage there.… The very opposition seems to nerve me to work and I feel with the facilities I have now I may succeed.… I shall be seriously ill should I fail in this now I am so thoroughly wrought up.” Eliza, knowing her son’s fragile health, was terrified: “My dear boy, let me … caution you to fortify your mind against possible difficulty and disappointment.”

Alec frequently caught the horse-drawn tram to Cambridge to visit his benefactor Gardiner Hubbard—and his pupil Mabel. Gertrude Hubbard liked her husband’s protégé, and often invited him to join them for midday Sunday dinner, with its unvaried menu of roast beef followed by floating islands—meringue in almond-flavored custard. After the meal, Alec would play the piano. From the piano stool, as his fingers danced over the keys, he would look around at the black walnut furniture, the marble-topped safe, the walls covered in red velvet, all glowing in the light from the gas chandelier, and quietly measure the gulf between this mansion and his own threadbare office. “How well I remember it all,” he later admitted to Mabel, “the blazing fire, the comfortable meal, the luxury and love.… I looked at [the] happy home much as a friendless beggar looks into the windows of a cheerful room.” But he seldom let his mind dwell on the contrast, or on his developing feelings toward Mabel Hubbard. The telegraph race consumed him. After Christmas, he was able to redouble his efforts. He acquired the skilled assistant his partners had promised him: Thomas Watson, a twenty-two-year-old who was employed in a Boston metal-working shop.

Chapter 6

T
HE
F
ATEFUL
“T
WANG
” 1875

A
continual roaring, clanging, and whining echoed through the dingy machine shop at 109 Court Street, Boston. About twenty-five men worked here, under the supervision of the owner, Charles Williams. Bent over metalworking lathes (mostly worked by hand, but Mr. Williams had a couple of engine-driven machines), they manufactured keys, relays, sounders, registers, switchboards, gongs, galvanometers, and a few printing telegraph instruments. These were the simple components required for the meager list of electrical appliances then in use: telegraph equipment, fire alarms, call bells. The loft’s brick walls had once been whitewashed, but now only patches of dull white showed here and there through the dirt. Overhead, a tangle of racing leather belts and whirring pulleys hid most of the grimy beams and ceiling. At the center of the room were wooden racks holding steel, iron, and brass sheets and rods. Piles of rough castings littered the floor. In one corner of the room there was a small forge, and a sink where the men washed up. Another corner was partitioned off for the office and salesroom, where finished machines were displayed in glass cases. However, flimsy partitions could not shield customers from the soot that hung thick in the air, the stench of viscous machine oil, or the noise of the metalworking equipment.

There were workshops like this scattered through Boston, where young men could apprentice as electricians and where inventors could get their ideas translated into equipment. But Mr. Williams’s shop was known as one of the best. And the most skilled machinist at 109 Court Street was a clean-shaven, taciturn Salem livery stable manager’s son called Thomas Watson.

Machine-shop protocol dictated that customers conferred with Mr. Williams about their needs, and once they had placed their orders, Mr. Williams allocated the work among his employees. One day, however, a stranger rushed out of the front office and through the shop to Thomas Watson’s workbench. He was, recalled Watson in his autobiography, “a tall, slender, quick-motioned young man with a pale face, black side-whiskers and drooping mustache, big nose and high, sloping forehead crowned with bushy jet-black hair. It was Alexander Graham Bell.… He was bringing me two little instruments I had made.… They had not been made in accordance with his directions and he had impatiently broken down the rudimentary discipline of the shop by coming directly to me to have them altered.”

The instruments in Alec Bell’s hands were a practical application of the ideas he had explained to Gardiner Hubbard in the fall of 1874—the transmitter and receiver of his harmonic telegraph. He explained to Watson how the instruments worked on the principle of sympathetic vibrations and, when perfected, would send six or eight telegraph messages over a single wire simultaneously. The transmitter had an electromagnet attached to a reed made of a steel spring, and an adjustable contact screw. The receiver had a similar magnet and reed, but no contact screw. Alec described how the reed of the transmitter, kept in vibration by a battery connected through the contact screw, interrupted the battery current the number of times per second that corresponded to the pitch of the reed. This intermittent current, passing through the telegraph wire to the distant receiver, would set the reed of that receiver into vibration as long as it was tuned to the same pitch as the transmitter reed. Alec theorized that if six transmitters with their reeds tuned to six different pitches were all sending their intermittent currents through the magnets of six distant receivers with reeds tuned to the same pitches, each receiver would select from the mix-up along a single wire its own set of vibrations, and would ignore the rest. The operator at the receiving end could then read the dots and dashes yielded by the receiver. But the instruments had to be tuned with extraordinary accuracy to ensure the separation of each set of vibrations.