Reluctant Genius (23 page)

Back in Boston, as Mabel carefully pasted the newspaper reports into Alec’s already bulging scrapbook, she must have smiled at the thought of her dearest Alec successfully jolting smug New Englanders out of their skepticism. But she was her mother’s daughter. Although she was happy for Alec to give public lectures, she didn’t want his dignity diminished. “Why do you let them speak of you as
A.
Graham?” she asked him in a letter. “I personally hate it when I think how handsome the full name is.”

The stress of public performance soon took its toll on Alec, and his mood swung between elation and depression. “I have a little of the volcano in my composition and I often feel as if I shall go mad with the feverish anxiety of my unsettled life,” he confessed to his fiancée in April. “Thank heaven you do not know what it is to be drifting about the world by yourself, without a place you can call your own.” But marriage to Mabel continued to seem beyond his reach. He had no income from the telephone, because Gardiner Hubbard was still developing his market strategy for selling or leasing equipment. Hubbard was also trying—and failing—to find backers for the venture. In Chicago, the inventor Elisha Gray was now contesting Alec’s patent, despite his friendly overtures in Philadelphia the previous year. Alec was so convinced that in the end the Hubbards would not allow Mabel to marry him while his finances remained insecure that he decided to launch himself into another money-raising lecture tour. But the initial novelty of the “talking telegraph” was wearing off. When Alec spoke in May at Chickering Hall in New York City, a
New York Times
reporter gave a lukewarm account of “Prof. Alexander Graham Bell” and his “exhaustive discussion of the transmission of sound … illustrated by a number of complex and not very intelligible figures cast upon a prepared background by means of a stereopticon.” The reporter was mollified only when he managed to hear on Prof. Bell’s telephone receiver the popular tune “The Sweet By and By” being played on an organ in New Brunswick, New Jersey, thirty-two miles away.

It was the business world that would seize the potential of the speaking telegraph. An enterprising engineer set up the first experimental telephone exchange in Boston on May 17, 1877; it connected Brewster, Bassett and Company, bankers, the Shoe and Leather Bank, and the Charles Williams Company. At last, Gardiner Hubbard decided that Alec’s invention was sufficiently reliable, and commercial production at the Charles Williams workshop moved into high gear. Gardiner cleverly opted to lease telephones rather than sell them so that he and his partners could maintain control. In June he drew up the legal documents for the formation of the Bell Telephone Company, with himself, Alec, Tom Watson, and Thomas Sanders as shareholders. “We shall soon begin to reap the rewards of Alec’s invention,” Gardiner wrote triumphantly to their lawyer. The following month, Alec sold a part interest in his English patent for $5,000 to a Rhode Island cotton broker named William H. Reynolds. In early July, Watson reckoned there were 200 telephones in service. Within a month that figure had risen to 778, and by the end of August to 1,300, although these were almost entirely for dedicated single lines rather than for systems radiating out of manually operated switchboards. In early 1878, the world’s first commercial telephone exchange would be installed by eager entrepreneurs at New Haven, Connecticut. Six months after that, Canada got its first telephone exchange, in Hamilton, Ontario.

One of the first customers was Sam Clemens (better known as Mark Twain), in Hartford, who persuaded his boss at the
Hartford Courant
to connect his home with the newspaper’s offices. Twain would also be one of the first writers to incorporate the telephone into a short story. In his 1880 sketch “A Telephone Conversation,” the narrator eavesdrops on two women speaking about such topics of universal female concern as children, scandal, and church. Within only a couple of years, now that a few privileged users were listening to the familiar voices of friends and family rather than to strange voices in public demonstrations, the telephone had lost its “weirdness.”

This explosion of commercial activity finally persuaded Gertrude Hubbard—and, more particularly, her husband, Gardiner—to give their permission to Alexander Graham Bell to marry their daughter.

Once Gardiner Hubbard had announced to Alec that the wedding could go ahead, Mabel and her mother turned their attention to the bridal trousseau. But there were severe restrictions on Mabel’s choice of gowns and colors. A few months earlier, Gertrude Hubbard’s mother had died, so the rigorous demands of North American mourning protocol had enveloped the Hubbard family. All the women were shrouded in black crepe from head to foot. Mrs. Hubbard and her eldest daughter, Sister, were expected to wear only black and white for two years after Grandma McCurdy’s death. Mabel, Roberta, and Grace might wear lavender after they had observed full mourning for twelve months. In a tight little group like the Hubbard women, it was inevitable that Mabel would insist on conforming to family tradition.

“You English, for you are English, wear mourning for a very short time,” Mabel explained to her fiancé. “Here it is the custom to put it on seldom but when you do, you wear it for a long time. [Mama] said she felt very strongly about it; if I put on colors, it would seem as if you had taken me away from my family, that I cared no longer about them and their sorrow.” Mabel assured Alec that she wished their wedding to be a happy one, but “Berta and Grace wear black until winter, and the Gertrudes until next winter, and I should feel badly if my dress separated me from my own family.”

Alec knew that this was a crucial moment in his future marital politics: it was a test of how far Mabel would be prepared to leave her family’s circle. But he also knew that it was a test that he, rather than Mabel, must not fail, as her family was so important to her. For once he was moderate. He told her that she should do whatever she felt best— but he did persuade her that her wedding gown need not be black.

Bride and groom agreed that the ceremony should take place in the parlor of the Hubbards’ Brattle Street home—the same parlor in which Alec had first demonstrated to Gardiner Hubbard the properties of piano strings, and in which he had poured out his love for Mabel to her mother. Only Mabel’s family and a handful of friends were invited to attend the wedding. Alec’s parents were not present—probably to Alec’s relief, as he knew the social gulf that yawned between the two families. On July 10, 1877, a bower of Madonna lilies saved for the occasion by the gardener was constructed in the bay window at the front of the Brattle Street drawing room, and the dining-room chairs were arranged around the perimeter of the room. The following day, Wednesday, July 11, Tom Watson and Alec’s new junior assistant, Eddie Wilson, took the horsecar from Boston to Cambridge, self-consciously clutching the first pairs of white gloves either of them had ever owned. Before knocking on the Hubbards’ front door, they surreptitiously pulled the soft kid gloves onto their calloused workmen’s hands. Inside, they found Mabel standing like a queen, surrounded by family. Her thick, wavy hair neatly dressed in an elaborate coil, she wore a simple white gown with Alec’s wedding gift to her, a cross of eleven pearls, at her throat. Her large gray eyes barely left Alec’s face, and she looked astonishingly young. But Alec, now thirty, knew that his nineteen-year-old wife already had far more business sense than he would ever have. In addition to the pearl cross, he had also presented her with all but 10 of his 1,507 shares in the Bell Telephone Company, which constituted about 30 percent of the total. This gesture horrified Mabel’s parents, but by now they had learned to be surprised by nothing that Alec Bell did.

From Cambridge, the newlyweds traveled to Niagara Falls for a weeks honeymoon. They stayed in Clifton House, the grandest of the resort’s hotels, in which well-heeled visitors could enjoy gardens, billiard rooms, baths, and nightly balls, as well as spectacular views of the falls from balconies and verandas. (Clifton House even kept a pack of hounds for any English visitors who wanted a spot of hunting.) Niagara Falls was a popular venue for honeymooners, who thrilled to the raw power of the waterfalls and the feats of human daring they inspired. Only a few years before the Bells’ visit, the Italian tightrope-walker Maria Spelterini, sporting a risqué costume of scarlet tunic, green bodice, and flesh-colored tights, had dazzled the crowds by performing her high-wire act with her feet encased in peach baskets. Mabel wrote an enthusiastic letter to her mother about the excitements of the place, including a description of her trip on the
Maid of the Mist,
the pleasure boat that took them immediately below the falls. Although she could not hear the water’s thunderous roar, she could feel the boat shuddering and vibrating with its extraordinary force. The untamed power of so much water made Mabel feel “oppressed and frightened,” and she was “glad to get away from [the falls] and admire them from a distance.” Mabel kept no private journal of her first weeks as a married woman, although she did secrete in a Clifton House envelope a sentimental memento—an unruly tangle of her thick, golden brown hair. Nor did she confide to her mother any details of married life with Alec, except for her exasperation at his slowness in the morning: “I have at last succeeded in waking my Scotchman, a feat which took more than ten minutes to accomplish.”

One week after the wedding, Alec and Mabel arrived in Brantford. Melville Bell had made a brief visit to Boston earlier in the year, but this was Mabel’s first encounter with her mother-in-law. As Alec helped her down from the cutter that had brought them from the station, Mabel smiled shyly at the plain little woman with a prim bonnet and starched lace collar who awaited her on the porch of Tutelo Heights. Eliza smiled back and then, to Mabel’s total surprise, walked down the steps toward her, lifted her hands up, and broke an oatcake over her head. Alec roared with laughter at the startled expression on his bride’s face and explained that this was the traditional Scottish welcome to a new bride, symbolizing the promise that she would never go hungry. Mabel brushed the crumbs off her hat and stepped gingerly into the house, wondering what other Scottish customs she would encounter.

Once in the parlor, Mabel admired Eliza’s paintings, mostly copies of Old Masters, which covered the walls. But she also noticed the modesty of the Bell establishment—and the distance Alec had traveled when he was accepted by the Hubbard family. “It is so funny to see him here, he is so different from them all, and actually seems a great dandy,” she told her mother. A couple of days later, the new bride donned her “brown silk and white grenadine” gown for a large party, at which Eliza served ham sandwiches and a trifle cake (“a queer mixture of sponge cake, strawberry preserves, [homemade] wine and custards”). Champagne was poured for a motley crowd of farmers, lawyers, local politicians, and drivers.

The young Bostonian was quite taken aback, and struggled not to allow her lip to curl like Cousin Mary’s. “Such a democratic assemblage I never saw,” she wrote home. But she couldn’t resist noting that the Mohawk chief George Johnson was present, and was “as intelligent and civilized looking as most of the people there.” The down-home Ontarians, for their part, must have found Mabel quite an exotic bird. Tightly corseted, and with ruffles, beaded fringes, and a rosette embellishing her silk skirt, she was far better dressed than any of the female guests. So was Alec, who sported the grosgrain-edged topcoat, creaseless striped trousers, stiff collar, and gray silk bowtie that he had worn for his wedding. But before the evening was out, he had removed the coat, loosened his tie, and sat down at the piano to play a few Scottish favorites, including “Bonnets of Bonny Dundee,” and some popular American tunes such as “Comin’ through the Rye” and “Green Grow the Rushes, Oh!”

Alec and Mabel returned to Boston by train in early August so that Alec could attend the first shareholders meeting of the Bell Telephone Company. The company, which had been created the previous month, was a voluntary association, unincorporated and without any declared capitalization; it consisted of a declaration of trust in which Alec assigned all his telegraphic patents, past and future, to Gardiner Hubbard as trustee with the responsibility for administering the company. Voting rights and five thousand shares were divided among the board of managers: Alec, Gardiner Hubbard, Gardiner’s brother Charles Eustis Hubbard (who had ten shares), Thomas Sanders, and Thomas Watson. Sanders was elected treasurer; Alec, electrician (in charge of research and development); and Tom Watson, superintendent (in charge of manufacturing). By now, Charles Williams’s machine shop in Boston, where Alec and Tom had conducted some of their first experiments, was manufacturing telephones at the rate of twenty-five a day. Thanks to Gardiner Hubbard’s efforts, there were buyers for Bell telephones all over the eastern seaboard and into the Midwest. Before the month was out, an enterprising Melville Bell (to whom Alec had given the Canadian patents to his invention) had connected the Ottawa office of Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie to the residence of the Canadian governor general, the Earl of Dufferin, and rented them two telephones, for $42.50 each per year.

By then, Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell had left New York City bound for Scotland aboard the 2,713-ton steamship
Anchoria.
Mabel discovered to her delight that the
Anchoria,
a three-masted, one-funnel vessel built in 1874 at a shipyard in Britain’s Barrow-in-Furness, was a thoroughly modern ship: “All the bells in our rooms are electric bells. I think this such an appropriate steamer for Alec to sail in, it is so full of electricity.” Unfortunately, the bells didn’t work, which made them, as Mabel noted in the joint journal that the newlyweds briefly kept during the voyage, “a tantalizing mockery.” Before they were halfway across the Atlantic, however, Alec had fixed them. He had also set up telephone wires between the wheelhouse, the captain’s bridge, the smoking room, and the drawing room, to the delight of both crew and passengers.