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Authors: Charlotte Gray

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Gertrude Hubbard (left), with Alec and Mabel, outside her Washington mansion, Twin Oaks.

But this was only part of the problem. A larger part was his own nature. He did not have the self-discipline to adopt a methodical strategy for testing out his intuitions in practice. He had knuckled down to his experiments when he was in his twenties because he was driven by the need to make money to marry Mabel and to prove to his father that the telephone was as important as Visible Speech. But once he had achieved these goals, he spread his energies too thin. He himself was rarely prepared to do the painstaking testing that inventions like the photophone or the vacuum jacket required. He preferred leaps of the imagination, during which he might experience a eureka moment, to the dull slog of careful calibrations. Soon after they became engaged, Mabel had commented that “you like to fly around like a butterfly sipping honey, more or less from a flower here or another flower there,” and Alec’s intellectual capriciousness had only increased since then. He
so
wanted to keep on inventing, but he allowed himself to be pulled in too many directions at once.

Moreover, he lacked the knowledge and training that were increasingly required for scientific innovation. As Robert V. Bruce has pointed out, Bell’s understanding of mathematics was limited. Too often he relied on analogy. This had proved to be a stroke of genius in the invention of the telephone, when his firm grasp of the principles of human speech and hearing allowed him to speculate that an electric current could mirror sound waves. It was also useful for the photophone. But when dealing with challenges outside his knowledge base, it could lead him up intellectual alleys that were little short of ridiculous. At one point, as he recorded in a notebook, he wondered, “Are odours vibrations? If so, may they not be vibrations between sound & heat?” A few years later, he wondered whether “thought transference” was possible. He coiled wire around his own head, then connected it to a coil around his assistant’s head, to see if he could transmit ideas without speaking. All that was shared was a headache.

But a larger issue was the changing nature of the business environment in the nineteenth century. Alexander Graham Bell was increasingly out of step with his times.

From today’s vantage point, the United States from 1865 to 1900 seems compellingly exuberant, particularly as it is often called, in the phrase coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, “the Gilded Age.” But the Bells’ world of big houses, confident, bearded men, and a settled pace of life is deceptive. Post-Civil War America was in a state of transition, as a motley collection of antagonistic states became a nation. The speed of that shift to nationhood was breathtaking, matched only by the speed of the technological revolution that accompanied it. Alec himself had contributed enormously to the latter with his invention of the telephone: by 1898, the United States, with a population of 76 million, would have 800,000 telephone sets. This was twice as many as in all of Europe, which had a considerably larger population. Equally important was the rapid spread of railroads, knitting distant regions together. The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869; by 1880, there were 93,000 miles of track in service across the continent, and that number jumped to 165,000 miles by 1890.

One of Alec's more bizarre ideas involved on apparatus for transferring brain-waves between individuals.

The rail network created national markets both for industrial products, such as the steel required for rails, and for consumer goods, such as household furnishings. Everything was going farther and farther, faster and faster—and the accelerating economy was changing the way that innovations went from the inventors brain to mass production. Scientific knowledge was crucial for improvements in how everything was produced, from textiles and domestic appliances to steel, oil, and railroad equipment. Smart businessmen no longer simply waited for the next good idea to come along: they actively sought out technologies that would increase output and, of course, profits. And savvy inventors recognized this appetite for their innovations. Before 1850, there were rarely more than five hundred inventors eager to patent their inventions each year in the United States. Thirty years later, the figure was twenty thousand and growing.

One of the canniest of such inventors was Alec’s rival Thomas Edison. Edison recognized, in the words of his biographer Neil Baldwin, that progress and competition were identical.” Edison was not content with dreaming up new innovations, such as the phonograph, the incandescent lightbulb, and the carbon microphone for telephones. He was an entrepreneur: he also wanted to push his ideas through development and patenting to commercial use. He would be granted 1,093 patents during his lifetime, compared to Alexander Graham Bell’s 31 patents (some of which were in association with colleagues). Edison was single-minded: he allowed nothing to get in his way. (He deserted his first wife, Mary, on their wedding night, scurrying back to his workshop to check a new device. She died when she was only twenty-nine, after a breakdown, leaving three children Edison had little to do with.) But Edison was prepared to do the laborious detailed work that Alec either ducked or delegated to others. It was Edison who gave us the aphorism, “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” At Menlo Park, twenty-five miles east of New York City and strategically situated on the Pennsylvania Railroad line, he constructed both a laboratory and a machine shop in the late 1870s. He hired experts, such as John Kruuesi, a Swiss clockmaker, Charles Batchelor, a British machinist, and Ed Johnson, an engineer, who together could translate his brainwaves into models and patents. And he was, in the words of author Harold Evans, “an impresario of invention.” As soon as Edison saw a glimmer of commercial potential in any of his inventions, he trumpeted his success near and far, in the interests of raising the public interest and capital he would need to bring it to market. “Anything that won’t sell,” he once announced, “I don’t want to invent.” The buzz he created attracted the attention of the major investors of the Gilded Age (or “robber barons,” as they are more often known), most notably Jay Gould and J. P. Morgan.

Alec was a throwback to a different age, when a lone inventor waited for inspiration to strike and then watched to see if others might exploit his invention. Alec didn’t have an entrepreneurial bone in his body. For example, in the mid-1890s, he devoted a lot of time to perfecting an automated central switchboard that would do the work of twenty telephone operators, yet he never bothered to file a patent application. “Mrs. Bell was shocked,” Charles Thompson recalled, and she asked her husband, “Why not?” Alec replied, “It would turn all of those poor girls out of their jobs.”

Alec pursued his fascination in science for science’s sake at the Volta Laboratory. In 1889, he moved his laboratory from Connecticut Avenue to another former stable—this time in Georgetown, behind his father’s house. After his breakfast ritual each morning, he would disappear down M Street, to his office in the little redbrick building. In the evenings, as he strode home, his fellow Washingtonians would tip their hats at the distinctive figure with a thick beard and well-padded paunch. Sometimes Mabel would walk west along M Street to meet him and enjoy his company by street lamp. “I do not very often feel that I have so much of my husband’s attention as I did tonight,” she noted in her journal late in October one year. “He is usually so full of other things, but tonight it was too dark for Alec to talk to me so I had things all my own way.”

There were two other outlets for his scientific curiosity in Washington. The first was the weekly journal
Science,
founded in 1880 and self-described as “the medium of communication among the Scientists of America.” Thomas Edison had been an early backer of this publication, but he quickly lost interest in swallowing its deficits and felt no obligation to play a larger role in the scientific community. In 1882, Alec and his father-in-law, Gardiner Hubbard, became the journal’s major investors. Alec invested as a way of keeping abreast of science; Gardiner Hubbard was looking for innovations that might have commercial application. Year after year, the journal continued to lose money as subscriptions fell far short of the six thousand necessary to break even. “We are feeling very short,” Mabel noted in February 1885,
"Science
having robbed us of so much.” Two years later Alec noted gratefully, “There are few wives as self-sacrificing as you are, very few that would allow their husbands to take thousands of dollars from their income to invest in unprofitable enterprises like
Science.
” The journal would cost Alec and his father-in-law some $80,000 by 1891 ($1.5 million in today’s currency), of which about $60,000 ($1.2 million) came from the Bells. But Alec enjoyed the scientific camaraderie. Describing to Mabel an editorial meeting held in Philadelphia in September 1884, he wrote, “It was a grand thing to see all these splendid men there.” Eventually, the American Association for the Advancement of Science took over
Science
as its official journal in 1900.

The second Washington opportunity for Alec to stay in the scientific swim was an institution of his own invention: his Wednesday-evening get-togethers. Architect Joseph Hornblower designed at 1331 Connecticut Avenue a special one-story wing, topped by a stone balustrade, for these gatherings. The large room was lined with books of travel, biography, and general literature, the woodwork was of carved teak, and there was an elaborate backlit stained-glass window that depicted the Temple of Isis at Philae. The guest lists for these weekly meetings were a who’s who of late-nineteenth-century scientists: they included John Wesley Powell, director of the U.S. Geological Survey; Edward Morse, an eminent zoologist and orientalist; William H. Brewer, professor of agriculture at Yale University; Thomas Mendenhall, president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Simon Newcomb, director of the American Nautical Almanac office and professor of mathematics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University; Edward Drinker Cope, professor of geology and mineralogy at the University of Pennsylvania; Dr. John Shaw Billings, first director of the New York Public Library and designer of the Johns Hopkins medical school; Alpheus Hyatt, professor of zoology and paleontology at Boston University; and Samuel Scudder, editor of
Science.
There was probably no other household in America that could claim so many remarkable thinkers in regular attendance— or so many highbrow debates, gray beards, and well-chewed pipes. But one personality dominated the room.

As Dr. L.O. Howard, a renowned entomologist and Wednesday regular, would recollect in later years, “What
interested
[others],
delighted
him. I never knew a man with so many enthusiasms, I never knew a man who was so instantly and truly responsive to an interesting or quaint turn of thought or to a fine new idea. He was as like a child, to whom his little world is a wonderland, as it is possible for a great man with a great mind to be.” David Fairchild, a plant biologist who would become Alec’s son-in-law, put it another way: “Mr. Bell was tall and handsome with an indefinable sense of largeness about him. He always made you feel that there was so much of interest in the universe, so many fascinating things to observe and to think about, that it was a criminal waste of time to indulge in gossip or trivial discussion.”

The evening would start with general conversation, then Alec would turn to one of his distinguished guests and invite him to speak about his own particular interest. Since Alec had found out the activities of his guests in advance, the speaker usually had a paper prepared. By the end of the evening, as Charles helped Alec’s guests into their cloaks and overcoats, the room would be thick with tobacco smoke and Alec himself would be afire with new knowledge or ideas. On one occasion there was a heated discussion about the health risks attached to the widespread habit of spitting on Washington’s sidewalks. Alec’s guests decided to form a committee to educate the population about the dangers of spreading diseases like tuberculosis in this fashion, and they elected Alec chairman. (This particular campaign achieved little because the first meeting was scheduled for ten o’clock one morning, far too early for the nocturnal Dr. Bell. When Charles tried to wake him for the meeting, Alec growled, “Let them spit all they mind to,” rolled over, and went back to sleep.)

The Wednesday-evening soirées gradually became a well-known and prestigious Washington institution. But news of colleagues’ investigations and scientific breakthroughs reinforced Alec’s uneasy sense that instead of piling up new achievements, he was simply coasting on his reputation, if not sliding downhill.

By the late 1880s, the Bells were well established in Washington. Washingtonians were proud to have Alexander Graham Bell in their midst: gleaming white invitation cards to balls and social functions adorned the mantelpiece in the Rhode Island Avenue parlor. Although Alec did not really enjoy the social round, he was always affable and charming in public. Mabel commented how, at parties, the “listlessly polite face of the hostess [would] change and light up when you come, and the look of interest [would] deepen when your name is announced.” After she attended a reception at the Smithsonian Institution with her father, she noted, “I felt what a very distinguished man my husband was that they should all be so attentive to his wife.”

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