Reluctant Genius (48 page)

Chapter 18

F
AMILY
R
EMAINS
1900-1906

T
he new century dawned in a rush of energy and giddy optimism. The English-speaking world had been transformed in the previous century. Britain had built an empire that spanned the globe; the United States had transformed itself from a rugged pioneer society into an industrial power; the new Dominion of Canada reached right across the continent and was starting to assert its independence from Westminster. The momentum seemed unstoppable as the bells rung out at midnight. In London, there were street parties and fireworks in Trafalgar Square. New York City was draped in “colored electric fire, hung from invisible wires,” according to the
New York Herald,
and the crowd gave a lusty rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” beneath a banner that read “Welcome 1900.” There was such a fear of riots in San Francisco, reported the
Nation’s Business,
that Police Chief Sullivan had planted five policemen at each corner of Market Street to prevent “indiscriminate public kissing on the part of persons who had not been properly presented to each other.”

As the
Washington Post
would point out on January 1, 1901, “We have sanitation, surgery, drainage, plumbing, every product of science and accessory of luxury.” Cities were becoming pleasanter places to live, as automobiles started to replace horse-drawn vehicles and eliminate the need for street-sweeping and stabling. (In 1896, an enterprising reporter in Rochester, New York, had estimated that the town’s 25,000 horses produced an annual pile of manure 175 feet high, covering an acre, which hosted 16 billion flies.) Manned flight seemed just around the corner. What other excitements would the new century bring? Alexander Graham Bell was determined to be part of the ferment of new ideas, new advances. But there were so many damned distractions.

In October 1900, Alec tore himself away from his kites and sheep in Cape Breton to escort his mother-in-law, Gertrude Hubbard, to London. There they joined Mabel, Elsie, and Daisy, who were knee-deep in white satin, point lace, and orange blossoms. Elsie and Gilbert Grosvenor had decided to get married in London because Mabel and her daughters had scheduled a visit there for the fall. The wedding took place at the Eccleston Square Congregational Church, where Elsie, in the opinion of her proud mother, “carried herself splendidly…. I could read each slow word as it fell from her lips.” It was a grand occasion, as befitted the prestige of the bride s father. Joseph Choate, the newly appointed American ambassador to Great Britain, attended both the ceremony and the reception at the Alexandre Hotel. “Oh it cost a lot!” Mabel confided to her friend Mrs. Kennan. “We began with thirty [invited for breakfast] and ended seating seventy at two dollars and something a head, with champagne extra.” To outsiders, the father-of-the-bride’s exuberance and pleasure appeared whole-hearted, but the mother-of-the-bride knew his mind was elsewhere. Before he arrived in England, he had made it clear in a letter to Mabel that “I MUST RETURN IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARDS.”

Mabel insisted on remaining in England after the wedding. In February 1901, she and Daisy watched the event that would come to symbolize the end of the old century: the state funeral of Queen Victoria, the monarch who had been on the British throne since 1837. Mabel described the event to Elsie: “At the slow, slow tread of the soldiers marching with guns reversed, all stood so still and motionless and presently all heads were bared. Daisy said you could almost have heard a pin drop … in all that great multitude. The soldiers passed, the gun carriage rattled on, the King followed grave and anxious-looking with the Kaiser reining in his horse so that the King could ride a neck ahead.”

Alec, however, had insisted on returning to the United States before Christmas. On the voyage home, on the S.S.
Ivernia,
he amused himself by developing an apparatus to desalinate seawater through evaporation. Once back in Washington, he got caught up in yet another project: developing a way of tabulating the results of the 1900 U.S. Census. He quickly found himself overwhelmed by business matters— census details, National Geographic Society minutes, the next issue of the
Volta Review
(a magazine he had founded about deaf education), begging letters from would-be inventors and entrepreneurs. “I am mad, whopping mad,” he scribbled to Mabel. “My time has all gone.” As soon as he could, he extricated himself from his Washington activities and escaped to Beinn Bhreagh.

Alexander Graham Bell was now fifty-four. Each year brought more accolades, and many men his age would have been happy to rest on their laurels. He was president of the National Geographic Society, a regent of the Smithsonian Institution, and a frequent recipient of honorary degrees. (He would collect over a dozen altogether, including from Harvard University in 1896, Edinburgh University in 1906, Oxford University in 1907, and Canada’s Queen’s University in 1916.) Requests for speeches, articles, and personal appearances by the genius who invented the telephone continued to flood in from all over the world.

But the inventor’s enthusiasm for new experiments remained undimmed. He read newspapers avidly, and always remarked when contemporaries such as Thomas Edison and Sam Langley continued to make headlines. Alec dreaded growing old and being left out of the game; he wanted to stay abreast of scientific innovation and play a role in the race to build a manned flying machine. “I am anxious that my WORK shall live after I have gone,” he told Mabel—and he was talking about his current late experiments, not the telephone. “I am not willing
to die
without completing some of the problems I have in hand.”

There was an element of the intense egomaniac, accustomed to having his world revolve around him, in such statements. But Alec insisted on pursuing his research interests in Cape Breton, despite its distance from such centers of technological innovation as Boston, Washington, or London, where eager innovators and thrusting capitalists eager to exploit their inventions congregated. Even Alec admitted this was a disadvantage. He decided not to give a prestigious lecture on flying machines in London in 1901 because, as he told Mabel, “I would run a great chance of MAKING A FOOL OF MYSELF on account of my ignorance of what others had done.” Despite his talent and ambition, Alexander Graham Bell lacked the killer instinct that would be the hallmark of so many successful twentieth-century innovators. He remained a loner, driven by curiosity and philanthropic motives—the same urge to advance science and improve the world that had motivated him from the earliest days of helping deaf children enter a speaking world.

Mabel’s admiration for her husband’s energy rarely wavered. “I never saw anybody,” she confided to her daughter Daisy in 1906, “who threw his whole body and mind and heart into all that interested him in a hundred different directions.” Nevertheless, she was exasperated by the way that Alec’s genius bordered on mania, as he recklessly spawned ideas. His lack of intellectual discipline appalled her, even as she created the context in which he could follow his dreams. His brain seemed to work as carelessly as waves beating on the shore, she once remarked, delivering flotsam and jetsam in untidy and unpredictable heaps along the beach. Why couldn’t he focus on just one invention that might, God willing, even have a commercial application?

As early as 1899, Mabel had quietly suggested to Alec that he might make faster progress with his kites if he had six or eight thoroughly competent workmen in the laboratory, instead of just Arthur McCurdy plus a local handyman. This system was working well for Thomas Edison, at Menlo Park. “Why not try,” she wrote, “to see if by having a lot of men you cannot advance into one month the labors of several.”

At this point, Alec brushed the suggestion of a teamwork approach away. “You must remember that this is not a question of Invention but
Discovery
—and discovery is
groping
—a slow laborious systematic groping after knowledge—disheartening, in the number of blind alleys explored.” Only when he knew where he was going, he told Mabel, “will be the time when I can follow your suggestion of half a dozen men or more in my laboratory instead of two.” So Mabel quietly withdrew, leaving behind in the laboratory a poem she had seen in a newspaper:

If things seem a little blue,
Keep on fighting.
Stay it out and see it through
Keep on fighting.

The downside of eminence is the obligations it can entail. In December 1903, Alec and Mabel found themselves sitting in the drafty, dimly lit foyer of the Eden Palace Hotel in Genoa, staring at a relentless and chilly rain as it fell on the cobbled streets outside. They had come in haste to Italy on an unexpected mission. The remains of a minor eighteenth-century mineralogist, who was the illegitimate son of a British aristocrat and had never crossed the Atlantic, were buried in Genoa’s old British cemetery, on a cliff high over the port. Now the cemetery was scheduled for demolition as the port expanded. It had already been eroded by blasting in the adjacent marble quarry, and coffins had begun to slip and slide down the cliff face, emptying their contents into the Mediterranean as they tumbled. Most of those British bones disappeared unnoticed, but those of the long-dead mineralogist had huge importance for Americans. Seventy-five years earlier, for unknown reasons, this little-known Englishman called James Smithson had bequeathed half a million dollars (the equivalent in today’s currency of $50 million) to the United States to fund in the capital an institution “for the increase & diffusion of Knowledge among men.” Samuel Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, had agreed with Alexander Graham Bell, one of the institution’s regents, that Smithson s remains should be rescued.

Alec had volunteered for this assignment, but he had not planned to be in Europe, and he developed a severe cold during the transatlantic crossing and the journey by rail down the Italian coast. On his arrival in Genoa, he discovered that Italian authorities were not inclined to release Smithson’s skeleton without a lot of formalities. Snuffling and grumbling, his dark eyes heavy-lidded with sleeplessness, he retired to bed in disgust, leaving Mabel (who understood and spoke more Italian than he did) to meet the American consul, Mr. Bishop, and drive up to the gravesite.

Mabel was quite bewitched by the cemetery, despite the endless drizzle and gloomy skies. Bright red lilies and carnations were in bloom. “Everything was of the simplest, and the effect was of thorough good taste,” she wrote in her journal. “It was like a beautiful park of cypress trees whose dark foliage was relieved against the white marble paving, the pink and white chapel.” The following day she went to the bank and withdrew several thousand lire, to pay for a permit to open the grave, a permit to purchase a coffin, a permit to export the body, and permissions from the national government, the city government, the police, and the health officials. “There seemed to be no end to the red tape necessary before the Government’s order to remove the body could be complied with.”

The permits and permissions did not do the trick: the Italian authorities erected more roadblocks. Only when Alec rose from his sickbed, announced that he represented President Theodore Roosevelt himself, and distributed several more bribes was the final permission granted. Then Alec, Mabel, Mr. Bishop, and a troop of gravediggers tramped up to the cemetery. As the gravediggers maneuvered Smithson’s decaying coffin out of the damp earth, Mabel, shrouded in a long, dark gabardine raincoat, took out her camera and started snapping. Playing to the camera, Mr. Bishop picked up Smithson’s skull and stared into the eye sockets. The disinterment was otherwise conducted as fast as possible, in order to get Smithson’s remains, now in a new zinc coffin, aboard the steamer
Princess Irene
and on the high seas, “out of reach of interdict by Italian or French warrant.”

When the bones arrived in Washington, D.C., a few weeks later, an elaborate funeral procession was organized to accompany the coffin from the Navy Yard across town to the Smithsonian. But Alec’s mind was already elsewhere. The previous night, he had worked in his study in 1331 Connecticut Avenue until 4 a.m. When Charles went to wake him at nine the following morning, so he might participate in the ceremonies, Alec was drowsy and reluctant. “Why am I to get up if I don’t want to?” he protested.

“Because you are to be at the Navy Yard at 10 a.m. sharp to escort the remains of James Smithson to their last resting place,” Charles told him.

Alec’s eyes remained closed. “Nonsense. What are you talking about?” he snapped. “He’s been dead for fifty years.”

“Can’t help it sir,” Charles persisted. “He is in Washington now and you brought him here.”

After a brief silence, Alec grunted, “What did he come back here to bother me for?”

Smithsons remains had barely arrived at the Smithsonian before the institution s most famous regent was asked to participate in another exercise. This time, it involved the art collection of Charles Lang Freer, a Detroit art lover who had made a fortune manufacturing railroad cars. Freer had a fabulous collection of Asian and American art, including several paintings by his friend James Whistler. In 1904, he offered to leave the Smithsonian his art collection, and half a million dollars to maintain it. Alec found himself, along with Langley and two other regents, heading off to Detroit to look at paintings. None of these elderly scientists had any expertise in art, or any sympathy for the collecting instinct. They yawned their way through five hundred works of art and a thousand pieces of pottery. “I admire and appreciate [Mr. Freer] himself much more than I do the objects of his affection and even adoration,” Alec would later write. “He .. . throws his whole heart and soul into the study of things that unfortunately appear to me to be trivial and unimportant in themselves.” Luckily, Alec had invited his younger daughter, Daisy, who like her mother had a strong interest in art, to accompany him on the trip. She convinced her father and his colleagues that the Freer collection was not “trivial and unimportant,” and the regents of the Smithsonian Institution decided to accept the millionaire’s offer. When the collection finally opened in a specially built gallery on the Mall in 1923, it was appraised at $23 million.