Reluctant Genius (53 page)

But this was, effectively, the end of the Aerial Experiment Association. Tom was dead, and Glenn had returned to his Hammondsport machine shop to set up his own aircraft company. On the evening of March 31, 1909, Alec, Douglas, and Casey assembled in front of the fireplace in the Point’s great drawing room to watch the clock tick away the last minutes of the AEA. It was, in Alec’s own words, “a pathetic little group” that assembled under the Beinn Bhreagh clock. “Casey moved the final adjournment,” Alec wrote later, “Douglas seconded it, and I put it formally to the vote. We hardly received the response ‘aye’ when the first stroke of midnight began. I do not know how the others felt, but to me it was a really dramatic moment.”

The men of the Aerial Experiment Association had achieved so much. They had put five craft aloft, four of them self-powered, heavier-than-air machines, and they had done so in less than eighteen months. Although no valuable patents had emerged from the association’s endeavors, its experiments had edged the science of aeronautics forward by refining inventions, such as ailerons, made by others. Two of the AEA’s innovations—the steerable tricycle undercarriage and wing doping—were genuine world firsts that all subsequent experimental craft in these early years copied. The AEA’s activities, and particularly the speeches and interviews about aviation that Alec had given throughout North America, contributed to the fizz and thrill of the flying-machine craze, and to public confidence that manned flight was possible. One newspaper described the group as “a brilliant coterie.” The association s members had formed a “band of comrades on a grand adventure,” as Mabel put it. Her initiative had also given her husband a taste of the collective effort that increasingly characterized the field of scientific invention. And the surviving members all benefited from the training it had given them.

Only Casey Baldwin and Alec Bell himself now remained in Baddeck. The various AEA flying machines were not the last inventions that Alec would have a hand in—he was already exploring a new idea. Nevertheless, that chilly Cape Breton night in 1909 was a melancholy moment for the sixty-two-year-old inventor, who would never again enjoy anything as stimulating as Bell’s Boys.

Chapter 20

T
HE
A
ULD
C
HIEF
1909-1915

B
y 1909, Alec was almost indistinguishable from illustrations of Santa Claus. An aureole of silvery curls topped his wide forehead, and his bushy white beard and mustache broadened his face into a permanent expression of goodwill. His dark eyes were as intense and observant as ever, but his cheeks usually had a ruddy glow and, despite his wife’s efforts to control his diet, his weight hovered around 250 pounds and he boasted a well-padded paunch. (“You can have your dear bacon and Rochefort cheese,” Mabel instructed him in 1906, “if you will give up sugar and bread.” He didn’t.) To complete the Jolly Saint Nick image, he was often followed by a gaggle of small grandchildren as, clad in his distinctive long wool stockings and grey tweed knickerbockers, the sixty-two-year-old inventor strolled over his Cape Breton estate.

The Bells’ first grandchild had arrived in 1901. He was named after his great-grandfather Melville Bell, who died four years later. (Alec recorded Melville’s birth in his notebook, sandwiched between notes for a speech on heredity and studies for tetrahedral kites.) The Grosvenors would eventually have seven children. Their family included five daughters (Gertrude, born in 1903; Mabel, 1905; Lillian, 1907; Carol, 1911; and Gloria, 1918) and two boys (Melville and Alexander Graham Bell Grosvenor, who was born in 1909 and died—likely of appendicitis—when he was only five). The first Fairchild grandchild, Alexander Graham Bell Fairchild, was born in 1906, and was followed by Barbara in 1909 and Nancy Bell in 1913. The permanent residences of both the Grosvenor and the Fairchild families were in Washington, where Gilbert Grosvenor continued to edit
National Geographic Magazine
and David Fairchild pursued his plant studies in the Department of Agriculture. But each summer, the breezes over Beinn Bhreagh carried the sounds of children’s chatter and laughter.

The Grosvenor clan had taken over the the Lodge, the Bells’ original house on the property, while the “Fairchildren,” as Mabel liked to call them, stayed at the Point, where the whole clan would meet for meals. At dinner, Alec, in a black velvet jacket, would preside at one end of the long, linen-covered table, Mabel, with narrow gold bracelets on her smooth white arms, at the other end. Each grandchild was expected to have a story or some interesting item to relate at the dinner table, the little speech “always beamed at Grandmamma,” recalled Daisy, “who had to see the lips to understand.” Now in her fifties, Mabel was a benevolent presence at family meals. She wore her thick brown hair, still untouched by gray, in a loose knot at the back of her head. With her rimless spectacles (essential for seeing exactly what people were saying), loose linen gowns, and tweed cloaks, there was an air of the brainy Cambridge intellectual woman about her—lean, stylish, but a little disheveled.

After dinner, a scientific experiment might be performed. Alec would ask Mary, the kitchen maid, to bring an empty milk bottle, then he would insert a lighted piece of paper and balance a shelled hard-boiled egg in the mouth of the bottle. The children stood on tiptoe to watch the egg being sucked into the bottle. Then the inevitable question, “Why?”—which the children were expected to reason out. Later, Alec might sit at the piano in the big hall and start pounding out Scottish ballads, spirituals, or Gilbert and Sullivan favorites such as “Tit Willow” and “I’m Going to Marry Yum-Yum.” On other occasions, Mabel would organize charades or amateur theatricals, in which VIPs from Washington, guests from Baddeck, and the grandchildren were all encouraged to join.

Mabel Bell’s devotion to her children and grandchildren was even stronger after the tragic death of her mother in October 1909. Eighty-two-year-old Gertrude Hubbard had been riding along Connecticut Avenue in Washington, in the back of her chauffeur-driven car, when a streetcar crashed into the rear of the vehicle. She died two hours later, in the hospital. Alec and Mabel were in Cape Breton at the time, preparing for the visit of yet another Canadian governor general eager to visit the famous inventor in his Cape Breton lair. Earl Grey had expressed a particular interest in the flying machines that he had often read about in the newspapers. On hearing the ghastly news from Washington, however, the Bells immediately traveled south, leaving Casey, and his new wife, Kathleen Baldwin, to receive His Excellency. After the funeral, Alec returned to Beinn Bhreagh, but Mabel stayed in Washington to help her last surviving sister, Grace, pack up her parents’ possessions and move her own family into Twin Oaks.

Losing her mother was a severe blow to Mabel. Gertrude Hubbard had been a champion of and advocate for Mabel throughout her life, a constant source of the kind of encouragement that enabled her daughter to dismiss her deafness as no great handicap. One afternoon she sat down at her mother’s desk and gazed out at the marvelous garden, filled with fruit trees and exotic perennials, that Gertrude Hubbard had created. Then she wrote sadly to Alec, “Nobody was as proud of me as she was, nobody else ever made the most of any bright little thing I ever did or said. It is growing more and more strange to have to do without that underlying sense of her love which has lain deep down at the bottom of my heart and comforted me in my moments of deepest depression. ‘Mama would see, mama would care,’ and it didn’t matter that she really neither knew nor cared, I had but to tell her to get all the sympathy and understanding I wanted.” The woman on whom she had relied so heavily—who had kept her in the speaking mainstream, encouraged her to marry Alec, and helped her through personal crises such as the deaths of her sons—was gone. Mabel had needed her mother’s support, and now she was much more alone than she had ever felt before.

Alec with three of his ten ground-children: Lilian (in his arms), Gertrude (left), and Mabel Grosvenor.

As usual, Mabel weathered her personal crisis by turning her attention to those who needed her. Alec left all domestic arrangements to her, including the job he hated most: overseeing the finances. After a visit to Cape Breton in 1911, Mabel’s cousin Mary Blatchford reported, “Everything here begins with her and works around again the same… . Mabel is a determined person, and what she demands is generally accomplished.” The estate’s considerable running expenses often troubled Mabel, who struggled to balance the books. With around forty employees, including domestic and grounds staff, coachmen, shepherds, laboratory assistants, and boatmen, plus maintenance of roads and an expanding settlement of outbuildings, Beinn Bhreagh swallowed up the Bells’ considerable investment income. Mabel was constantly borrowing against future dividends.

However, the Bells still enjoyed a sizable fortune, and Alec was well protected from financial pressures. Mabel never stinted on her husbands laboratory expenses, and in addition gave him an allowance of $10,000 a year (around US$200,000 in today’s values) throughout their marriage. But she never abandoned her campaign to make Alec overcome his reluctance to patent and commercialize his ideas. Sometimes she would go over the laboratory accounts and ascertain the approximate cost of a particular invention. According to Charles Thompson, she would present this to her husband and ask him, “Why can’t this thing be put on the market?” Alec would reply, “I cannot waste my time doing that sort of thing, if any one wants to, let them go right ahead.” If Mabel suggested he was wasting money, he reacted with indignation: “I have used the money to accomplish my purpose. The end justifies the means.” Mabel would just sigh. “Our expenses are out of all proportion to our income,” she confided to her son-in-law Bert Grosvenor. “But…one lives only once and [Mr. Bell] has the right to do what he will with the products of his own intellect.”

Mabel’s happiest moments in her later years came when a grandchild was left in her care at Beinn Bhreagh. She was always content to hold a sleeping infant or to sit at the kitchen table with a toddler who was playing with candle wax. “All the plans, the hopes and the ambitions that have lain buried in the graves of my own little sons,” she wrote, “sprang to life with the coming of each one of my three grandsons.” The granddaughters too got lots of attention, although “Gammie”could be a little severe. “She and I sometimes washed the breakfast dishes together because she thought I wasn’t getting enough household training,” Mabel Grosvenor recalled later. “She took our education seriously… . [W]hen she didn’t approve of my reading matter, she gave me the most boring book to read about the lives of the painters.”

For the older children, however, “Grampie” was the draw. He was such a fund of fascinating experiments and knowledge—how to make a whirligig fly through the air, where to find the biggest frogs, what were the best materials from which to construct a model boat. He kept two big jars of hard candy in his study for young visitors. “When we knocked at his door,” Melville later recalled, “no matter how busy he was, he’d welcome us with a ‘Hoy! Hoy!’ and a cheery ‘Come in.’ He’d always want to know what we’d been doing and would draw us out with questions. Then with great ceremony like a circus master, he’d reach up to the shelf and hold a candy jar out to us. But Lord forbid if we asked for candy He would always find some excuse to change the subject with a fairy tale or amusing incident.” Alec’s indulgence to his grandchildren included ordering a Shetland pony for them by mail from Harrods department store in London.

Mabel with her granddaughter Nancy Bell Fairchild.

Yet grandchildren were not enough to divert the inventor’s attention from his work for long. The urge to make another important contribution to science never left him. Alongside sketches and notes on his abiding preoccupations (saltwater distillation, improved wing design for airplanes, speedboats) there were new ideas in his notebooks—for solar heating, for example, or composting at Beinn Bhreagh. “Above everything,” his son-in-law David Fairchild would write later, “he loved to meditate, to think, to dream in the inventor’s sense, and to be free from interruptions. As he expressed it, he had ‘a yearning for something deeper than the bare facts.’”