Reluctant Genius (60 page)

Early success was both a blessing and a curse for Alexander Graham Bell. It proved his genius and made him wealthy, but it also reinforced his reluctance to move his ideas from the drawing board to the marketplace. Born in 1847 into a world without electric lights, automobiles, planes, radios, or refrigeration, he died when television, space travel, computers, and iPods were still way beyond most people’s imaginations. Today, he is remembered mainly as the avuncular figure captured in photographs taken at the end of his life, when he was revered as, in the endlessly repeated cliché, “the Father of Telephony.”

Yet he
was
a genius, even if he was always reluctant to take his inventions from the laboratory bench to the commercial world. Studying his notebooks, I’ve become convinced that he probably envisioned not only the technologies that we take for granted today but even some of those that still await invention. His imagination, like his spirit, knew no bounds.

Appendix

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ATENTS
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SSUED BY THE
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SSOCIATES

Sources

A
wealth of primary material is a treat for a biographer. For this book, I was blessed, if not almost overwhelmed. The Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers, which cover the years from 1834 to 1974, constitute one of the most extensive family collections I have ever seen. The collection contains correspondence, diaries, journals, laboratory notebooks, patent records, speeches, writings, subject files, genealogical records, printed material, and other papers pertaining to Bell’s work in a wide range of scientific and technological fields, including communication, aviation, eugenics, and marine engineering. It also includes material documenting his contributions to the education of the deaf, and correspondence with individuals, ranging from Helen Keller to Theodore Roosevelt, Guglielmo Marconi to Woodrow Wilson. The originals of the papers are housed in Washington, at the Library of Congress; the collection there consists of about 147,700 items in 446 containers plus 8 oversize boxes. There are duplicates of most items at the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site (AGBNHS) in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, in 180 three-ring binders of personal letters,

which were transcribed in the 1920s in preparation for an earlier biography. In Baddeck, there are also 135 volumes of “Home Notes” (handwritten accounts of life in the Bell household, including visitors received, stray thoughts, and weather reports), 37 volumes of “Lab. Notes” (handwritten notes and hand-drawn diagrams of experiments), 25 volumes of the
Beinn Bhreagh Recorder
(the informal and irregular magazine that Bell enjoyed compiling for family and friends from 1910 onward), 5 volumes of “Dictated Notes,” and 7 volumes of the
Aerial Experiment Association Bulletin.

A substantial proportion of these papers consists of letters exchanged between various family members, and in particular between Bell himself and his wife, Mabel. These were my raw material for this biography. Vivid, intimate, colorful, poignant—there was so much to work with in this extraordinarily rich resource. Every piece of dialog in this book, every sentence in quotation marks, is taken word for word from letters and diaries in the collections. I have not invented anything. I have not footnoted the origin of each quotation, as my text usually makes obvious the source within those dozens of letters, chronologically cataloged. However, I note in this section those letters on which I have drawn that come out of sequence.

The passages in italics that I quote from these letters and journals were underlined in the originals. Throughout his life, Bell used English spelling, while his Boston-raised wife used American spelling: their different styles have been preserved in the transcripts in the Bell archive by earlier authors and by me.

I was far from being the first visitor to this gold mine, and I was fortunate to be able to draw on previous biographies of the Bells. The most authoritative and traditional treatment of Alexander Graham Bell, particularly during his early career, is Robert V. Bruce’s
Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1973). Professor Bruce’s book is detailed, insightful, and fascinating, written by a scientist and assuming a degree of scientific knowledge. Professor Bruce taught me a lot. I also learned much from the large-format and more recent
Alexander Graham Bell: The Life and Times of the Man Who Invented the Telephone
(New York: Abrams, 1997), co-authored by Bell’s great-grandson Edwin S. Grosvenor and Morgan Wesson, which contains many previously unpublished photographs and an interesting exploration of the telephone industry.

I turned to four books for personal reminiscences of the Bell family. These were
Alexander Graham Bell: The Man Who Contracted Space
(Boston: Grosset and Dunlap, 1928), by Catherine Mackenzie, Bell s secretary in the last eight years of his life;
The World Was My Garden: Travels of a Plant Explorer
(New York: Scribner, 1938), by the Bells’ son-in-law David Fairchild;
Chord of Steel
(New York: Doubleday, i960), by Thomas Costain, a Brantford-born Canadian author who interviewed Brantford residents about their memories of the Bells; and
Genius at Work: Images of Alexander Graham Bell
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982), by Dorothy Harley Eber, who recorded many elderly Baddeck locals as they reminisced about their illustrious American neighbors.

The first book to cover the lives of both Alexander Graham Bell and Mabel Hubbard was Helen E. Waite’s
Make a Joyful Sound: The Romance of Mabel Hubbard and Alexander Graham Bell
(Philadelphia: MacRae Smith, 1961). Waite was able to talk to the Bells’ two daughters, to whom the book is dedicated. Although dated in style, the book is modern in perspective: it endeavors to give Mabel Bell credit for her contributions to her husband’s achievements. Similarly, Lilias M. Toward’s
Mabel Bell: Alexander’s Silent Partner
(Toronto: Methuen, 1984; published in large print, Wreck Coves, N.S.: Breton Books, 1996) traces Mabel Bell’s role in the Bell story.

I also looked at
Sounds Out of Silence: A Life of Alexander Graham Bell
(Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1997), by James Mackay, which contains many new details of Bell’s childhood in Scotland and of his visits to Britain.

Lastly, I felt a very direct connection with some of the people mentioned in this book when I listened to
Voices of History 2,
recordings from the British Library Sound Archive (British Library Board, 2005) at www.bl.uk/soundarchive. The two-CD set includes short speeches by Thomas Edison, Thomas Watson, and Lord Kelvin. No recording of Bell’s voice is known to survive.

C
HAPTERS 1,2, AND 3

For descriptions of Bell’s childhood in Scotland and England, I drew on accounts recorded by Bell himself, plus personal reminiscences solicited immediately after his death by Fred DeLand, the superintendent of the Volta Bureau who was given the task of arranging and cataloging the family’s archives for the newly established Bell Room at the National Geographic Society’s headquarters in Washington. (This is the collection that was subsequently transferred to the Library of Congress.) These reminiscences are in Volumes 112-113 at AGBNHS.

For background on the look and feel of Edinburgh during the mid-nineteenth century, I consulted Arthur Herman’s
How the Scots Invented the Modern World
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001) and Michael T. R. B. Turnbull’s
Curious Edinburgh
(Stroud, U.K.: Sutton Publishing, 2005). My own biography of poet Pauline Johnson,
Flint & Feather: The Life and Times of E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake
(Toronto: HarperCollins, 2002), describes nineteenth-century Canada, and in particular the little Ontario town of Brantford. For Bell’s early Boston years, I relied on Thomas H. O’Connor’s
The Hub: Boston Past and Present
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001) as an introduction to that city. I also used
Boston University
(Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing, 2002), by Sally Ann Kydd.

Kenneth Silverman’s
Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F B. Morse
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003) is an excellent account of the birth of the telegraph, and Neil Baldwin’s
Edison: Inventing the Century
(New York: Hyperion, 1995) explores the frenetic scientific activity when Bell was a youth.
They Made America,
by Harold Evans (New York: Little, Brown, 2004), was a useful source on the climate of innovation and on individual inventors in this era.