Authors: Charlotte Gray

Reluctant Genius (61 page)

BOOK: Reluctant Genius

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For discussions of different theories of education for the deaf and hard of hearing in this and subsequent chapters, I did a thorough literature search and learned much from Jonathan Rée’s
I See a Voice
(London: HarperCollins, 1999) and Harlan Lane’s
When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf
(New York: Random House, 1984).

C
HAPTER 4

Mabel Hubbard Bell described her education to Carolyn Yale for the latter’s article “Mabel Hubbard Bell, 1859-1923,”
Volta Review
25 (1923): 107-110. She also sporadically kept a journal during the years 1870 to 1873 (vols. 103 and 104, AGBNHS). The story of Laura Bridgman, the little deaf and blind girl who was taught by Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, is told in two recent biographies:
The Education of Laura Bridgman,
by Ernest Freeberg (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), and Elizabeth Gitter’s
The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl
(New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001).

C
HAPTERS 5 AND 6

The best description of the research leading to the invention of the telephone appears in Robert V. Bruce’s
Bell.
Thomas Watson described his work with the inventor in
Exploring Life: The Autobiography of Thomas A Watson
(New York: D. Appleton, 1926). The development of the telephone is also explained well in several books for younger readers, most notably Naomia Pasachoff’s
Alexander Graham Bell: Making Connections
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) and A. Roy Petrie’s
Alexander Graham Bell
(Don Mills, Ont: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1975).

C
HAPTER 7

My account of Alexander Graham Bell’s courtship of Mabel Hubbard is drawn from Bell’s own account in his letters and in a journal he kept at this period (vol. 123, AGBNHS). For background color, I drew on Henry James’s novels, particularly
The Bostonians
(New York, 1886).

C
HAPTER 8

There are many accounts of the 1876 Philadelphia Exhibition; one of the best is available at
http://www.nga.gov/resources/expo1876.htm
. My picture of Dom Pedro is drawn from Lilia Moritz Schwarcz’s biography
The Emperor’s Beard: Dom Pedro II and His Tropical Monarchy in Brazil,
translated by John Gledson (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003).

The description of Mabel and Alec Bell’s conversation at Boston Station is taken from the article by their daughter Elsie Grosvenor, “Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell—A Reminiscence,” in the
Volta Review
59 (1957): 209-305, and “Notes on Dr. Alexander Graham Bell by Mrs. Elsie May Bell Grosvenor” (vol. 175, AGBNHS).

C
HAPTER 9

Background on the fight for women’s equality in America during these years comes from Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron de Hart, eds.,
Women’s America: Refocusing the Past,
4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

C
HAPTER 10

Most of the descriptions of the Bells’ sojourn in Britain come from Mabel’s letters to her mother. I drew on Asa Briggs’s
Victorian Things,
4th ed. (Stroud, U.K.: Sutton Publishing, 2003) and Judith Flanders’s
The Victorian House
(London: HarperCollins, 2003) for further domestic details. Queen Victoria’s reaction to the telephone can be found in her edited journal.

C
HAPTER 11

James M. Goode has resurrected many of the streetscapes and mansions that the Bells knew in Washington in his monumental
Capital Losses: A Cultural History of Washington’s Destroyed Buildings,
2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003). For information about big business in the late nineteenth century, I consulted
The Gilded Age,
edited by H. Wayne Morgan (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1970), and
Essays on the Gilded Age,
by Carter E. Boren, Robert W. Amsler, Audra L. Prewitt, and H. Wayne Morgan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973). Gertrude Hubbard’s remarks to Mabel Bell about the conduct of Western Union during the copyright case were quoted by Mabel in a letter to her mother, written on November 22, 1898, after her fathers death (vol. 88, AGBNHS).

C
HAPTER 12

Bell himself gave a full description of his treatment of President Garfield, in his correspondence with his wife. Other details appear in Catherine Mackenzie’s
Alexander Graham Bell.
Helen Waite supplied information about Bell’s attitude to his American citizenship in
Make a Joyful Sound.

C
HAPTERS 13 AND 14

Charles Dudley Warner’s travel essay,
Baddeck, and That Sort of Thing: Notes of a Sunny Fortnight in the Provinces,
was originally published in Boston in 1874. The full text is now available online at
http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa.browse.author/w.29.html.

The Bells’ first visit to Cape Breton is the stuff of local legend. The story of Alec Bell’s repair of the local telephone was included in an address given by J. A. D. McCurdy to the Canadian Society of Cost Accountants and Industrial Engineers, Hamilton, Ontario, December 10, 1941 (vol. 174, AGBNHS). Maud Dunlop’s memoir appeared in the
Sunday Leader,
March 29, 1925. Marian H. Bell Fairchild wrote down her earliest memories of family holidays in Baddeck in 1944 (vol. 174, AGBNHS).

For my account of the demography and culture of Cape Breton, I relied on
Cape Breton Over,
by Clara Dennis (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1942);
Beyond the Hebrides,
by Donald A. Fergusson (Halifax, N.S.: Lawson Graphics Atlantic, 1977), and Marcus Tanner’s
The Last of the Celts
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004).

One of the most valuable sources on the routines and dynamics of the Bell household was Charles F. Thompson, who worked for the family for over thirty years. The Bell archives contain two accounts by Charles, written on February 23, 1923, and March 20, 1924 (vol. 113, AGBNHS). Bell’s Wednesday soirées are described in David Fairchild’s
The World Was My Garden.

C
HAPTER 15

Alec Bell’s relationship with Helen Keller is part of a much larger story: the extraordinary life and career of Helen Keller herself. The classic biography of Keller is Joseph P. Lash’s
Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy
(New York: Delacorte Press, 1980). Keller herself wrote movingly of both her disability and her debt to Bell in
The Story of My Life
(New York: Doubleday, 1902),
Midstream: My Later Life
(New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1930), and the recently republished
The World I Live In,
edited by Roger Shattuck (1903; New York: New York Review Books, 2003).

Richard Winefield describes the clash between Bell and Gallaudet in
Never the Twain Shall Meet: Bell, Gallaudet, and the Communications Debate
(Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 1987). In
The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community,
Harlan Lane discusses Bell’s interest in the genetic origins of deafness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).

Mabel Bell made her admission about her coolness toward deaf people in a letter to her son-in-law Gilbert Grosvenor, dated October 11, 1921 (vol. 99, AGBNHS). She herself wrote a paper entitled “World of Silence,” which is in the Bell Papers and is quoted in Winefield,
Never the Twain Shall Meet, 76-77.

C
HAPTERS 16 AND 17

Much of the information about the Bells’ life in Baddeck comes from the reminiscences of Charles Thompson and from letters written by Cousin Mary Blatchford describing her visits in 1891 and 1911; these letters appeared in the
Beinn Bhreagh Recorder,
vol. 23, October 14, 1919. The
Halifax Chronicle’s
description of Beinn Bhreagh comes from Robert V. Bruce’s
Bell.
The letter in which Alec Bell describes his experiments to his wife is dated December 14,1893.

Social life in Washington is captured in James M. Goode’s
Capital Losses
and Julia B. Foraker’s lively (if autocratic) memoir,
I Would Live It Again: Memories of a Vivid Life
(New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1922). Robert M. Poole describes the founding role played by the Grosvenor and Bell families in the National Geographic Society and its magazine in
Explorers House: National Geographic and the World It Made
(New York: Penguin, 2004).

The growing interest in flying machines in the late nineteenth century has been explored by many authors and experts. Two sources I found particularly useful were
A Dream of Wings: Americans and the Airplane, 1875-1Q05
by Tom. D. Crouch (New York: Norton, 1981) and the article “Samuel Langley’s Steam-Powered Flying Machines,” by C. David Gierke, which appeared in the magazine
Aviation History
in July 1998.

C
HAPTERS
18
AND
19

Statistics about Rochester’s streets appear in
Essays on the Gilded Age
by Carter E. Boren, et al., 99. The information about the Bells’ trip to Genoa for Smithson’s remains comes from Mabel’s journal and Charles Thompson’s memoirs. The incident is also described in
The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America’s Greatest Museum: The Smithsonian,
by Nina Burleigh (New York: William Morrow, 2003).

Bells’ Boys have been described in many volumes on aviation history, including those cited above. The most exhaustive treatment of them is found in
Bell and Baldwin: Their Development of Aerodromes and Hydrodromes at Baddeck, Nova Scotia,
by J. H. Parkin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964). Additional sources for this chapter included the article “The Tetrahedral Principle in Kite Structure,” which appeared in the
National Geographic Magazine,
14 (1903), and the article “A Few Notes of Progress in the Construction of an Aerodrome,“ by Bell himself, which appeared in the
Beinn Bhreagh Recorder
of October 12, 1910. In
High Flight: Aviation and the Canadian Imagination,
Jonathan F. Vance explores the obsession with being airborne that characterizes Canada, as well as Alec Bell. The contributions to aviation technology made by Bells’ Boys are described in
Ideas in Exile: A History of Canadian Invention,
by J. J. Brown (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967).

For information about the Wright brothers, I turned to
The Bishop’s Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright,
by Tom D. Crouch (New York: Norton, 1989), and
On Great White Wings: The Wright Brothers and the Race for Flight,
by Fred E. C. Culick and Spencer Dunmore (Toronto: McArthur and Company, 2001). Seth Shulman’s
Unlocking the Skies
(New York: HarperCollins, 2002) is a lively account of the career of Glenn Hammond Curtiss.

C
HAPTERS 20 AND 21

Catherine Mackenzie wrote “Some Notes about Dr. Alexander Graham Bell,” covering her former boss’s work routines, for Fred DeLand in the 1920s (vol. 112, AGBNHS). Much of the information about Bell with his grandchildren, as well as the Mary Pickford anecdote, appears in a delightful unpublished memoir by Melville Bell Grosvenor, entitled “Life with Grandfather.” I also gathered additional information from Dr. Mabel Grosvenor, the Bells’ granddaughter, who now lives in a Washington retirement home, during interviews in 2003, 2004, and 2005. Bell’s work with hydrofoil craft is covered in John Boileau’s fascinating
Fastest in the World: The Saga of Canada’s Revolutionary Hydrofoils
(Halifax, N.S.: Formac, 2004). The description of Bell and Baldwin’s voyage in a rowboat across Bras d’Or Lake in April 1917 appeared in the
Beinn Bhreagh Recorder,
vol. 21, 86-91.

E
PILOGUE

I drew on Robert V. Bruce’s
Bell
for much of the information about the subsequent development of Bell’s patented inventions. For the impact of Bell’s most important invention, I turned to
The Social Impact of the Telephone,
edited by Ithiel de Sola Pool (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), and
The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications,
by Paul Starr (New York: Basic Books, 2004).

Photo Sources

A
ll photos and illustrations are from the photo archives at the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site (AGBNHS), Baddeck, N.S., except for the following images:

p.iv: Portrait of Alexander Graham Bell by Timoléon Lobrichon, (artist), from the Gilbert H. Grosvenor Collection of Alexander Graham Bell photographs, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (inset portrait of Mabel Hubbard from the AGBNHS).