The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) (8 page)

I
N THE WINTER OF
1874, Bell became a frequent visitor to the Hubbard home and a regular guest at the family’s midday Sunday dinner. It was an elegant affair. Usually, the Hubbards served generous helpings of roast beef, followed by “floating island” for dessert—an almond-flavored meringue in a custard sauce that was particularly favored by Gertrude Hubbard. Bell no doubt relished the surroundings and the cuisine, but he welcomed the company even more. He soon found himself—awkwardly and privately—becoming increasingly infatuated with his winsome student Mabel Hubbard.

Bell’s feelings for Mabel had begun to surface during their tutoring sessions. With Gardiner Hubbard often away for weeks or even months at a time in Washington, working on matters relating to the Hubbard Bill, and Gertrude Hubbard frequently accompanying her aging parents in New York, Mabel was often left with her older cousin, Mary Blatchford, in Cambridge. As an energetic and enterprising girl nearing her sixteenth birthday, Mabel would make her way from Cambridge to Boston by the horse-drawn streetcar for lessons with Bell or his teaching assistant Abby Locke in his office on Beacon Hill. Mabel recounts in her journal that when she first met Bell, she had found him interesting but “did not think him exactly a gentleman.” His clothes were not fashionable, Mabel noted, and he dressed carelessly. At first, she had also guessed that Bell was over forty when he was, in fact, twenty-six years old. As the lessons progressed, though, Mabel’s occasional letters to her mother show that she clearly warmed to her tutor.

Mabel wrote that Bell seemed to enjoy talking with her. He was full of so many ideas, Mabel said, that she rarely took her eyes off his face; she didn’t want to miss any of them. As for Bell, Mabel charmed him from the first, and, on at least a few occasions, he found an excuse to walk with her to her ride after their class. Once, after a heavy snowfall, Mabel recounted, Bell

In a postscript to another letter, Mabel writes:

And in another she tells her mother,

With more opportunities to see Mabel outside of the classroom, Bell quickly came to view her less as his deaf pupil and more as the charming and appealing object of his affection. Shortly after Mabel turned sixteen, for instance, Bell attended a dance party held in her honor at the Hubbard’s home. Despite the handicap of her deafness, Mabel hosted Bell and some twenty other young men and women with poise and grace, even though she was crestfallen to learn at the last minute that her dear friends Edith and Annie, daughters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, were both sick and couldn’t come.

Gardiner Hubbard was away in Washington at the time, so Gertrude wrote him a full account of the party, describing what a striking young woman his daughter had become. As Gertrude recounted, Mabel received and introduced her guests

With the first signs of spring in 1875, Bell was distracted and mystified by Mabel’s growing hold on his affections. In a characteristic move, he started a special journal to help him sort out his feelings and chronicle their changing relationship. In it, he agonized over his situation and his emotions. Mabel was eleven years his junior. And Bell had been her teacher. He feared that she viewed him only in that capacity and would never accept him as a suitor. He fretted that a great gulf existed between his meager income and Mabel’s affluent upbringing. He worried, too, that it would be improper for him to confide his feelings to one so young.

“I do not know how or why it is that Mabel has so won my heart,” Bell wrote.

If the cause of his affections was a mystery, Bell had no difficulty finding the quality in Mabel that he admired most. As he put it,

ON JUNE 2, 1875
, with the future of Bell’s love life still very unresolved, he finally made a significant breakthrough in his telegraphic research after many months of frustration. Working in two adjoining rooms up in the attic of the Williams shop, Bell and Watson had set up a series of linked transmitters and receivers to test their latest version of the multiple telegraph. The circuit they built had three separate buzzerlike transmitters tuned to distinct pitches. Bell and Watson had also built six separate receivers, two for each transmitter; they placed three of them in Bell’s room and three in the room next door. If things went according to plan, when Bell triggered a transmitter, the corresponding tuned receivers in each room—and only these corresponding receivers—would sound in sympathetic vibration.

After successfully tuning two of the transmitters to their matching receivers, Bell began work on the third set. But he could not get the corresponding receiver in the next room to function. Suspecting that its vibrating reed might have frozen against its contact, Bell removed the battery-driven transmitters from the circuit and called to Watson next door to pluck the transmitter’s reed by hand to free it. Amazingly, even without the battery, Bell heard the reed in the receiver before him vibrate in concert with the one Watson had plucked. Bell yelled out to Watson next door to keep plucking all the reeds and, sure enough, Bell heard each of their distinct tones through the receivers in his room.

It was a momentous accident. Bell guessed correctly that the residual magnetism in the circuit had allowed the reeds to create just the kind of “tuned” electrical current he had been seeking for the multiple telegraph. If that were the case, it meant that his theory was largely correct, and that their repeated failures had resulted mainly from grossly overestimating the amount of vibration needed to send a message.

That day, as he listened to Watson pluck the reeds, Bell also realized something even more portentous. With his keen musical ear, Bell recognized that he could hear not just the pure tones created by the reeds’ vibration, but also the overtones that gave them their particular timbre. As Bell would later contend, the discovery made him even more confident that it would be possible to send speech over a wire—if he could only figure out how to transmit it in the first place.

Bell was coming tantalizingly close to the invention of a telephone. Around this time, a letter to his parents clearly captures his sense of excitement and continued uncertainty:

Unfortunately for Bell, the fog would linger for some time yet. Meanwhile, amid the important progress in his work, Mabel Hubbard occupied Bell’s thoughts more than ever. And Watson began to notice the change in Bell, as he recounted much later in his autobiography:

At the end of June 1875, Bell was dismayed to learn that Mabel planned to vacation on Nantucket for the summer with her older cousin Mary Blatchford. The thought that Mabel would leave before Bell could confess his affection so troubled him that he resolved to take action. Alone in his Salem apartment, not knowing how else to handle the situation, Bell composed a letter to Mabel’s mother. He wrote:

As Bell tried to delicately explain,

Bell confided to Gertrude Hubbard that he wanted to tell Mabel of his feelings and learn whether she might reciprocate them. But he was well aware of Mabel’s youth and, despite his strong feelings, he would do nothing against her parents’ wishes. As Bell wrote,

Bell’s letter prompted an immediate meeting with Gertrude Hubbard. Mrs. Hubbard liked Bell and undoubtedly tried to be kind and gentle. But she told him that she felt Mabel was too young to entertain thoughts of marriage. She believed her daughter needed time to mature, and she urged Bell to wait a year before telling Mabel herself of his feelings.

Several days later, upon returning from one of his many business trips to Washington, Gardiner Hubbard was even more adamant on the subject. As Bell summarized in his journal entry of June 27, 1875:

Having vowed to obey her parents’ wishes, Bell now found himself in an emotionally excruciating predicament. He wanted more than ever to spend time with Mabel, but was explicitly constrained from betraying his true feelings to her.

Shortly before Mabel’s planned departure to Nantucket, Bell’s promise was put to an upsetting test. On a lovely June evening, he was strolling in the garden at the Hubbard’s house with Mabel, her younger sister Berta, and an even younger cousin named Lina McCurdy. Berta and Lina were telling fortunes by pulling petals off a flower. When Bell’s fortune came up “love,” the girls teased him to confess who it was that had captured his heart. Flustered, but bound by his agreement to remain silent, Bell stiffly declined to answer. The dreadful result, Bell wrote later, was that he feared he had led Mabel to conclude he loved another and did not wish to tell her about it.

Once Mabel departed for her vacation, Bell’s worry and regret about the incident grew to obsessive proportions. At the beginning of August, unable to bear it any longer, Bell went again to Mrs. Hubbard to announce his decision: he would go to Mabel in Nantucket and profess his love unless her parents explicitly forbade it. Mr. and Mrs. Hubbard tried to persuade him to wait at least until Mabel’s return. But, just then, Mary Blatchford got wind of the news and took it upon herself to apprise Mabel of the situation.

On August 4, 1875, Mrs. Hubbard met once more with Bell. She explained that, just as she and her husband were hoping to discourage Bell again from acting precipitously, she had received a letter from Mabel which, she said, embarrassed her and left her “undecided how to act.” By way of explanation, Gertrude Hubbard read out a portion of her daughter’s letter to Bell. In it, Mabel asked pointedly whether Bell had requested her hand in marriage:

Most impressive to Bell was the maturity evident in Mabel’s letter. While she marveled at the prospect of Bell’s affections and said she wasn’t sure how she felt toward him, Mabel clearly relished the notion of making decisions for herself. As she wrote,

Mabel’s apparent maturity bolstered Bell’s resolve. He realized that his discussions with Mr. and Mrs. Hubbard, however well intentioned, had been unfair to Mabel herself. He pointed out to Mrs. Hubbard that