Reluctant Genius (29 page)

It didn’t take long. Now that the Bell Telephone Company had a monopoly on telephone service, shares worth
$65
each in March rose to $337 in September and to $525 in October. When the deal with Western Union was announced, the share price topped $1,000. “We are beginning to realize that we have wealth,” Alec informed his father just before Christmas. By now, he and Mabel were worth, in today’s equivalent, about $20 million, and the numbers kept rising.

In 1880 there was a further corporate reorganization, and the National Bell Telephone Company became the American Bell Telephone Company. Mabel (to whom Alec had handed over his original one-third interest in the embryonic Bell Company, at their wedding) had been selling small numbers of shares ever since the price started rising early in 1879, and she continued throughout 1880. Nonetheless, she remained the company’s largest single shareholder at the end of 1880, owning 2,975 of the company’s 73,500 shares. By Christmas 1880, Alec could write to Melville that their income was now $24,000 a year, when a loaf of bread cost two cents and a housemaid earned twenty-five cents a day plus room and board. In today’s terms, their annual income amounted to nearly half a million dollars, in an era when there was no income tax. How standards had risen after exposure to wealth! “We should be able to live on that,” wrote the man who had previously thought
$5
,000 a year would be more than sufficient.

Yet wealth was not a major priority for either Mabel or Alec. Alec was most eager to pursue some of the other ideas he had for the exploitation of electricity. He filled his notebooks with ideas for switchboards, phonographs, and an underwater distress signal. While he was still giving evidence in the Western Union battle, he had started to explore the idea of using light waves rather than wires to transmit speech. He recruited a young man called Sumner Tainter, a manufacturer of optical instruments who had once worked in Boston alongside Thomas Watson in Charles Williams’s shop, to help him develop what he had already named a “photophone.”

In a laboratory Alec had set up near his Rhode Island Avenue house, Alec and Tainter constructed a device that would use mirrors to reflect sunlight into the photophone’s transmitter. When a speaker’s voice made another mirror in the transmitter vibrate, a varying beam of light was reflected toward a saucer-shaped receiver. Inside this receiver was a crystal of selenium, a photoconductive element. When light shines on selenium, the current it conducts increases. In the photophone receiver, the selenium crystal, a battery, and a telephone receiver were connected together such that they reproduced the sound that vibrated the mirror in the transmitter.

Alec was soon as obsessed with the photophone as he had once been with the telephone, and he reverted to his unconventional work patterns. He would work through the night, fiddling with the apparatus and making notes. Then he would snore all morning, the curtains in his bedroom drawn tight. When his wife reproached him for his antisocial behavior, he begged for acceptance of his night-owl habits. According to Mabel’s journal, he pleaded that “I have my periods of restlessness when my brain is crowded with ideas tingling to my fingertips when I am excited and cannot stop for anybody.” He begged to be left alone when he was in this high-strung state: he didn’t need to eat or sleep, he assured her. Any attempt to make him do either would bring him crashing back to earth, his train of thought derailed and his ideas vanished. Such behavior today would be regarded as hypermanic.

Mabel had her own concerns—the concerns of a young wife and mother who wanted to settle down. Initially, Alec resisted the idea of making their permanent home in the capital, which he found too busy, too hot, and too pretentious. “I am afraid a quiet life in Washington is too good a thing to be hoped for,” he wrote to Mabel in 1879, when he was staying in the Hubbards’ Brattle Street house, “so I think we all had better settle down together here in Cambridge.” Boston remained much more congenial for an inventor: Alec could mingle there with university professors and discuss his own ideas with the machinists in Charles Williams’s workshop. But Gertrude and Gardiner Hubbard now spent far more time in their Washington home, on Connecticut Avenue close to Dupont Circle, than in Cambridge. Mabel wanted to be close to her mother and sisters, and her gentle pressure slowly paid off. “Alec has stopped railing at Washington and is beginning to find there are nice and scientific people here,” she told her mother. Early in 1880, Gardiner Hubbard, who was in charge of a trust fund that Alec had set up at the time of his marriage to handle telephone rights outside North America, agreed to invest some of the monies in a permanent home for the Bells in Washington. Residence in Washington meant that Mabel would now have to learn the geography—physical and social—of a city that (greatly to its own satisfaction) was rapidly becoming one of the worlds most powerful political capitals.

By the late 1870s, the city on the Potomac River had finally escaped from the dark shadow of the Civil War. As the federal government, under President Rutherford B. Hayes (the first president to use the telephone), flexed its political muscle, people flooded into the city. The Washington Monument was still an incomplete stump, but there was a building boom, and the District of Columbia embarked on an ambitious program to grade streets, install streetlamps, lay sewers and gas mains, and plant trees. “It is a very unfinished city,” Gertrude Hubbard commented to Eliza Bell, with all the asperity of one accustomed to the sophistication of Boston and New York City, “but certainly [it] will be a very beautiful one and is quite unlike any other.”

Before the Civil War, the majority of members of Congress lived in boardinghouses, or “messes” as they were called, but with the advent of railroads and the end of the war, congressional wives began to accompany their husbands to the capital. Government officials were joined by a surge of western mineral kings, department store millionaires, prominent real estate speculators, and powerful industrialists from the northern and Midwestern states. These nouveaux riche newcomers commissioned architects like Adolph Cluss and Henry Hobson Richardson to design imposing mansions for themselves northwest of the Capitol, along K Street, Connecticut Avenue, 16th Street, Massachusetts Avenue, and New Hampshire Avenue. So many mining millionaires, including Nevada senator William Morris Stewart, bought land around Dupont Circle in the 1870s that it was nicknamed “the Honest Miner’s Camp.” The elaborate new mansions boasted arched carriage entrances, massive chandeliers, polished mahogany paneling, cavernous stone fireplaces, forests of ferns, and all the technical improvements of the time—gas lighting, central heating, speaking tubes, ventilators, hot and cold running water, and dumbwaiters.

Politics and business still dominated Washington conversations, but there were now enough wives and daughters in the city to constitute “Society,” with its own rituals, hierarchy, and rigorous calendar. During the “Season” (November until the start of Lent in the spring), the Washington elite attended countless luncheons, dinners, card parties, receptions, weddings, and balls. “Every afternoon,” Gertrude Hubbard noted, “from two to half after five there are calls to be made or received. On Mondays the families and Judges of the Supreme Court receive; on Tuesdays the Senators; on Wednesdays the members of the Cabinet; on Thursdays the members of the House; on Fridays Army and Navy and on Saturdays residents. Every evening there are large formal receptions, dinners or dances.” Gertrude pretended to a certain aloofness—“those who really enter into the gay life must find it most exhausting”—but it was a world in which she wanted to move. She had three unmarried daughters, and after the travails of the past few years and the slurs on her husband’s good name, she yearned for social vindication.

Mabel found the rituals strange. “People here seem to spend their time in making calls and in receiving,” she wrote her mother-in-law in Canada. But she too wanted to “belong” and quickly slipped into the habit of identifying a woman by her husband’s position. “I am just now waiting anxiously for the member from Boston to call on me as she said she would and the Senator from Mass. has been here.” She enjoyed the adventure of new acquaintances within the unfamiliar world of politics. One of the first calls she made was on the wife of Republican senator James G. Blaine. “I have seldom seen a more thoroughly handsome suite of rooms than those into which we were ushered,” she noted in her journal. “The prevalent tint was a soft, yet rich tint of dead gold, heightened by the glow of a wood fire.… Mrs. Blaine herself harmonized well with the surroundings, a tall stately woman of the Martha Washington type.” When she and her sisters heard that the wife of Anthony Pollock, one of the Bell Company’s lawyers in the patent case, was sending out 250 invitations to a party, they waited anxiously to see if they would receive one. Mabel noted in her journal her relief when, belatedly, the yearned-for card arrived. In the end, however, she missed the party. Alec was in Boston, working with Thomas Watson on various improvements to the telephone, including a new kind of circuit, a call-bell, and two variable-resistance transmitters. “All working satisfactorily,” he blithely reassured his wife in a telegram. Yet he failed to return in time for the Pollock soirée and Mabel noted that “I decidedly did not think it satisfactory.”

Washington had always been a southern city, and its rigid southern code of morals often appalled Mabel. Coming from progressive Boston, she didn’t agree with the tut-tutting triggered by any woman who stepped out of line. When the famous British actor Sir Henry Irving and his leading lady, Ellen Terry, were scheduled to appear at the National Theater in 1879, Washington’s grandes dames decreed that Irving would be “received” but that Terry would be given the cold shoulder. This thin-lipped disapproval was sparked by the diva’s unfortunate marital history. After her marriage at age sixteen to the British painter George Frederick Watts, who was thirty years her senior, she had eloped with architect Edward Godwin, by whom she had two children. She had returned to the stage when that liaison failed, and had married a fellow actor, Charles Kelly, who turned out to be a drunk. Since then, she had poured her passions into her children and her stage career. In a private journal, Mabel deplored Washingtonians’ hypocrisy: “Because of a fault committed years ago and repaired as far as possible by devoted care of her children, Miss Terry is to be excluded from all good society while Irving, about whose past there are stories and who is certainly divorced from his wife, is received and feted everywhere.” But she acknowledged that she did not have the nerve to buck the conventions: “My own position in society is not yet secure and I have no right to injure my husband or children.”

Alec had no appetite for afternoon calls, let alone gossip, and often resorted to strategic headaches. “This afternoon I spent making Alec a new cravat,” another journal entry reads, “and getting ready to make some calls. My [new] maroon dress came home in time for me to wear it, but when Alec saw me in it he utterly refused to make calls with such a gorgeous person and I had to go down on my knees to him before he would hear of it and then to put on his things myself.” More to Alec’s taste was an expedition to a new skating rink: “Alec was so fascinated that after a while he got over his dread of being laughed at and joined in.… He did cut a ridiculous figure at first.… He upset one young lady and wasn’t able to help her up and ran into the arms of another beside tumbling down himself.”

Washington’s social life did offer some tantalizing prospects to Alec. A meeting with some members of an Arctic expeditionary force gave rise to the suggestion that the inventor accompany them. Alec burst through the front door of the Rhode Island Avenue house, afire with enthusiasm: “Oh Mabel! Wouldn’t it be lovely to see the sun above the horizon for all the twenty four hours!” As he rattled off the rationale for his going—“Only a few months, perfectly safe, such a chance for making experiments and discoveries determining the influence of the North Pole on the magnets …”—Sister joined Mabel in the hall and assumed a look of extreme skepticism. “Yes,” she snapped at her brother-in-law. “Go, and leave Edison a clear field in which to steal marches.” Alec gave a weary nod of submission and returned to his photophone experiments.

Both Alec and Sumner Tainter felt they were making little headway with the photophone in January 1880. Alec wrote in his notebook that they were having such problems with selenium that “we have both been quite unwell ever since.” But the following month, there was a breakthrough. One day when Alec’s cousin Charlie Bell dropped by, Alec managed to get the photophone working in the laboratory. He showed Charlie how to operate it, then he disappeared to the basement where he had rigged up a receiver to which photophone sounds could be transmitted on a telephone wire. Charlie began uttering various sounds into the mouthpiece, including Alec’s own signature greeting. Alec described in a letter to his father what happened next: “I heard the words Hoy-hoy-hoy in different tones—the vowels being wellmarked.… Then came a song ’God save the Queen’—the words in this case seemed perfectly intelligible and plain.” Alec could barely contain his excitement as he explored the implications of his invention: “I have heard articulate speech produced by sunlight! I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing! … I have been able to hear a shadow and I have even perceived by ear the passage of a cloud across the sun’s disk.” He immediately understood the potential of his discovery. “We can talk by light to any visible distance without any conducting wire.”

The photophone would have to await the development of fibre-optic technology, a century later, before it could become a practical substitute for the telephone. In Alec’s day, the photophone was limited to line-of-sight transmission on sunny days. It was typical of Alec that he had been exploring an idea that was not profitable in the short term, rather than perfecting the telephone and ensuring its continued development. His reluctance to think commercially about his intellectual preoccupations meant that he could never be the Bill Gates of the nineteenth century.