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On July 9, 1877, the Bell Telephone Company was incorporated. Alec, Gardiner, Gardiner’s brother Charles Eustis Hubbard, Thomas Sanders, and Thomas Watson made up the board of managers. Sanders operated as secretary, Watson was in charge of manufacturing, and Alec was technically the “electrician,” though this role, too, would fall to Watson. There were an estimated two hundred phones in operation, rented out at a rate of $20 a year for a pair connecting a home and another location, or $40 a year for business rentals, plus installation fees. At this point in time, this is how the telephones worked, in pairs connected only by hastily erected wires.
On July 11, two days after incorporation, Alec and Mabel were married. It was a small ceremony in the Hubbards’ home, fragrant with Madonna lilies from the garden. As a wedding gift, Alec gave Mabel a cross of eleven pearls, and all but ten shares of his portion (1,507 shares) of the Bell Telephone Company, approximately one-third ownership.
Afterward, they went to Brantford, Ontario, to visit Alec’s family, who couldn’t make it to the Cambridge ceremony. This was the first time Mabel would meet Eliza, with whom she’d been writing for over a year. In that time, they had continued to correspond about art, Mabel sending Eliza a charcoal sketch, describing her work in oil paints, and admiring Eliza’s etchings. When Melville was off on a lecture tour, Mabel wondered in her letters how Eliza was handling it: “I should think you would find the house lonely while he is away.” And Eliza had sent gifts that Mabel treasured: first, a beautiful shell, later, Mabel’s engagement ring, an heirloom.
Now Alec and Mabel approached through a vine-covered arbor where Eliza waited for them. She hardly let Mabel say a word before she broke a piece of oatcake over her head, in an old Scottish tradition. Mabel thought her “just as nice and kind as she can be, so bright and quick,” but quiet, too, so that she reminded Mabel of a little bird.
Alec’s family had planned a reception at the house—a party to celebrate both the invention and the marriage. Alec was going to demonstrate the telephone, but as the guests started to arrive, he was still outside, struggling to lay the last of the telephone wire that would connect the home to the local telegraph office. Chief Johnson, of the local Mohawk tribe, arrived to find Alec at work, and quickly got himself a hammer and filled his pockets with staples. Together, they went with their wire along the road, though the woods, orchards, and finally to the telegraph office. Then, as the remaining guests arrived to a spread of ham sandwiches and trifle cake, Alec and Chief Johnson returned to the homestead, joining the thirty guests.
They all hushed as Alec approached his transmitter, lifted the phone, and spoke. After a brief conversation, Alec called over Chief Johnson, “Would you speak in Mohawk for me?” he asked.
And so Chief Johnson took the telephone.
Mabel marveled at the crowd—“such a democratic assemblage I never saw”—as she mingled among farmers, lawyers, drivers, and all the Bells that could gather. It was more diverse and fundamentally different from her Cambridge circles. In terms of class, the Bells were decidedly lower than her family, but they also had a freedom she lacked, a ruggedness and an openness that broadened their circle to people unlike themselves. The next morning she observed eight empty champagne bottles in the hallway as she and Alec readied to attend church on the reservation.
In early August, a month after incorporation, telephone installation had nearly quadrupled with close to eight hundred telephones in operation, now connecting pairs of houses in Hartford and New York. On the fourth of the month, Alec and Mabel left on the steamship Anchoria for their European honeymoon. On board, there were so many Scots that Alec fell into his old accent, adding to Mabel’s labor in lip-reading. “I only know I can hardly understand him most of the time,” she wrote to Eliza.
They landed in time to make an appearance at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, where the telephone—and its inventor—became the central attraction. Back in North America, the telephone had reached Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco. Melville presided over Canadian rights, setting up lines in Brantford, and Alec made Gardiner the trustee for the rights in Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Belgium, and France.
In October, with thirteen hundred North American telephones in operation, Alec and Mabel traveled to the seaside town of Covesea. It was an old family getaway for the Bells, and now it would be the setting for Alec and Mabel’s official honeymoon in a thatched-roof cottage, roses and fuchsia climbing up its sides.
Here they planned to leave technology behind, to live mostly on fish, to be self-sustaining and rugged, though neither of them knew how to cook. They purchased a loaf of bread, a half pound of sugar, and a pound of butter. Alec thought that this would be enough for a week. Mabel was not so sure and was particularly worried about his idea of cooking their own freshly caught fish—neither of them had so much as seen a fish cooked. “Alec appears to think it a very simple operation,” she wrote, “but I have an idea that the fish has to be opened and cleaned, and a part of its inside taken out first.” But never mind fish, the task of boiling tea and eggs was enough to “break Alec’s courage” when it came to food preparation.
When it became clear that they needed help, their landlady brought them fresh milk and then got to boiling eggs, tea, and potatoes for them, eventually arranging to do the rest of their cooking.
Relieved of the duty of gutting fish, Alec dropped lump after lump of sugar into his tea, holding the cup to the light after he did to watch the disruption of little bubbles rising to the surface. Even on vacation, he was an experimenter, and now he was trying to deduce whether it was the sugar itself or the air trapped within the cubes that caused the phenomenon.
They went every day to the rocks, the cliffs, the sandy shore. They stopped bringing food with them, too much trouble, and now they went unhindered. At the shore, the walked along the sand for miles, exploring the caves tucked into the cliffs, keeping an eye on the rising tide. Mabel was falling more and more in love with her husband every day, and in her belly she felt it. It was shifting; it was growing. She was pregnant with their first child.
“O Mamma darling,” she wrote to Gertrude a month earlier, “if I only could put my arms tight around you and ask you if it may really, really be true what Alec and I are just beginning to hope may be. I’m most afraid to write it for fear it would be so hard to feel that you will go on hoping after it is all over—the hopes and fears. And I am so afraid that it may be all wrong… Mamma, you must not say anything or believe anything until I write again.” But day by day, her certainty grew.
Climbing back over the cliffs, Alec set up blankets and shawls, leaving Mabel with the company of a book while he went off “hunting.” Mabel wasn’t fooled. For all the show of it—he could wrap a stone in paper, throw it in the air, and shoot it on the way down—she was pretty sure he spent more time just watching the birds. She described his pistol as “quite harmless.”
They walked alongside farms, the air without a hint of frost, so “soft and mild” that the harvest had not yet been taken in. They passed countryside crisscrossed with wire fences, and Alec bemoaned all that wasted wire, which he thought could be perfect for the telephone. Even now, on his honeymoon, he couldn’t entirely give himself over to rest—his mind was always alive, always obsessing. Soon he and Mabel were back out there with his device, he connecting it to wire fencing, she yelling with all her might into the transmitter. The fact that it didn’t work didn’t dissuade him. It was just that the wire had grown rusty, he said.
He went back to watching birds, telling Mabel all about his hope to build a flying machine. His thoughts darted everywhere. “He goes climbing about the rocks and forming theories on the origin of cliffs and caves,” Mabel reported, “which last problem he has solved to his satisfaction. Then he comes home and watches sugar bubbles, starts out the next morning after rabbits…”
Their last night there, tired of his too-short bed, Alec slept outside on the beach.
In the morning, Alec wrote a poem in the sand with a mussel shell and danced wildly around the lines as he wrote them. When he got stuck on a rhyme, he stood with his bare feet wide, his arms outstretched, his face puzzled.
Mabel worked on sketching him, marveling at her husband’s mind, moving without a moment’s notice from torpedoes to telephones, tides to ruins to flying machines. She hadn’t found him handsome when they met, nor even though their courtship, but now she did. She saw him in so many new ways now. When they’d first met he seemed so careless, improper, “hardly a gentleman.” But then she saw him in Tutelo Heights and in Covesea, and he seemed the height of class compared to the ruggedness of the people he grew up around. Somehow he’d become perfect. And now he was at the center of what was becoming one of the most important inventions in the world, and he loved her. He stood before her on the sand, arms outstretched, feeling the power of the sea behind him, the puzzle of words before him.
Then, turning to the sea, a look of shame crossed his face. It didn’t seem proper, he said, that the inventor of the telephone should go wading. Mabel was full of love for him, for the family they were now beginning. She looked at her husband and shrugged. “Don’t be a slave to your own position,” she said. And with that, he set out into the sea.
After their honeymoon, Alec and Mabel traveled from Scotland to En-gland, and when she was certain of her pregnancy, they put off their return to the States—originally planned for November 1877—until October 1878, on the advice of their doctor. In the meantime, they rented a seventeen-room house in South Kensington, living far beyond their means. Alec continued to work on the telephone, giving lectures that drew crowds of as many as two thousand people, and coming up with small but vital improvements like pairing the two circuit wires within a common insulation, to decrease interference on the line.
As the pair settled into their married life, Alec’s fame grew. “Everybody seeks to do him honor,” wrote Mabel. “He has been introduced to all the great people, Lord this and Sir that, and all are anxious and eager to speak with him.”
Despite all the effort Mabel had poured into keeping her husband on track to becoming a famous inventor, she now shrank from the attention. Every new person she met would have been a new communication challenge, a sap on energy. She wrote to her mother: “Oh, I wish I were safe at home, I’d give up all hope of ever being Lady Bell and all the glories of being the wife of a successful inventor, everything but just being Alec’s wife, to come home to quiet humbleness.”
But Alec’s star was rising. In January 1878, he got a letter from Queen Victoria’s private secretary asking when it would be convenient for Alec to present the telephone to the Queen. He wrote back that the next Thursday or Friday would be good for him, but that he “awaited Her Majesty’s commands,” a particularly British suppliance that disgusted Mabel.
But that’s not to say she wasn’t excited—it was, after all, the Queen—and she ordered a Parisian dress for the occasion. She tried not to be too descriptive in her requests for it, asking for something simple and not showy, for receptions and ceremonies, for this new life of hers, as the wife of a famous inventor. She anxiously awaited it as Alec drew up phone lines and arranged for famous singers to be posted on the other ends. He had a telephone receiver made for the Queen, with polished walnut and gold switches.
Mabel’s dress arrived soon after she found out that she wasn’t actually invited to the event, and she saw it through the veil of her disappointment: its black silk, its excessively long train, its horrible beaded trim, its exorbitant price. “Well,” she wrote, “if this isn’t a showy dress, I don’t know what is.”
Meanwhile, on the evening of January 14, Alec waited for the Queen. He had grown out his beard and put on thirty-six pounds since his wedding day, weighing in at 201. Since his pants kept tearing, he’d arranged to have new clothes made before visiting the Queen. Now he stood with a solid grandeur, imposing and dignified, if a little less light on his feet.
He waited in the Council Room of Osborne House, a royal retreat on the Isle of Wight. The room was furnished in white, red, and gold, adorned with three-quarter-length portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. She arrived at nine thirty in black silk and a widow’s cap, the mourning garb that she’d been wearing since her husband’s death sixteen years earlier. At first, Alec found her “humpy, stumpy, dumpy,” her physical appearance fat and her hands coarse, but he soon found that she was warm and dignified and he quite liked her. He spent about fifteen minutes explaining the invention to her, showing her a telephone that had been sawed in half, so she could see the inner workings. The Queen was entranced by him.
And then, after Alec had secured the phone connection, he began to hand the phone to her, only to find that she was looking away. He, who spent his days around deaf people, lightly touched the Queen’s arm to get her attention. But nobody touches the Queen, especially not some scrappy inventor. There must have been a collective sharp intake of breath, a pause of horror, but the Queen just turned and took the phone when he handed it to her.
They listened to a singer, Kate Field, on one line, and then later switched to another, connected to Cowes. As the concert songs began, the Duke of Connaught exclaimed, “It sounds like distant music on the water!” and soon took to the line to talk with people on the other end. They called Southampton and then London, and around midnight, the experiment ended.
Queen Victoria called the invention “most extraordinary,” and the newspapers had a ball with Alec’s faux pas, drawing a picture of him pulling at the Queen’s arm as she beamed.
Alec and Mabel settled into their temporary London home, and on May 8, 1878, Mabel gave birth. The first time Mabel held her daughter, the child looked up at her with “grave wondering questioning wide open eyes.” Alec examined her mouth, her eyes, her ears, verifying that all were functioning well. He wanted to name her Darwinia, for Charles Darwin, but he was voted down. Instead, she was named Elsie, a Scottish variation of the name Eliza, for his mother.
Alec took to his newborn daughter with his usual curiosity. “He is at once so fond of it and yet so afraid of the poor little thing,” wrote Mabel, “and he hardly knows how to hold it.” As it was, Alec awaited the day when she would seem real to him, old enough for him to feel like he could truly love her. “I often take her up in my arms and nod to her and play with her from a feeling that it’s my duty to try and like her—but somehow or other if the truth were told I have to imagine what she’ll be like when she is two or three years old before I can summon up any real feeling of affection for her.” He was quietly tortured by this—“at my secret hard-heartedness”—but he was tortured, too, by any strange bubbling in Elsie’s mouth, or by any “suspicious noise” her body made.
Outside the walls of their home, the telephone was becoming ubiquitous. “Wherever you go,” wrote Mabel, “on newspaper stands, at news stores, stationers, photographers, toy shops, fancy goods shops, you see the eternal little black box with red face, and the word ‘Telephone’ in large black letters.”
By mid-November, the English press was running even the tiniest telephone stories, and the public flocked to whatever lecture on the subject they could find. People began experimenting with the telephone not only across great distances, but also down great distances, into mines and attached to the helmets of divers. They worked to connect police departments with each other; they worked to connect banks. Telephone caricatures graced the pages of Punch while physicians tried to see if the device could help them understand more about respiratory diseases.
In America, it was satirized. The Daily Graphic in New York City ran an image titled “Terrors of the Telephone—the Orator of the Future,” featuring a speaker, sweaty and crazed, speaking into a receiver whose wires stretched to audiences in China, Dublin, Fiji, and dozens of distant lands around the globe. In this image, it’s not peace or reconciliation that voice brings, but too much connectivity. This one man, his frenetic energy radiating through the wires, is able to reach anyone, anywhere. This new technology was too much to handle, the image suggested; we shouldn’t be so connected. Some stillness, some peace, was being lost.