Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,3
His first child, a bright-eyed little girl named Eliza, had died of diphtheria when she was just three years old. Garfield had adored her, marveling at her precociousness and nicknaming her Trot, after Elizabeth Trotwell in David Copperfield, one of his favorite books. Thirteen years had passed since Trot’s death, but for Garfield, the pain of losing her was still fresh.
Although he worried for the health of his surviving children, Garfield himself seemed uniquely out of place among the fair’s somber scenes of death and disease. He had always been poor—and, even as a congressman, continued to live a simple and frugal life—but he had never been frail. On the contrary, he was the picture of health and vitality. With his quick, crisp stride, he was a striking contrast to the men and women at the fair who, rather than walk, chose to pay the exorbitant price of sixty cents an hour to be pushed through the halls in a cushioned “rolling chair” by a uniformed attendant. In many ways, Garfield had less in common with these people—a group that included the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—than he did the man from Joplin, Missouri, who had loaded a wheelbarrow with minerals from his home state and, over a period of three months, pushed it all the way to Philadelphia for the fair.
It was this kind of gritty determination that impressed Garfield most. He admired men who seemed not to notice even the most insurmountable of obstacles. He saw that caliber of man all around him at the centennial fair, tinkering with an engine or worrying over the strength of a blade. Among this group, eclipsed by the vast shadow of hundreds of other inventors, were two men whose ideas would not only change the world, but had the unique potential to save Garfield’s life.
Next door to Machinery Hall, where Garfield spent his first day at the fair, was the Main Exhibition Building, a twenty-one-acre, glass-enclosed behemoth. Inside, at the far east end of the building, past row after row of dazzling exhibits from far-flung nations, was a small staircase that led upstairs to a quiet, easily overlooked gallery. In one corner of that gallery, bent over a rough, wooden table that held a collection of mysterious-looking brass-and-wood instruments, was a serious young Scotsman named Alexander Graham Bell.
The invention Bell had brought with him from Boston was “a new apparatus operated by the human voice”—the telephone. He had won a patent for it just three months earlier, and he knew that the fair was his best opportunity to prove that it really worked. He had come to Philadelphia, however, with great reluctance, and with each passing day he had only grown more convinced that he should have stayed home.
Bell’s principal work was not inventing, but teaching the deaf. He had inherited this work from his father, but he loved it with a passion that was all his own, and he was astonishingly good at it. Even the emperor of Brazil, on a recent break from the Centennial Exhibition, had visited Bell’s classroom in Boston. Bell’s school would administer its annual exams the next day. It was the most important day of the year for his students, and not being there to help them prepare made him miserable.
From the moment Bell had stepped off the train, he had encountered one disaster after another. He suffered from debilitating headaches brought on by extreme heat, and Philadelphia was in the grip of a brutal heat wave. To his horror, when he examined his luggage, he discovered that some of his equipment had been lost in transit. Worse, what had arrived was damaged.
When Bell had finally reached the fairgrounds and entered the Main Exhibition Building, he realized that not only was his telephone broken and incomplete, but his exhibit would be nearly impossible to find. Because of his reluctance to attend the fair, he had missed the official deadline for registering. His fiancée’s father, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, who was a member of the Massachusetts Centennial Committee and who had been urging Bell for months to enter his invention, had secured an exhibit space for him at the eleventh hour, but it was arguably the least desirable location in the entire hall. Instead of being taken to the electrical exhibits, Bell had been led upstairs to the Massachusetts educational section, his small table wedged between an exhibit of pipe organs and a collection of educational pamphlets. His invention would not even be listed in the fair’s program.