Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,32

piano, was almost completely deaf. Eliza Bell had spent most of her life separated from the world around her by the ear trumpet she relied on to hear even faint fragments of words. Her second son, however, refused to be distanced from his mother by her handicap. Instead, he would put his mouth very close to her forehead and speak in a voice so low and deep she could feel its vibrations.

While Bell’s mother had been left with some whispers of sound, his wife could hear absolutely nothing. Mabel Hubbard, whose father, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, had been Bell’s earliest backer, had lost her hearing after contracting scarlet fever when she was five years old. As a teenager, she had been one of Bell’s first students, and he had quickly fallen in love with her. Although Mabel was then only seventeen years old, ten years younger than Bell, he knew with an unshakable certainty that she was the only woman he wanted to marry. “I should probably have sought one more mature than she is—one who could share with me those scientific pursuits that have always been my delight,” he had written to Mabel’s mother. “However, my heart has chosen.”

Although, in the public mind, Bell was now an inventor, he still thought of himself, and would always think of himself, first and foremost as a teacher of the deaf. Not only did he teach, but he trained new teachers. This work, which he knew would never bring him wealth or fame, meant more to him than anything else he had ever done. “As far as telegraphy is concerned,” he confided to Mabel, “I shall be far happier and more honoured if I can send out a band of competent teachers of the deaf and dumb who will accomplish a good work, than I should be to receive all the telegraphic honours in the world.”

What concerned Mabel, however, was not what her husband worked on, but the feverish intensity with which he worked. Soon after their engagement, she had written to her mother that the endless hours Bell devoted to the telephone frightened her. “He has his machine running beautifully,” she wrote, “but it will kill him if he is not careful.”

Bell’s parents, terrified that they would lose their only surviving child, had long pleaded with him to slow down. In the summer of 1870, just a month after the death of their oldest son, they had convinced Bell to emigrate with them from Scotland to Canada, where, they hoped, he would live a quieter life. To their frustration and despair, he had only worked harder, conceiving the telephone and then moving to the United States, where he worked day and night to give substance to his ideas. Ten years after they had left Scotland, Bell’s mother wrote to him to ask if, now that he had accomplished so much, he would finally rest. “I wish very much … that you would for a time, turn away your thoughts altogether from the subject you have so long been poring over, and give your mind a rest,” she wrote. “I am dreadfully afraid you are overstraining it.”

Bell, however, wanted nothing more than to strain his mind, and could not bear to be interrupted when in the thrall of his thoughts. Now that he was married, he begged his wife to let him work as long as he needed to, even if he disappeared for days at a time. “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 wrote her in 1879. “Let me alone, let me work as I like even if I have to sit up all night or even for two nights.… Oh, do not do as you often do, stop me in the midst of my work, my excitement with ‘Alec, Alec, aren’t you coming to bed? It’s one o’clock, do come.’ Then … the ideas are gone, the work is never done.”

When struggling with an invention, the only respite Bell would allow himself was to play the piano deep into the night. Although he had been taught by a mother who could not hear the music, he had quickly learned to play by ear, picking up tunes and then changing them, making them his own. As a boy, he had even dreamed of becoming a composer, but his father had discouraged him from pursuing a profession that, he believed, would reduce