Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,33
his son to little more than a “wee bit fiddler.” Although he followed his father’s advice, Bell never gave up music, clinging to it with a particular ferocity in times of stress and anxiety. It was a habit that may have given him some release but little rest, as he succumbed to what his mother described as a “musical fever.”
Even to Bell’s father, a highly regarded elocutionist who for years had worked in his study until two in the morning, developing a universal alphabet, his work habits seemed not just extreme, but dangerous. “I have serious fears that you have not the stamina for the work your ambition has led you to undertake,” Alexander Melville Bell wrote his son. “Be wise. Stop in time.… I feel so strongly that you are endangering your future powers of work, and your life, by your present course, that I can write on no other subject.… Break your pens and ink bottles.… Wisdom points only in one direction. Stop work.”
As much as he loved his wife and his parents, Bell either would not stop or could not. He tried to explain to Mabel why he worked such long hours, refusing to stop to eat or rest. He had, he said, a “sort of telephonic undercurrent” in his brain that was constantly humming. “My mind concentrates itself on the subject that happens to occupy it,” he wrote, “and then all things else in the Universe—including father—mother—wife—children—life itself—become for the time being of secondary importance.”
By 1880, so frustrated had Bell become with the Bell Telephone Company—the time it stole from his laboratory work and the battles that he now realized it would always be fighting—that he simply quit. “I have been almost as much surprised as grieved at the course you have taken,” his father-in-law, who had become the company’s president, wrote him that summer. “My mortification and grief are only tempered by the hope that you do not realize what you have done.” Bell, however, understood exactly what he had done, and he would never regret it.
Renting a small house in Washington, D.C., where his parents had settled, Bell at first tried to write a history of the telephone, to at least acknowledge the singular role it had played in his life. To no one’s surprise, however, the temptation to return to his work quickly became too strong to resist. “However hard and faithfully Alec may work on his book,” Mabel wrote, “he cannot prevent ideas from entering and overflowing his brain.” Before long, Bell had opened a new laboratory.
In February of 1881, just a month before Garfield’s inauguration, Bell eagerly moved his equipment and notebooks into a small, two-story brick building that stood in the middle of a large, open stretch of land on Connecticut Avenue. He christened the building the Volta Laboratory, in honor of the science prize that Napoleon Bonaparte had created at the beginning of the century and that Bell had won that past summer. Along with the prize had come a substantial sum—50,000 francs, or $10,000. With the money, he was able not only to lease the building but to hire an impressive young inventor named Charles Sumner Tainter. Bell had found Tainter in Charles Williams’s electrical shop in Boston, the same shop where he had met Thomas Watson six years earlier. Watson had left the Bell Telephone Company about the same time Bell did, announcing his intention to travel and enjoy his modest wealth, and leaving Bell in great need of a man like Tainter.
Although by now even Bell admitted that he needed rest, he could not ignore the ideas erupting and colliding in his mind. “These are germs of important discoveries yet to come,” he wrote his parents early that year, “and I find it hard to rest here with the laboratory so close at hand.” One of these ideas was the photophone, a wireless telephone that relied on light waves to carry sound. So feverishly did he work on the invention that he finally had to seek medical care for an ailment that he described as “functional derangement of the heart brought on by too much Photophone.”
At the same time that Bell was fretting over his new invention, he was also settling an old score. He had not forgotten that Thomas Edison had made and patented improvements to the telephone, and he now realized with delight that he could return the favor. A few years earlier, Edison had invented the phonograph, but had set it aside before