Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [131]
Brown had turned down Arthur’s request to stay on in the White House as the president’s private secretary. He wished, he said, to complete the work he had begun. When he had finished that work—organizing Garfield’s papers and preparing them for binding—he left Mentor for New Haven, Connecticut, where he attended Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School.
Little more than two years later, Brown returned to Ohio, a college-educated man. When Mollie arrived home after a trip to England with her mother, he was waiting for her at the dock, with a ring in his pocket. The diamond was, Mollie would later tell her daughter, “a small stone, but a very good one.” Three months later, Mollie and Joseph were married, in a double wedding with Harry Garfield and his fiancée, Belle Hartford Mason. The wedding took place before the large bay window of the library that Lucretia had built for James.
After Garfield’s death, Alexander Graham Bell stayed on in Washington, still convinced that his induction balance would save lives. The reason for its failure remained a frustrating and demoralizing mystery to Bell until the day Garfield’s autopsy results were announced. “It is now rendered quite certain why it was that the result of the experiment with the Induction Balance was ‘not satisfactory,’ as I stated in my report,” he wrote soon after to Mabel, in a letter filled with as much anger as sorrow. “For the bullet was not in any part of the area explored.”
The realization that, while he had carefully searched Garfield’s right side for the bullet, it had been lying on the left, was sickening to Bell. “This is most mortifying to me and I can hardly bear to think of it,” he confessed to Mabel. “I feel that now the finger of scorn will be pointed at the Induction Balance and at me—and all the hard work I have gone through—seems thrown away.” More painful to him than the damage to his reputation was the thought that his invention would be dismissed as useless, or even dangerous. “I feel that I have really accomplished a great work—and have devised an apparatus that will be of inestimable use in surgery,” he wrote, “but this mistake will re-act against its introduction. The patients I am anxious to benefit would hardly be willing to risk an operation … after what has occurred.”
As dejected as Bell was, however, he could not give up on his invention. On October 7, less than a month after Garfield’s death, he again tested the induction balance, this time on several patients of Dr. Hamilton, who had been one of Garfield’s surgeons. The tests were an unqualified success—the first time the invention had found a bullet “the position of which was previously unknown”—and they left Bell even more convinced that, had he been permitted to search both sides of Garfield’s body, he would have found Guiteau’s bullet.
Bell made no further entries in his laboratory notebook about the induction balance until October 25. On that day, however, his notes covered four pages. “An old idea not previously noted came back to me with considerable significance,” he wrote from a hotel room in Paris. A few days later, he returned once again to the invention, with the same determination and enthusiasm he had had from the moment of its inception.
Bell knew that the induction balance was important. His mistake was in believing that, because it had not worked on the president, no one would be willing to use it. In the years to come, the induction balance would lessen the suffering and save the lives not just of Americans but of soldiers in the Sino-Japanese War and the Boer War. Even during World War I, doctors would often turn to the induction balance when they could not find an X-ray machine, or did not trust its accuracy.
The induction balance, however, was not the only medical invention that would come out of this difficult time in Bell’s life. The death of his son also inspired him to build a machine that would essentially breathe for those who,