Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [35]
His “first incentive to invention,” he would often say, had been a neighbor’s “injunction to do something useful.” Rising to the challenge, Bell, just fourteen years old, had built a contraption that used stiff-bristled brushes mounted to rotating paddles to scrape the husks off wheat. To his delight, the machine had worked, and, in the thump and thwack of his first invention, he had witnessed the potential of his own ideas.
Bell soon realized that, through invention, he could change things, make them better. It was clear to him, moreover, that the world needed to be changed. In a time of widespread illness and early death, he understood grief and suffering as well as any man. Before his twenty-fourth birthday he had lost both his brothers to tuberculosis, leaving him an only child and the sole object of his parents’ dreams and fears. “Our earthly hopes have now their beginning, middle and end in you,” his father had written him after his older, and last, brother’s death. “O, be careful.”
From painful personal experience, Bell also knew how difficult life could be for those fortunate enough to survive disease or injury. His mother, who had homeschooled him and his brothers and had taught him to play the 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