Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [36]
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 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