Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [37]
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 it was finished. Bell and Tainter were certain it could be made into something practical, and valuable. “Edison was completely absorbed in the work of perfecting the electrical light, and seemed to have lost all interest in the phonograph and had failed to appreciate its importance,” Tainter wrote. “But we had faith in its future.”
Since he had freed himself from the telephone, Bell had been desperately looking not just for a new project, but for work that would capture his heart and imagination, work that had meaning. When Mabel had complained that a school for the deaf he had founded in Scotland took too much of his time, Bell, frustrated that she could not understand what seemed so obvious to him, had snapped, “I trust you will … see that I am needed.” Nothing, not fame or wealth or even international recognition of his work, was as important to him as this. “I have been absolutely rusting from inaction,” he tried desperately to explain, “hoping and hoping that my services might be wanted somewhere.” The work he was now doing in the Volta Laboratory might not ease suffering or save a single life, but in this cramped and cluttered little building he knew that, if he were needed, he would be ready.
• CHAPTER 7 •
REAL BRUTUSES AND BOLINGBROKES
Tonight, I am a private citizen. To-morrow I shall be called to assume new responsibilities, and on the day after, the broadside of the world’s wrath will strike. It will strike hard. I know it, and you will know it.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
At 2:30 in the morning on March 4, 1881, the day of his inauguration, Garfield sat at a small desk in his boardinghouse in Washington and wrote the final sentence of his inaugural address. Although he had been thinking about the speech since his election and had read the addresses of every president who had preceded him, he had not put pen to paper until late January. Over the past month, a friend recalled, he had written “no less than a half-dozen separate and distinct drafts of the address in whole or in part, each profusely adorned with notes, interlineations, and marginalia.” Then, three days before, Garfield had swept aside all these drafts, dismissing them as “the staggerings of my mind,” and had begun again. When he finally finished, just