Bell had agreed to give him a series of private lessons for $350 a year; and as the child lived with his grandmother in the city of Salem, sixteen miles from Boston, it was agreed that Bell should make his home with the Sanders family. Here he not only found the keenest interest and sympathy in his air-castles of invention, but also was given permission to use the cellar of the house as his workshop.
For the next three years this cellar was his favorite retreat. He littered it with tuning-forks, magnets, batteries, coils of wire, tin trumpets, and cigar-boxes. No one outside of the Sanders family was allowed to enter it, as Bell was nervously afraid of having his ideas stolen. He would even go to five or six stores to buy his supplies, for fear that his intentions should be discovered. Almost with the secrecy of a conspirator, he worked alone in this cellar, usually at night, and quite oblivious of the fact that sleep was a necessity to him and to the Sanders family.
"Often in the middle of the night Bell would wake me up," said Thomas Sanders, the father of Georgie. "His black eyes would be blazing with excitement. Leaving me to go down to the cellar, he would rush wildly to the barn and begin to send me signals along his experimental wires. If I noticed any improvement in his machine, he would be delighted. He would leap and whirl around in one of his `war-dances' and then go contentedly to bed. But if the experiment was a failure, he would go back to his workbench and try some different plan."The second pupil who became a factor--a very considerable factor--in Bell's career was a fifteen-year-old girl named Mabel Hubbard, who had lost her hearing, and consequently her speech, through an attack of scarlet-fever when a baby.
She was a gentle and lovable girl, and Bell, in his ardent and headlong way, lost his heart to her completely; and four years later, he had the happiness of making her his wife. Mabel Hubbard did much to encourage Bell. She followed each step of his progress with the keenest interest.
She wrote his letters and copied his patents. She cheered him on when he felt himself beaten.
And through her sympathy with Bell and his ambitions, she led her father--a widely known Boston lawyer named Gardiner G. Hubbard--to become Bell's chief spokesman and defender, a true apostle of the telephone.
Hubbard first became aware of Bell's inventive efforts one evening when Bell was visiting at his home in Cambridge. Bell was illustrating some of the mysteries of acoustics by the aid of a piano. "Do you know," he said to Hubbard, "that if I sing the note G close to the strings of the piano, that the G-string will answer me?""Well, what then?" asked Hubbard. "It is a fact of tremendous importance," replied Bell.
"It is an evidence that we may some day have a musical telegraph, which will send as many messages simultaneously over one wire as there are notes on that piano."Later, Bell ventured to confide to Hubbard his wild dream of sending speech over an electric wire, but Hubbard laughed him to scorn. "Now you are talking nonsense," he said. "Such a thing never could be more than a scientific toy.
You had better throw that idea out of your mind and go ahead with your musical telegraph, which if it is successful will make you a millionaire."But the longer Bell toiled at his musical telegraph, the more he dreamed of replacing the telegraph and its cumbrous sign-language by a new machine that would carry, not dots and dashes, but the human voice. "If I can make a deaf-mute talk," he said, "I can make iron talk." For months he wavered between the two ideas. He had no more than the most hazy conception of what this voice-carrying machine would be like.
At first he conceived of having a harp at one end of the wire, and a speaking-trumpet at the other, so that the tones of the voice would be reproduced by the strings of the harp.
Then, in the early Summer of 1874, while he was puzzling over this harp apparatus, the dim outline of a new path suddenly glinted in front of him. He had not been forgetful of "Visible Speech" all this while, but had been making experiments with two remarkable machines--the phonautograph and the manometric capsule, by means of which the vibrations of sound were made plainly visible. If these could be im-proved, he thought, then the deaf might be taught to speak by SIGHT--by learning an alphabet of vibrations. He mentioned these experiments to a Boston friend, Dr. Clarence J. Blake, and he, being a surgeon and an aurist, naturally said, "Why don't you use a REAL EAR?"Such an idea never had, and probably never could have, occurred to Bell; but he accepted it with eagerness. Dr. Blake cut an ear from a dead man's head, together with the ear-drum and the associated bones. Bell took this fragment of a skull and arranged it so that a straw touched the ear-drum at one end and a piece of moving smoked glass at the other. Thus, when Bell spoke loudly into the ear, the vibrations of the drum made tiny markings upon the glass.
It was one of the most extraordinary incidents in the whole history of the telephone. To an uninitiated onlooker, nothing could have been more ghastly or absurd. How could any one have interpreted the gruesome joy of this young professor with the pale face and the black eyes, who stood earnestly singing, whispering, and shouting into a dead man's ear? What sort of a wizard must he be, or ghoul, or madman?
And in Salem, too, the home of the witchcraft superstition! Certainly it would not have gone well with Bell had he lived two centuries earlier and been caught at such black magic.
