The History of the Telephone | Page 6

impressed by the progress
made by these pupils, and by the pathos of their dumbness, that when
he arrived in Canada he was in doubt as to which of these two tasks
was the more important--the teaching of deaf-mutes or the invention of
a musical telegraph.
At this point, and before Bell had begun to experiment with his
telegraph, the scene of the story shifts from Canada to Massachusetts. It
appears that his father, while lecturing in Boston, had mentioned
Graham's exploits with a class of deaf-mutes; and soon afterward the
Boston Board of Education wrote to Graham, offering him five
hundred dollars if he would come to Boston and introduce his system
of teaching in a school for deaf-mutes that had been opened recently.
The young man joyfully agreed, and on the first of April, 1871, crossed
the line and became for the remainder of his life an American.
For the next two years his telegraphic work was laid aside, if not
forgotten. His success as a teacher of deaf-mutes was sudden and
overwhelming. It was the educational sensation of 1871. It won him a
professorship in Boston University; and brought so many pupils around
him that he ventured to open an ambitious "School of Vocal
Physiology," which became at once a profitable enterprise. For a time
there seemed to be little hope of his escaping from the burden of this

success and becoming an inventor, when, by a most happy coincidence,
two of his pupils brought to him exactly the sort of stimulation and
practical help that he needed and had not up to this time received.
One of these pupils was a little deaf-mute tot, five years of age, named
Georgie Sanders. 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