The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) by Seth Shulman Page B

a greenhouse, it stood just down the road from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s equally luxurious Colonial-style estate.
    Since arriving in Boston, Bell had traveled in some fancy circles. The well-heeled Sanders family, for instance, had included him in many social gatherings. They lived in a large house dating from the Colonial period topped with a Captain’s Walk that overlooked the Atlantic. But the tasteful grandeur of the Hubbard residence was striking by almost any comparison. Bell had already noticed how beautifully dressed, supremely well mannered, and bright Mabel was. She was easily the most winning student he had ever tutored. Mabel’s home even more clearly reflected her family’s wealth and upper-class pedigree.
    Mabel’s father, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, an attorney and entrepreneur, had offices in both Boston and Washington. His father, Samuel Hubbard, had sat on the Massachusetts Supreme Court. His maternal grandfather and namesake, Gardiner Greene, was reputed in his day to be the wealthiest man in Boston. And the Hubbards’ Boston roots went deep. For example, Hubbard attended Harvard Law School in the early 1840s; his first American ancestor, William Hubbard, a notable Massachusetts pastor, had graduated from Harvard College some two hundred years earlier, in 1642.
    Bell had already met Gardiner Hubbard professionally in conjunction with Hubbard’s impressive work on behalf of the deaf. After Mabel lost her hearing, Hubbard refused to relegate one of his four charming daughters to an asylum, as was the custom of the day. Instead, he devoted himself to creating opportunities not only for Mabel but for other deaf children as well. Among his accomplishments in this regard, Hubbard was a founder and first president of the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts—an institution that would gain world renown for its innovative methods of teaching the deaf to speak and helping them integrate into the hearing world.
    Thanks to Hubbard’s efforts and his daughter’s natural talent, Mabel became an accomplished lip reader, and her comprehension was impeccable. By the age of twelve, she was attending classes in a regular school with hearing children two and three years her senior. Nonetheless, Hubbard felt her speech could be improved. In August 1873, he sought out Bell’s services shortly after his daughter’s return from an extended sojourn in Europe with her mother and sisters.
    Now, some fourteen months later, Bell drank up the hospitality and attention of the Hubbard family. Mabel’s mother, who fully rivaled her husband in her energetic nature and rarefied background, charmed him from the start. Gertrude McCurdy Hubbard was the daughter of an established and well-to-do New York family. Her father, Robert Henry McCurdy, was a trustee and founder of the vast Mutual Life Insurance Company.
    Not only did Gertrude Hubbard oversee a busy residence and social schedule in Cambridge, New York, and Washington; she was also highly educated and self-directed. When Mabel was small, for instance, she took it upon herself to learn Hebrew so she could read the Old Testament in its original language. More recently, when Gertrude Hubbard traveled with her family to Europe, her husband returned home after several months to tend to business. Mrs. Hubbard, however, remained abroad for two more years to single-handedly tour her four daughters through Geneva, Vienna, Rome, Florence, Paris, and London.
    In the Hubbards’ formal drawing room, which was decorated in High Victorian style, with red velvet wallpaper, gilded drapes, and gaslights with crystal fixtures, Bell entertained his hosts on the family’s grand piano.
    After playing a favorite sonata, Bell seized the opportunity to tell Gardiner Hubbard about his telegraphic research. As the two men stood together by the piano, Bell gave Hubbard a demonstration that stemmed directly from his original experiments with tuning forks in Scotland: he showed how,