He, eleven years older than her and a genius for invention, also a speech therapist dedicated to people suffering from hearing problems, fell in love with that girl, totally deaf due to scarlet fever.
But she, coming from a wealthy family, at first paid no attention to the insistence of that Scottish-born teacher, “a lanky fellow, dark, with jet-black eyes and hair, poorly dressed and unkempt,” as she would describe him. the twentieth century almost dawned.
They are Alexander Graham Bell, who patented the invention of the telephone, and Mabel Gardiner Hubbard. Both, in addition to sharing history in the appearance of the telephone – a revolution in telecommunications at that time – would star in a very little known and moving love story.
In the image that heads this text, taken in October 1903, they do not appear, however, next to the telephone, but kissing immersed in what appears to be a futuristic installation.
Contemplating the photo from this present, dislocates and amazes, as if something were out of place in the snapshot where the period wardrobe, the whiteness of the aged beard contrast with the ease and delivery of the kiss.
But it is not contemporary art what is observed in the photo, but one of the many tetrahedral kites that Bell designed, experimenting with manned flying machines on the way.
By the time the photograph was taken, they were already married. From being a student of Professor Bell, the young American became his confidant and, finally, his wife, on July 11, 1877, the same month that he was 30 years old.
From then on, they did not stop loving and admiring each other. He, as a unique wedding gift for that time, gave his fiancée almost a third of the shares of the nascent Bell Telephone Company. She, persuaded of the potential of Alec, as she affectionately called him, sold some of her properties to help found the Experimental Air Association, with the purpose of building an airfield in Canada to create flying “the first vehicle heavier than the air”.
Due to the insistence of the intelligent Mabel – who thanks to the efforts of her parents had been one of the first deaf children in the United States to learn to speak and lip-read, and she did it in several languages - it was that Bell introduced the telephone at the World’s Fair in Philadelphia, in 1876. There he was awarded the Gold Medal for Electrical Equipment, thus catapulting the commercial success of the invention he patented and that Antonio Meucci, an Italian scientist, had been the first to develop.
The couple had four children, two girls and two boys, the latter of whom died shortly after birth. Mabel and Bell spent 45 years together complementing and loving each other, while evoking the many inventions due to him: from the photophone, which transmitted sound through rays of light, predecessor of the wireless telephone; the metal detector – used in the search for the bullet that assassinated then-US President James Garfield in 1881 – to the hydroplane.
More than one historian and biographer assures that as the time of the inventor’s death approached, due to complications from diabetes, that August 2, 1922, in Beinn Bhreagh, Canada, Mabel held his hand.
Moments before the last gasp, she had begged him not to leave her, and Alec, in the sign language he always spoke to, said no. That was his last word.
That day, phones in the US and Canada were silenced for a minute in tribute to the great man.
Five months later, Mabel’s heart was also silenced, determined to continue flying with her love.
