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Bell frets becoming 'laughing stock' over telephone experiments

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In our world of electronic and digital communications, one wonders what evidence of our day-to-day lives will exist for our descendants in the next century. Modern technology has given us the ability to be in almost constant touch with one another. But, will our emails and texts still exist a hundred years from now? For decades, letter writing was often an everyday occurrence for most people. Keeping in touch meant sitting down with pen and paper. Receiving a letter was often an exciting event, especially from someone miles away. And, for many, including Alexander Graham Bell and his family, these letters were something to be kept, not simply discarded once read. The Bells were profuse writers and as a result, their story can be told today through thousands of letters.

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Born in Scotland in 1847, Alexander Graham Bell lived a unique life. Influenced by his father, Melville, a professor of elocution, and his deaf mother, Eliza; the loss of his brothers, Melville and Edward, to Consumption; and marriage to his deaf pupil, Mabel Hubbard, Bell left a legacy to the world that few could imagine living without. How this came to pass is best revealed through the letters between these individuals. Here, we present those letters to you.

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With the summer heat wave taking hold in Boston, as it was in Brantford, Alec wrote this uneasy letter to Mabel. The Bureau of Awards required a report on the apparatus Alec had demonstrated at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. He had not yet been able to set pen to paper accordingly. And the telephone experiments of the previous few days had disappointed him as it was pointed out that his long-distance transmission from Boston to New Hampshire had only travelled over the short part of the circuit rather than the long lines.

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Boston
July 16th, 1876

My darling May

I fear that no gold medal from Philadelphia will ever grace your neck – if my answer to that paper is to be taken as the ground of award! I am mortified & disgusted with myself for my inability to concentrate my thoughts upon the subject at all – simple as it must seem to you – and I feel that such a ridiculous weakness upon my part must be a source of mortification to you too. The truth is my mind is full of something else – and will go on working away at its own sweet will in spite of all I can do. Those experiments of the past few days have quite unsettled me. – I see so much in them. I can’t help thinking of them all the time – even when purchasing cups for Laurie’s wedding! I feel altogether as if I were in a dream – hearing you speak – talking to you and others upon all sorts of subjects & yet there is a sort of telephonic undercurrent going on all the while. I sit down to answer those questions & in a few minutes I find my paper covered with rude drawings of that improved form of apparatus I prevented you from copying. I can’t keep my mind off it for two minutes at a time.

What to do I don’t know. I fear I shall become the laughing stock of the whole family – and disappoint you all.

It is all so ridiculous too. I am so ashamed of not having that finished yet – that I dread going out to Cambridge till it is done. You may therefore expect me back somewhere about Christmas!

I am too much mortified to go near Cambridge tonight.

Don’t be angry with me for letting everybody see how foolish I can be.

Your loving
Alec.

The Bell Letters are annotated by Brian Wood, curator, Bell Homestead National Historic Site.

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