Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry Read Free

English scientific circles, Bell senior began to admire the spirit of curiosity and opportunity in the New World.
    Then the hand of destiny struck the Bell family cruelly. In quick succession, both of Aleck’s brothers died of tuberculosis, a common illness in the Victorian era of coal furnaces and damp cities. When Aleck started to look ill from the exhausting demands of teaching and researching, his heartbroken mother and father made a fateful decision to take their last son out of Britain. In 1870, when Aleck was twenty-three, they sold their properties and sailed for the New World.
    Choked with bereavement, the depleted Bell family bought a farm by the banks of the Grand River in Ontario. Aleck spent his first Canadian summer in a numbed state, lying on a pillow in the middle of a field, reading vacantly, for days at a time. His slow return began with curiosity about a nearby Mohawk reservation. He approached their chief, requested permission to study the Mohawk language, and was allowed to observe their school. The children’s playful company lightened his heavy heart.
    Seeing that his son was in need of a fresh start, in 1874, Melville Bell used his university connections to get Aleck a job in Boston as an elocution specialist. Arriving at Boston’s train station, Aleck instantly fell in love with the city and returned to his routine of teaching and researching. It was during a school vacation back in Ontario that Bell built his own copy of Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph and began to contemplate sound machines.
    Curiosity opens eyes, but there is nothing like chance encounters to open doors. As an inspirational therapist, Bell quickly made a name for himself among Boston’s deaf community. One day after a lecture, he was approached by a wealthy businessman, Gardiner Hubbard, who asked him to give private tutoring to his deaf daughter, Mabel.
    While teaching Mabel Hubbard to speak, Bell began to make a lasting impression on the educated Hubbard family. A natural gentleman with impeccable manners, he measured six foot four, had greased-back jet black hair, and always dressed in a striking manner. He was also an excellent self-taught pianist who entertained his hosts with Highland ballads, Victorian waltzes, and even some Chopin sonatas he had learned by ear.
    Very quickly the Hubbards adopted Bell as a member of the family. It just so happened that Gardiner Hubbard’s commercial and political energies at the time were focused on the telegraph industry. The telegraph had been the biggest communications revolution since the railway in the 1840s but had become an abusive monopoly thanks to one of America’s largest companies, Western Union. In America’s business and political lobbies, Gardiner Hubbard was a vocal campaigner for opening up the sector to competition.
    While listening to Gardiner Hubbard’s views on the telegraph, Bell confessed he was developing theories about sound transmission. He felt he was close to an important breakthrough but was concerned he didn’t have a patent, or even the right to obtain an American patent, being a British citizen. Hubbard, who was an intellectual property lawyer, listened attentively and offered Bell his legal and financial support.
    Hubbard wasn’t the only supporter. Thanks to his father’s connections, Bell befriended a professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who kept him up to date on innovations being debated in the scientific community. Bell’s new landlady, Mrs. Sanders, treated him as an adopted son and secretly redecorated an entire room in the house. For his twenty-seventh birthday, she organized a surprise party; surrounded by his deaf pupils, and weeping with happiness, Bell was given his very own laboratory.
    Working eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, the pale, exhausted Bell often suffered acute migraines. He grasped the general principle for a telephone but dared not even share his ideas, rightly sensing that other inventors