Mabel Gardiner Hubbard

Mabel Gardiner Hubbard Bell (November 25, 1857 – January 3, 1923) was an American businesswoman, and the daughter of Boston lawyer Gardiner Green Hubbard. She was the wife of Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the first practical telephone.

From the time of Mabel's courtship with Graham Bell in 1873, until his death in 1922, Mabel became and remained the most significant influence in his life. Folklore held that Bell undertook telecommunication experiments in an attempt to restore her hearing which had been destroyed by disease close to her fifth birthday, leaving her completely deaf for the remainder of her life.

Biography

Mabel Gardiner Hubbard was born on November 25, 1857, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, to Gardiner Greene Hubbard and Gertrude Mercer McCurdy. She was also, due in great part to her parents' efforts, one of the first deaf children in the nation to be taught to both lip-read and speak, which allowed her to integrate herself easily and almost completely within the hearing world, an event virtually unknown to those in the deaf community of that era.

In support of her parents' efforts to increase funding for deaf education, Mabel testified before a congressional hearing at a young age. Her avoidance of the deaf community until her middle age when her parents died and left her to assume their roles as benefactor to the societies for the deaf, would later lead to criticisms that she was embarrassed by her impairment.

Described as "strong and self-assured", Hubbard became one of Bell's pupils at his new school for the deaf, and later evolved into his confidant. and Marian Hubbard Bell (1880–1962), who was referred to as "Daisy", and who was nearly named Photophone by Bell after her birth.

Hubbard also bore two sons, Edward (1881) and Robert (1883), both of whom died shortly after birth leaving their parents bereft. From 1877, she and "Alec", as she preferred to call Bell, lived in Washington, D.C. at their home, the Brodhead-Bell Mansion, which they occupied for several years, and from 1888 onwards residing increasingly at their Beinn Bhreagh (Gaelic for "beautiful mountain") estate, in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada.

After her husband, Bell's death on August 2, 1922, Hubbard slowly lost her sight and grew increasingly consigned to the care of her daughters, withdrawing into a world of silent darkness.

Hubbard understood Bell's reluctance to go to the exhibition and display his works. She secretly bought his train ticket to Philadelphia, packed his bag, and then took the unknowing Bell to Boston's train station where she told her shocked fiancé that he was going on a trip. When Bell started to argue, Hubbard turned her sight away from him, thus becoming literally deaf to his protests.

Stock ownership in the Bell Telephone Company The Bell Telephone Company was organized on July 9, 1877, by Hubbard's father Gardiner Greene Hubbard who owned 1,387 of the 5,000 issued shares and had the title of "trustee". Hubbard's husband Alexander Bell owned 1,497 shares. Bell immediately transferred all but 10 of his shares as a wedding gift to his new bride. A short time later, just prior to leaving for an extended honeymoon of Europe, Hubbard signed a power of attorney giving control of her shares to her father. This made Gardiner Hubbard the de facto president and chairman of the Bell Telephone Company, which later evolved into American Telephone & Telegraph, (aka AT&T) at times the world's largest telephone company.

Support to aeronautical research Hubbard was highly intelligent but usually preferred to remain in the background while Bell conducted scientific discussions and meetings among his peers—for many decades he held regular Wednesday evening intellectual salons in their home parlour, dutifully documented in the multiple volumes of his "homenotes".

At that time Hubbard sold some of her real estate and gave that amount of money to her husband and four others to establish the Aerial Experimental Association (AEA), for the purpose of constructing "a practical flying aerodrome", Canada's first heavier-than-air vehicle, the Silver Dart. Partly because of her founding of the AEA, but also for founding social and educational institutions, she was named a National Historic Person in 2018.

In popular culture Catherine Joell MacKinnon portrays Hubbard in episode 3 of season 11 "8 Footsteps" (October 9, 2017) of the Canadian television period detective series Murdoch Mysteries.

Family tree