Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922)

    THE SCHOOL OF ORATORY

9

                                  (3)

At this time Bell was teaching at the School of
Oratory of Boston University. There his title was
‘Professor of Vocal Physiology.’ He also gave lec-
tures on his father’s system of Visible Speech to
teachers of deaf children. It amounted to a sort of
normal training class. And he gave private lessons
to a little deaf boy, George Sanders, whose father,
Thomas Sanders, a wealthy leather merchant of
Haverhill, Massachusetts, was the chief backer of
Bell’s experiments. A year earlier, Gardiner Greene
Hubbard, a Boston lawyer, had become interested
in Bell’s electrical inventions, and had asked per-
mission to join Sanders in backing them.

In his photographs of the period, Bell looks a
rather sad young man, yet his contemporaries speak
of his quick stride, his animated gestures, the flash-
ing eyes that were brown, but which all his life were
so full of light that they looked black. He was tall
and slightly built, with an olive complexion and
abundant black hair which he habitually pushed
straight up on end. His black side-whiskers and
drooping moustache were in the mode of the seven-
ties, and, plus the old-fashioned cut of his coats,
they enhanced the air of professorial dignity of
which he was then very proud. Bell used to laugh
very heartily over some of those old photographs of
himself. In those days he tried, he said, to look just
as old as his father. ‘When I first saw my husband,’
his wife said once, ‘he was twenty-six and he looked
forty!’