Читать книгу The Chord of Steel - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 8

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The Bell family circle was complete in itself. They had friends from the outside but they did not need them. So identical were their interests that anyone outside the group of five was in a sense a stranger. Their chief pleasure was found in music. Mrs. Bell, whose power of hearing had now almost entirely deserted her, was still able to play the piano. Young Alexander was an adept at that instrument and played with the sensitive touch that Bertini had developed in him. They could all sing in the clear and resonant tones their father had taught them to employ. And the three sons could act and recite with almost the professional skill of their father.

In the field of music the family shared two enthusiasms, for Beethoven (sometimes arranged for four hands) and for Scottish ballads, the latter because of their associations. In recitation it was the Immortal Bard to whom they turned. Quotations from the musical lines of Shakespeare punctuated their conversation. If it had not been for the prejudice displayed earlier by his former church board, the father might have displayed an equal love for that laureate of the lower classes, Charles Dickens. Melville Bell’s sense of humor, which all his sons shared, was alert and spontaneous. His eyes would twinkle, he would throw back his leonine head, and from his finely tuned and trained throat would issue loud, pure laughter over the slang of the coach yards and the pot-houses, the anecdotes of Mark Tapley, the slyness of Sairey Gamp, and the orotund wisdom of Micawber. A familiar evening amusement was acting out scenes from Shakespeare and, one may be sure, from Dickens as well. Unable to take part because of her infirmity, their mother would sit at one side, knitting or embroidering, but catching each word spoken, partly through acquaintance with the story, partly by following their lips. It is not on record that she ever complained. She had accepted her misfortune with a resignation which precluded any pettiness.

By this time Alexander the Second, the hearty, robust, and highly talented father, had completed his great work, the development of Visible Speech. He had discovered that sounds were produced by easily distinguishable physical action inside the head and throat and that these never varied. The roar of a lion was the result of the same use of vocal cords which produced the bark of a dog or the deep snarl of the great cats. As the action never varied, it was possible to designate them by certain symbols. The symbols, more limited in number than might be supposed, could be written down like the letters of the alphabet.

This discovery, which was to revolutionize the treatment of the deaf and dumb, was a secret at first in the Bell family circle. The father occasionally assembled an audience and then sent his sons out of the room. He would ask members of the audience to make any kind of sound which occurred to them. The response would always cover a wide range. The spectators would whisper, shout, speak fragments of Chinese, drag up from their memories a phrase from the Eskimo or even something as violent as the battle cry of the Zulu. Frequently they would imitate bird calls, blow their noses, snore, or pretend to weep.

Standing at the head of the room, the broadly smiling Alexander the Second would chalk on a blackboard a cabalistic device to denote each sound. Then the three sons would return to the room and proceed to imitate each sound in turn. Sometimes they would be puzzled momentarily and would whisper among themselves after studying the queer combination of symbols chalked on the board. Inevitably they unraveled the mystery, even though they might be hard put to it to produce the sound themselves. They might not be very proficient in imitating a high, weird bird call, a yawn or a snore, or the exact shading of what today is called a Bronx cheer; but they never failed to convince the audience that the symbol had conveyed to their minds the sound intended.

When the family moved to London later, the boys would occasionally assist the father in a lecture by this demonstration of Visible Speech, always to the amazement of the audience. Unknown to themselves, they were blazing the trail for the mind-reading acts on the vaudeville stage in years to follow.

Once Alexander the Third was put to a severe test. He was summoned back to the lecture room and found himself confronted with a symbol which called for the sound of the letter t. Fortunately he noticed a mark attached which instructed him to use a “soft palate”; in other words, he was to apply the tip of his tongue against the palate instead of touching the upper gums with it. This was quite a trick but he succeeded in doing it and the result was a curiously soft sound which resembled k as much as t, something quite foreign to the forthright English tongue.

“Bravo!” called someone in the audience. It was the man who had asked for this sound, a civil servant in India whose work was to teach Sanskrit. The sound was the Sanskrit cerebral t, which, of course, no one else in the room had ever heard. The rendition, declared the teacher, had been perfect.

Visible Speech was a concrete method of enabling the dumb to teach themselves how to speak. To Alexander Melville Bell it was evident that deaf-mutes were silent, not because they lacked the physical organ used in speaking, but because they could not hear. Their vocal cords were ready to respond when called upon but the clamor of tongues about them meant nothing. They existed, these poor souls, lost to the finer pleasures of living, in a soundless void. But by learning the symbols they could acquire the faculty of making the sounds designated; and from this, in time, would come the ability to speak. As the organ of speech was the same in all people and the action was the same in all mouths, the symbols were universal. They meant the same to a Chinese child unable to ask for rice or a Bantu crone in an African kraal as to a deficient child in a sheltered English home.

It was a magnificent conception. Great results were obtained by all members of the family when the time came for them to teach unfortunate people in the breaking of the sound barrier.

Visible Speech became the abiding and predominant interest of all members of this highly vocal and talented family. They talked about it constantly. It was a crusade to which they were dedicating themselves. They must give their lives to teaching, to missionary work among the unfortunates who had not learned to express their wants in speech.

There had been for over a century a keen public interest in manufactured figures, called automatons, which were supposed to have human powers. This was not new, however. It had begun with the moving figures of Daedalus long before the beginning of the Christian era, and there had been iron flies and the brazen head, supposedly invented by the great Roger Bacon, which spoke words. In the middle of the eighteenth century they began to multiply. Jacques de Vaucanson constructed three figures, a flute player, a tambourine player, and a duck which quacked and flapped its wings. Finally there had been the chess players, figures resembling human beings which sat before a board and moved the chess pieces with hands encased in iron gloves. The claim was always made for them that they were so perfect they could not be beaten. At any rate, they always succeeded in soundly beating anyone who stepped up to challenge them. It was believed at the time that this was done by some form of magic, because on examination of the mechanism it seemed impossible for a man to be concealed in the works. Later it developed that a real man (who, of course, was a crack player) was able to get inside by the most ingenious of methods and from a concealed point of vantage to watch the board and move the arm of the automaton.

Flying and singing birds became more or less commonplace and these admittedly were deftly contrived by clockmakers in Switzerland. While the sons of the Bell family were growing up, there was an automaton which had been given the name of Psycho by its inventor, one J. N. Maskelyne. A new angle had been found this time, for Psycho played whist with all the skill and ferocity of a dowager.

No matter how successful they might be in some respects, the automatons had failed rather sadly when it came to the simulation of speech. It remained for a German, Baron von Kempelen, to solve this problem. The machine he introduced to the world baffled everyone by speaking; in a childish voice, it was true, but one that achieved almost natural tones. It was believed to be an imposition until the baron published a book, The Mechanism of Human Speech, in which he included a full explanation of the workings of the automaton.

When a duplicate of this machine was brought to the country, Melville Bell made an appointment to see it at close range. He took Alexander the Third with him.

The figure looked about as much like a human being as a doll and the sounds which came from its mouth were thin and unnatural. It was a clever imitation of the human voice, nevertheless, and young Aleck watched everything with a certain degree of amazement. His imagination took fire to such an extent that he secured a copy of the baron’s book, which was written in French. He knew a little French (no more than he had been taught at high school, which was sketchy, to say the least) but somehow he grasped the sense of the inventor’s explanations. This experience was an important one for him. It started his mind to thinking along lines which would lead ultimately to his great success.

After seeing the Kempelen automaton, the father decided to put his sons to a test. “My boys,” he said to the two oldest, “I have a task for you. I’ll give you a prize if you can make a figure which talks.”

So they set to work with enthusiasm, dividing the work between them. Alexander the Third was to make the head, which meant he must fashion the mouth and tongue. His older brother was to construct the throat, complete with larynx and vocal cords. The latter started with one advantage: he was skillful in the use of tools. Alexander was somewhat thumb-fingered and found it hard to manipulate the necessary tools but he made up for this shortcoming by an ingenious decision with reference to the materials he would employ. He decided to make the head of gutta-percha, which becomes soft when subjected to heat and can be easily molded while it remains in this malleable condition. Young Alexander, moreover, might be inept with saw and plane but he had the fingers of a sculptor, long, sensitive, and capable of achieving artistic effects. Molding the soft gutta-percha in his quick fingers, he made a replica of the human skull, equipped with gums, teeth, and palate. Holes were left in the roof of the mouth for nasal passages and this necessitated the construction of a nose on the outside. Apart from the nose, he did little to achieve the semblance of a human face. In its finished condition, the skull was more on the order of a modern robot’s head.

As fast as the gutta-percha cooled, the imperfections were corrected without disturbing the final form. The lips were made of iron wire covered with rubber over cotton batting. The tongue, which was to have been made of wood in connected sections and covered with rubber over cotton, proved to be so difficult and intricate that the boy never completed it to his satisfaction. He conducted many experiments with it, however, and succeeded in making a partial use of the tongue in the final operation.

The older brother in the meantime was making an artificial windpipe from a tin tube. Inside were two sheets of tin covered with rubber which could be vibrated by blowing through the windpipe.

When their father saw what they were striving to do, his face lighted up with satisfaction. Instead of attempting to copy the Kempelen figure, they had gone back to first principles and were aping nature. This, he said, was what he had hoped, for it was the only method by which the human voice could be produced with natural effects. The first test, when Alexander’s minutely constructed head had been joined to Melville’s ingenious throat, had to be made without a complete tongue or a proper organ bellows to pump air through the windpipe. They were too impatient to wait any longer.

The first result was sufficient to astonish them. When operated alone, the throat had produced a reedy sound. But now, when attached to the head, it gave out something unmistakably human, a deep “Ah!”

Excited beyond measure, the two boys began to experiment with ways of varying the sound. Alexander would manipulate the lips, opening and closing them, while Melville blew lustily through the windpipe. The lips began to give forth modulated sounds: Ma-ma, Ma-ma.

Success such as this had to be shared with the world, at any rate with the small world in which they lived. They were residing at the time in a flat at 13 South Charlotte Street, a huge stone structure with few windows and a very small entrance, which gave it some resemblance to a jail. It had been laid out with an eye to maximum living space and so one stairway served all the tenants. The stairs wound their way upward in a narrow well and there was very little light. The Bell family lived several flights up and the boys took their mechanical figure out to the dark landing. Alexander worked the lips vigorously while Melville blew into the windpipe until his face was almost purple with exertion. The gutta-percha head gave out a loud and agonizing succession of sounds.

“Mama! Mama! Mama!”

A door opened below them and an anxious voice called, “What’s wrong?” Other doors opened above and below and more voices joined in the chorus of inquiry. What was wrong with the child? Had the parents left it? Where was it?

The two young inventors, satisfied with the results, picked up the robot and returned on tiptoe to their own flat, leaving the other tenants to solve the mystery of the crying child.

To Alexander the Third this had been more than an interesting experiment. He had learned exactly how human beings achieved speech. It was not simple but it was now readily understandable.

He continued with experiments of his own. The family dog, an intelligent Skye terrier, was quick at learning tricks. The boy would set him to sustained growling and at the same time would manipulate the dog’s throat in order to modulate the sounds produced. Sometimes he would force his hand into the dog’s mouth and close the passage at the back, which would result in an entirely different sound from the first ma-ma-ma. It became instead ga-ga-ga. After much experimenting it was possible to get a succession of sounds, such as Ow-ah-oo gamama. This the delighted family, and particularly the quiet Mrs. Bell, translated as “How are you, grandmama?”

The dog was so intelligent that he began to take an interest in the tests. He would sometimes stand up on his hind legs and try to speak by himself. In fact, he became rather famous and many people came to South Charlotte Street to see and hear the talking dog.

Young Alexander Bell found in this much food for thought.

The boy had decided when quite young that the existence of three Alexanders in the family in as many generations was apt to be confusing. Having no second name, he concluded it would be proper for him to select one for himself and his fancy settled on Graham. He always said thereafter that it was because a friend of his father’s, a Mr. Alexander Graham, who had returned from abroad, was visiting in Edinburgh when the Bells lived in their third home at 13 South Charlotte Street. The boy developed a liking for the visitor and he seems also to have sensed how euphonious the combination of the two names proved. He announced at the time that in future he would be Alexander Graham Bell and his parents agreed that the idea was a sound one.

It seems possible that his liking for the name went so far back that it was instinctive with him. The Grahams had been for many generations a great family in Scotland. First of all there had been that great military leader and man of noble character, James Graham, first marquis of Montrose, who won so many victories for King Charles that his covenanting enemies hanged him “in his scarlet cassock in the Grassmarket.” More likely still to catch the fancy of a young boy was that famous and dashing soldier, John Graham of Claverhouse, who is remembered as Bonnie Dundee. For fuller measure there were quite a number of prominent Grahams about when the boy was growing up. There was another fine soldier, General Sir Gerald Graham, who had fought with bravery through the Crimean War a few years before; also Thomas of that ilk, who was a professor of chemistry and was held in high regard in scientific circles.

Whatever the reasons, the boy became Alexander Graham Bell. He was sensitive enough to feel that his grandfather might not like it. To respect the old man’s feelings in the matter, he never openly assumed the name until after the death of Alexander the First. In his later years he almost invariably referred to himself as “Graham Bell.”