Fairchild often spoke fondly of his father-in-law, and yet he once observed that the old gentleman led a particularly isolated life. “I’ve never known anyone,” he said, “who spent so much of his time alone.”
Lily, Governor, and the family very much loved that same old gentleman. As his granddaughter, Lily was devoted to him, but she was always the first to agree that Grandpa’s preferred lifestyle was one of continual seclusion. For Grandpa was, all his life long, a very private man—aloof and solitary, even as a boy.
Grandma said she’d heard stories about him from his youth. He was always depicted as bright and clever, although never particularly light-hearted. A friend, advising him on the eve of his departure for the New World in 1870, had urged, “Don’t get absorbed in yourself; it’s one of your great failings. Mix freely with your fellows.”
But Grandpa never did take that advice. He always seemed proud of the fact that, as he would later put it, he had “made a great many acquaintances and very few friends.” He became increasingly isolated as the years passed, later admitting, “I feel more and more, as I grow older, the tendency to retire into myself and to be alone with my thoughts.”
It sometimes worried Grandma. She once told him, “I cannot bear to think of you shutting yourself in and holding no communication with your neighbors. Please try to come out of your hermit cell. You have lived too much by yourself. You've talked about nature and solitude and all that, but you haven't been in a crowd at all, and that's what you need.”
“Incommunicative”—I guess that’s the word you’d have to describe Grandpa. He simply did not want to be bothered, a trait often misunderstood.
You can further understand, then, why Grandpa so disliked telephones. To him, the telephone was an avenue of constant intrusion. He hated to be interrupted by phone calls; more, he abhorred overhearing one-sided conversations—that is, one voice without the other.
Grandpa absolutely refused to have a telephone in his study at home. “Nobody would dream of coming to one's house,” he declared, “and demanding an audience while one was dining, or bathing, or sleeping. So why were people always making these preemptory interruptions by telephone?” Accordingly, he would not permit a phone call to interrupt a meal.
After vehement opposition, Grandpa did agree to have a single, solitary phone line installed in his hideaway houseboat, connected only to his home two miles away. The agreement was strict: no one would be allowed to phone him except Grandma, and only in an urgent emergency.
When someone once remarked that Grandpa really ought to have newer model telephones in his residence, he declared that he would always keep the old ones because they were always breaking down, which, of course, discouraged people from calling him.
But then, as I have sought to explain, Grandpa was a very private man—remarkably incommunicative, which is a profound irony considering that no man who ever lived did more to advance communication for the rest of us.
I'm sure you may have pictured him otherwise, but now I'm certain you will never forget the obstinate introvert, the man who hated telephones: Alexander Graham Bell.
Now you know the rest of the story.
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