Mabel Hubbard Bell

Mabel Gardiner Hubbard (November 25, 1857 – January 3, 1923), was the daughter of Boston lawyer Gardiner Greene Hubbard, who was the first president of the Bell Telephone Company. As the wife of Alexander Graham Bell, an eminent scientist and the inventor of the first practical telephone, she took the married name Mabel Bell.

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.

Mabel Gardiner Hubbard was born on November 25, 1857 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, to Gardiner Greene Hubbard and Gertrude Mercer McCurdy. She suffered a near-fatal bout of scarlet fever close to her fifth birthday in 1862 while visiting her maternal grandparents in New York City, and was thereafter left permanently and completely deaf. The disease also destroyed her inner ear's vestibular sensors, additionally leaving her with a greatly impaired sense of balance, to the extent that it was very difficult for her to walk at night in the dark.

Mabel was the inspiration for her father's involvement in the founding of the first oral school for the deaf in the United States, the Clarke School for the Deaf. Having been educated in both the United States and in Europe, she learned to both talk and lip-read with great skill in multiple languages. 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.

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