Mabel Gardiner Hubbard

Mabel Gardiner Hubbard (November 25, 1857 – January 3, 1923), was the daughter of Boston lawyer Gardiner Hubbard, and the wife of Alexander Graham Bell. She was born on November 25, 1857 in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Gardiner Greene Hubbard and Gertrude Mercer McCurdy. She contracted scarlet fever in 1861 or 1862, and was left deaf. She became one of Alexander Graham Bell's pupils, and they later married (on July 11, 1877) when she was 19. The... more

Mabel Gardiner Hubbard (November 25, 1857 – January 3, 1923), was the daughter of Boston lawyer Gardiner Hubbard, and the wife of Alexander Graham Bell. She was born on November 25, 1857 in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Gardiner Greene Hubbard and Gertrude Mercer McCurdy. She contracted scarlet fever in 1861 or 1862, and was left deaf. She became one of Alexander Graham Bell's pupils, and they later married (on July 11, 1877) when she was 19. They had four children: Elsie May Bell (1878-1964) who married Gilbert Grosvenor of National Geographic; Marian Hubbard Bell (1880-1962) who was referred to as "Daisy" ; Edward Bell (1881); and Robert Bell (1883). She was the inspiration for her father's involvement in the founding of the first oral school for the deaf in the United States, Clarke School for the Deaf. Mabel was also the indirect source of her husband's early commercial success after his creation of the telephone. The U.S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 made Bell... less