Mabel Gardiner Hubbard

Mabel Gardiner Hubbard (November 25, 1857 – January 3, 1923) was an American businesswoman, and the daughter of Boston lawyer Gardiner Green Hubbard. As the wife of Alexander Graham Bell, 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. Biography Mabel Gardiner Hubbard was born on November 25, 1857, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, to Gardiner Greene Hubbard and Gertrude Mercer McCurdy. She had 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 destroyed her inner ear's vestibular sensors, 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.