26/04/2026
【 Alexander Graham Bell falls asleep meeting Emperor Meiji ／ Japan Yesterday, Nov. 8, 2019 】
On Aug. 28, 1898, Alexander Graham Bell sat down at a hotel in Boston to write to his father. It was two weeks before he, his hearing-impaired wife Mabel, their two daughters and their chauffeur, an African American named Charles F. Thompson, would begin making their way to Japan. Pre-Wright Brothers and pre-Panama Canal, their trip would take nearly five weeks. First was a transcontinental train ride from Boston to San Francisco, followed by a trip across the Pacific Ocean aboard the S.S. Coptic, stopping briefly in Honolulu before heading to Yokohama Bay. The amount of time it would take did not excite Bell in the least and he made his lack of desire known to his ailing father.
“Neither Mabel nor I care much about going but we realize that our opportunities for traveling with our children grow less every year. Elsie is over twenty years of age and Daisy more than 18. How much longer will we be able to keep them with us?”
The trip would prove difficult for the 51-year-old inventor. With a long and bushy white beard accenting his 183-centimeter, 111-kilogram frame, Bell was set to stand out as a giant among Japanese residents, but the itch to travel was too strong, and since “Alec” and Mabel had lost parents (Bell’s mother, Mabel’s father) in the last year, they were also hoping to take a much-needed adventure. It didn’t hurt that Emperor Meiji had planned to bestow upon professor Bell the honor of the Third Order of the Rising Sun.
It had been just 22 years since Bell’s “speaking telegraph” breakthrough, a life-changing moment that he also shared with his father in a letter dated March 10, 1876: “This is a great day,” he wrote. “I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem — and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid on to houses just like water or gas — and friends converse with each other without leaving home.”...
On Aug. 28, 1898, Alexander Graham Bell sat down at a hotel in Boston to write to his father. It was two weeks before he, his hearing-impaired wife Mabel, their two daughters and their chauffeur, an African American named Charles F. Thompson, would begin making their way to Japan. Pre-Wright…
