A LETTER ABOUT ONE OF BELL’S MOST IMPORTANT STUDENTS, GEORGE SANDERS –
WHOSE FATHER PROVIDED CRITICAL FINANCIAL BACKING
FOR THE INVENTION OF THE TELEPHONE

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL. Typed Letter Signed to Margaret Sanders, Washington DC, 3 March 1915. 1 page, 8½" x 11", on his personal stationery.

Best-known as the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell was also a teacher of the deaf, and this letter exemplifies the close connection between these two aspects of his life. Writing here on his 68th birthday, Bell addresses the daughter of George Sanders, a former student of his whose father was significant in the development of the telephone.

“I am sorry to learn...,” Bell tells Margaret Sanders, “that your father has been ill, and hope sincerely that he is now all right again.

“I am very much interested in that little book you have sent to me and will make a suitable inscription on the title page as you suggest. It was a little picture story book I gave your father when he was a little fellow, only about six years old.

“It is rather a dangerous thing for you to send it to me, for I am greatly tempted to keep it and put it in the Volta Bureau,” Bell adds. “I propose to make a copy of the stories before returning the book to you, as they illustrate my method of teaching language to a little congenitally deaf child.” He closes, “With kind regards to your father and mother and sister, and best wishes for yourself,” and signs in full, “Alexander Graham Bell.”

Bell’s relationship with George Sanders was critical to his invention of the telephone. Bell began teaching speech to five-year-old Georgie, who was born deaf, in 1872 in Boston. The next year, he moved into the home of George’s grandmother in Salem, receiving free room and board in exchange for his continued instruction of the boy. Bell conducted some of his telegraph and telephone experiments there in the evenings. More important, in 1874, George’s father, Thomas Sanders, offered Bell much-needed financial support for the technical experiments that would result in the telephone. Bell’s other financial backer was Gardiner Hubbard, whose daughter Mabel was also a student of Bell’s and later, his wife. Sanders and Hubbard agreed to provide funds to cover all Bell’s expenses including, among other things, equipment, supplies, lab space, assistants, and legal fees as he worked on his inventions. In exchange for their crucial financial help, Bell gave the two men equal shares in any patents he secured and in any company that was organized to control the patents. Sanders and Hubbard thus received shares in Bell’s patent for the telephone, issued in March 1876, and in the Bell Telephone Company, established the following year. Thomas Sanders also became the company’s first treasurer.

The “little picture story book” that Bell discusses in this letter is also significant. It is known as the Sanders Reader, and Bell did end up with it, probably as a result of this correspondence with Sanders’s daughter. The book is now owned by the Bell Museum in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, and a facsimile of it was published in 1969; a copy of this facsimile book accompanies the letter. Bell added a note at the front of the book on 24 March 1915 – three weeks after the letter here – explaining, “This little book of pictures, accompanied by stories, was prepared in 1873 for the use of George Sanders, then about six years of age. It represents my method of teaching written language to a very young congenitally deaf child.” The book contains eighteen brief stories composed by Bell. Each is illustrated with a small color picture, cut out of some other work and pasted on one page, with the accompanying story written out by Bell on the facing page. Bell’s writing breaks each story up into the phrases in which it would be spoken or read and has certain words enlarged or underlined to indicate vocal emphasis.

As this letter testifies, Bell kept up a close relationship with George Sanders over the years. George “is dearer to me than he or any one else knows,” Bell wrote George’s grandmother in 1884, and he later described George as a “link connecting me with those happy Salem days.” After Thomas Sanders went bankrupt in 1891 due to bad investments, Bell arranged for George to learn the printer’s trade and helped him set up his own printing business. From time to time, he sent George loans and gifts. Until he died in 1922, Bell stayed in touch with George and his family and took a continuing interest in their welfare. (See Bruce, Bell, especially pages 296, 399-400, and 485.)

For himself, Bell continued, amid myriad other activities, to devote himself to the education of the deaf, and throughout his life, always listed “teacher of the deaf” as his primary profession.

For information on Bell’s relationship with Thomas and George Sanders, see Robert V. Bruce, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude, passim.

The letter has some slight marginal defects, but is basically in very good condition. A letter with superb association. $4500.00

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