Hi All, While looking around the Internet, I found some nice links to Cambridge maps, including maps of our neighborhood. (next message) When I started Wildfire, which was in the phone technology business, I got interested in the story of Alexander Graham Bell. Well, it turns out he was a neighbor. (sort of) Before he began his telephone experiments, he was a tutor to the deaf. He tutored the 16-year-old deaf daughter of Gardiner Hubbard, who was a wealthy businessman from Cambridge. The 1894 map below shows the size of the Hubbard estate. I see 15 homes owned by him in the area between Lowell and Sparks Streets. Bell fell in love with Mabel, and even though he was 27 at the time, he pursued her and eventually married her. Before and during the courtship, Hubbard became Bell's backer in research to create a "multiple telegraph" which would use frequencies to allow a single telegraph line to carry multiple telegraph signals. Bell failed at the multiple telegraph, but managed instead to invent and patent the telephone. (Edison actually perfected the multiple telegraph, and he also invented the carbon microphone which was what eventually made the telephone practical.) Bell's lab was in Boston, just a block from City Hall at 109 Court Street (no longer there). But when you travel down Brattle Street, you can imagine a young, love-struck Bell visiting his in-laws-to-be at their estate in Cambridge. Hubbard went on to found New England Telephone, and he also founded the National Geographic Society. In phone circles, there's talk that "Ma Bell" got its name because of Bell's wife, Mabel. http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/6153011?n=24&imagesize=2400&jp2Res=0.25
Here is the current map overlaid on 1894. You can see why Hubbard Park Road got its name. It went right through the estate. Hubbard died in the 1890s, and Mabel died in 1923. The area was re-developed by the 1930's
By 1930, the traces of the Hubbards seem to be gone.
http://wardmaps.com/viewasset.php?aid=451
