Gardiner Greene Hubbard

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Gardiner Greene Hubbard (August 25, 1822 – December 11, 1897) was the first president of the National Geographic Society.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts he was a lawyer, financier, and philanthropist. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1841, studied law at Harvard, and was admitted to the bar in 1843. He lived in Cambridge and joined a Boston law firm. He practiced his profession in Boston until 1873, when he relocated to Washington, D. C. Gardiner Hubbard's father Samuel Hubbard was a Massachusetts Supreme Court justice. Gardiner Hubbard helped establish a city water works in Cambridge, was a founder of the Cambridge Gas Co. and later organized a Cambridge to Boston trolley system.

In 1862, Gardiner Hubbard's daughter Mabel Gardiner Hubbard became deaf at the age of five from scarlet fever and later was a student of Alexander Graham Bell who taught deaf children.

During the late 1860s, Gardiner Hubbard lobbyed Congress to pass the U.S. Postal Telegraph Bill that was known as the Hubbard Bill. The bill would have chartered the U.S. Postal Telegraph Company that would be connected to the U.S. Post Office. The Hubbard bill did not pass. To benefit from the Hubbard bill, Hubbard needed patents which dominated essential aspects of telegraph technology such as sending multiple messages simultaneously on a single telegraph wire. This was called the "harmonic telegraph" or acoustic telegraph. To acquire such patents, Hubbard and his partner Thomas Sanders (whose son was also deaf) financed Bell's experiments and development of the acoustic telegraph which led to the invention of the telephone.

Hubbard organized the Bell Telephone Company on July 9, 1877, with Hubbard as president and Thomas Sanders as treasurer.

Hubbard became the father-in-law of Alexander Graham Bell when Mabel Hubbard married Bell on July 11, 1877.

Hubbard was intimately connected with the organization of the National Bell Telephone Company and the American Bell Telephone Company which merged smaller telephone companies.

Hubbard was a principal investor in the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company. When Edison neglected development of the phonograph, Hubbard organized a competing company in 1881 that developed wax-coated cardboard cylinders and disks for used on a graphophone. These improvements were invented by Alexander Bell's cousin Chester Bell, a chemist, and Charles Sumner Tainter, an optical instrument maker. Hubbard and Chester Bell approached Edison about combining their interests, but Edison refused.^[1]

Hubbard was the founder and first president for many years of the National Geographic Society, and made a large collection of etchings and engravings, which were given by his widow to the Library of Congress with a fund for additions.

Hubbard devoted much attention to the advancement of teaching the deaf and was president of the Clark School for the Deaf for ten years.

Gardiner Hubbard's life is detailed in the book One Thousand Years of Hubbard History (1895) by Edward Warren Day.

In 1890, Mount Hubbard on the Alaska-Yukon border was named in his honour by an expedition co-sponsored by the NGS while he was president.

[edit] See also

Massie Case, a famous manslaughter trial involving Hubbard's granddaughter

[edit] Further reading

Poole, Robert M. Explorers House: National Geographic and the World it Made. New York: Penguin, 2004. ISBN 1-59420032-7
Gray, Charlotte, Alexander Graham Bell and the Passion for Invention, New York, Arcade Publishing, 2006. ISBN 1-55970-809-3
Bruce, Robert V., Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude, Cornell University Press, 1973. ISBN 0-8014-9691-8