Hubbard

After studying law for a year at Harvard under
Joseph Story and Simon Greenleaf, he entered
the law office of Charles P. and Benjamin R.
Curtis in 1843. He married Gertrude Mercer
McCurdy, the daughter of Robert Henry Mc-
Curdy of New York City, on Oct. 21, 1846, and
made his home in Cambridge, Mass. For more
than thirty years he practised law in Boston and
Washington, but his eminence was due rather
to his keen and active interest in movements for
the public welfare. Before 1857 he had intro-
duced gas into Cambridge for lighting purposes,
secured a fresh water supply for the city, and
built between Cambridge and Boston one of the
earliest street-car lines in the United States. In-
terested in the education of the deaf through his
little daughter's loss of hearing from scarlet fever
in 1862, he led the movement which culminated
in 1867 in the incorporation of the Clarke Insti-
tution for Deaf Mutes (later Clarke School for
the Deaf) at Northampton, of which he was
president, 1867-77. He was for twelve years a
member of the Massachusetts State Board of
Education, and as a member of a special com-
mittee of the Board did much to make a remark-
able success of the Massachusetts educational ex-
hibit at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadel-
phia in 1876.

When the Boston school board started the
Horace Mann School for the Deaf, the principal,
Sarah Fuller, brought young Alexander Gra-
ham Bell \.q.v.~\ to introduce visible speech there
in 1871. Hubbard, meeting Bell, became inter-
ested in his electrical work and so in Bell's in-
vention of the telephone in 1875, in which he took
an active interest He directed its early business
development with extraordinary practical sense
and wisdom and served as the executive of the
first telephone organizations. As such he per-
sonally decided upon the policy of renting tele-
phones instead of selling them, a policy which
led directly to the present federated structure of
the Bell System. Through him also the Tele-
phone Company secured Theodore N. Vail in
1878 to build up the early telephone agencies into
a well unified commercial institution and public
utility. In 1877, Hubbard's daughter and Bell
were married.

Between 1867 and 1876 Hubbard made a se-
ries of studies of the postal service and the tele-
graph at home and abroad which brought him
recognition as a citizen of exceptional ability
who was disinterested in his attitude toward
public questions ("The Proposed Changes in
the Telegraphic System," North American Re-
view, July 1873; "Our Post-Office," Atlantic
Monthly, January 1875). Largely in conse-

Hubbard

quence of these studies, President Grant appoint-
ed him in 1876 member of a commission to in-
vestigate the transportation of the mails and to
make recommendations to Congress for their im-
provement. He was elected its chairman, but
disagreed with the conclusions of the other mem-
bers and presented a minority report alone (Sen-
ate Miscellaneous Document 14, 45 Cong., 2
Sess.). In 1879 Hubbard moved to Washing-
ton, where he lived for the rest of his life. The
headquarters of the Telephone Company re-
mained in Boston but Hubbard yielded to Wil-
liam H. Forbes and Theodore N. Vail the direc-
tion of that company, giving more attention him-
self for some years to the introduction of the tel-
ephone into foreign countries.

In Washington as in Cambridge he took an
active interest in local affairs. He was interested
in the Memorial Association of the District of
Columbia and in the Columbia Historical Soci-
ety. He was a trustee of the Columbian (now
the George Washington) University for twelve
years. In 1883 he joined his son-in-law, Alex-
ander Graham Bell, in founding Science, now
the organ of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, and in 1890 he was
associated with Bell in the founding of the Amer-
ican Association to Promote the Teaching of
Speech to the Deaf, of which he was a vice-pres-
ident until his death. He became a regent of the
Smithsonian Institution in 1895. He was three
times (1895-97) elected president of the joint
commission of the scientific societies of Wash-
ington which later organized the Washington
Academy of Sciences. He was the founder and
first president of the National Geographic Soci-
ety (1888-97); his interest in its Alaskan ex-
plorations is commemorated by the naming of
the Hubbard Glacier in his honor in 1890, and
his memory as the founder is perpetuated in the
Hubbard Memorial Hall, the home of the Soci-
ety in Washington, erected in 1902. Throughout
his life he maintained his interest in the educa-
tion of the deaf, taking occasion, when he visited
Europe, to observe schools for the deaf and re-
port his observations to the school at Northamp-
ton. He died at his home, Twin Oaks, Wash-
ington, in his seventy-sixth yean

[G. F. Hoar, in Proc. Am. Antiq. $&c.t n.s. XII
(1899), 217-26; Nat. Geog. Mag., Feb. 1898; Science,
Dec, 31, 1897; W. C Langdon, "The Early Corporate
Development of the Telephone" and "Two Founders of
the Bell System," Bell Tel Quart., July, Oct. 1923 j
Caroline A. Yale, Years of Building (1931); Am. An-
nals of the Deaf, Jan. 1898; Annual Report of the
Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Inst., 1898; E, W.
Day, One Thousand Years of Hubbard Hist. (1895) ;
Evening Star (Washington, D. C)» Dec. n, 1897; P*-
pers and correspondence in the possession of the family
and the National Geographic Society in Washington

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