Gardiner Greene Hubbard

Gardiner Greene Hubbard (August 25, 1822 – December 11, 1897) was an American lawyer, financier, and community leader. He was a founder and first president of the National Geographic Society; a founder and the first president of the Bell Telephone Company which later evolved into AT&T (at times the world's largest telephone company); a founder of the journal Science; and an advocate of oral speech education for the deaf.

One of his daughters, Mabel Gardiner Hubbard, married Alexander Graham Bell.

Hubbard was born, raised and educated in Boston, Massachusetts, to Samuel Hubbard (June 2, 1785 – December 24, 1847), a Massachusetts Supreme Court justice, and Mary Ann Greene (April 19, 1790 – July 10, 1827). His younger brother was Charles Eustis Hubbard (1842–1928), who later became the first secretary and clerk of the Bell Telephone Company.

Hubbard was a grandson of Boston merchant Gardiner Greene. He was also a descendant of Lion Gardiner, an early English settler and soldier in the New World who founded the first English settlement in what later became the State of New York, and whose legacy includes Gardiners Island which remains in the family.

He attended Phillips Academy, Andover, and graduated from Dartmouth in 1841. He then studied law at Harvard, and was admitted to the bar in 1843.

He first settled in Cambridge and joined the Boston law firm of Benjamin Robbins Curtis. There he became active in local institutions. 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. Hubbard also played a pivotal role in the founding of Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts. It was the first oral school for the deaf in the United States, and Hubbard remained a trustee for the rest of his life.

Hubbard entered the national stage by becoming a proponent for the nationalization of the telegraph system (then a monopoly of the Western Union Company, as he explained) under the U.S. Postal Service stating in an article: "The Proposed Changes in the Telegraphic System", "It is not contended that the postal system is free from defects, but that it removes many of the grave evils of the present system, without the introduction of new ones; and that the balance of benefits greatly preponderates in favor of the cheap rates, increased facilities, limited and divided powers of the postal system." During the late 1860s, Hubbard lobbied Congress to pass the U.S. Postal Telegraph Bill 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, but the bill did not pass.

To benefit from the 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 telegraphy. To acquire such patents, Hubbard and his partner Thomas Sanders (whose son was deaf) financed Alexander Graham Bell's experiments and development of an acoustic telegraph, which led to his invention of the telephone.

Following Curtis's retirement, Hubbard relocated to Washington, D.C., where he continued to practice law for 5 more years. In 1876, he was appointed by President Grant to determine the proper rates for railway mail and he served as a commissioner to the Centennial Exposition.

Hubbard organized the Bell Telephone Company on July 9, 1877, with himself as president, Thomas Sanders as treasurer and Bell as 'Chief Electrician'. Two days later, he became Bell's father-in-law when his daughter, Mabel Hubbard, married Bell. Gardiner Hubbard was intimately connected with the Bell Telephone Company, which subsequently evolved into the National Bell Telephone Company and then the American Bell Telephone Company, merging with smaller telephone companies during its growth. The American Bell Telephone Company would, at the very end of 1899, evolve into AT&T, at times the world's largest telephone company. Hubbard has been credited as the entrepreneur who distributed the telephone to the world.

In 1846, Hubbard married Gertrude Mercer McCurdy (1827–1909), the daughter of Robert Henry McCurdy, a prominent New York City businessman, and Gertrude Mercer Lee, who was the niece of Theodore Frelinghuysen, a United States Senator and former vice presidential candidate. Her brother, Richard Aldrich McCurdy, served as president of Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York. Together, they had six children:

Robert Hubbard (1847–1849), who died young.