The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5)

by Seth Shulman

  Less commonly known is the fact that Edison and Bell were close contemporaries, born just twenty days apart in 1847. Or that they were long-standing, often bitter rivals, with dramatically divergent temperaments, backgrounds, and approaches to invention. Edison, a cantankerous autodidact, had just three months of formal schooling. He worked slavishly long hours at his factorylike lab, made his assistants punch a time clock, and stressed experimentation and persistence above all else. Edison is always popularly associated with the incandescent lightbulb, but he is also responsible for a host of other pathbreaking inventions. His 1,093 patents set a record that still stands: the most ever garnered by a single individual. Every bit as impressive as the sheer scale of his productivity is its breadth. Edison’s inventions include motion pictures, the phonograph, the electric car, even the use of poured concrete in building construction, to name just a few.

  Edison doubtless accomplished more, but Bell wins points for panache. Having studied at University College in London and taught at Boston University, he was a refined, aristocratic professor, who slept late, liked to play the piano in the evenings, and believed that theory should guide experimental research. Bell projected an enlightened sensibility, and his interests, scientific and otherwise, ranged even further than Edison’s did. Bell not only compulsively followed technological developments in several languages, he liked to end his day by reading entries from the encyclopedia. He opened up progressive new avenues for teaching the deaf and introduced Helen Keller to her life-changing teacher. He helped launch the journal Science in the 1880s and served as president of the National Geographic Society. After the telephone, Bell even worked with a small team to design one of the world’s first successful airplanes. Bell’s concern over congenital deafness led to a sorry foray into the eugenics movement of his day, but overall he was broad-minded in his support for causes such as women’s rights and universal suffrage.

  Equally notably, most everyone seemed to like Bell—for his warmth, his erudition, and especially for his seemingly indefatigable verve for all things new. Perhaps one of the best accounts to capture Bell’s beloved manner comes from his son-in-law, David Fairchild. As he recalls,

  Mr. Bell was tall and handsome with an indefinable sense of largeness about him, and he so radiated vigor and kindliness that any pettiness of thought seemed to fade away beneath his keen gaze. He always made you feel that there was so much of interest in the universe, so many fascinating things to observe and to think about, that it was a criminal waste of time to indulge in gossip or trivial discussion.

  I was fascinated by Edison’s accomplishments. But, given what little I knew, I felt more of an affinity for Bell, so I decided to begin my research with him. I started to fill my office shelves with a large collection of secondary sources from the institute’s library about Bell’s life and times. But his own beautifully detailed laboratory notebooks offered my most natural point of departure.

  I COULDN’T HAVE come to a better place for this kind of work. The Dibner Institute offered a rarefied haven for scholars from around the world. Tucked into the westernmost corner of the bustling mosaic of the MIT campus, the institute was bequeathed by Bern Dibner, an enigmatic industrialist who, in the warehouse of his factory in Bronx, New York, amassed one of the world’s foremost collections of books on the history of science and technology. As Dibner’s interests turned increasingly from his business (making electric connectors such as those used for high-voltage power lines) to his passion (the history of technology), his warehouse shelves burgeoned with rare volumes by everyone from Archimedes to Volta.

  Each year since its founding in 1990, the Dibner Institute had invited a few dozen scholars to set up shop in its luxurious and decidedly unwarehouselike headquarters, to use its famed library, and to conduct research. In the office next to mine, Cesare Maffioli, a genial Italian, was studying Leonardo da Vinci’s uncanny grasp of hydrodynamics. Peter Bokulich, a younger colleague on the floor below with expertise in both physics and history, was investigating how one particular scientific article—known as the Bohr-Rosenfeld paper—influenced the emergence of the field of quantum mechanics. Not my normal cohort, to be sure, but a very interesting group to get to know.

  My first surprise when I opened the modern glass doors to the institute’s front office was the large oil portrait of Alexander Graham Bell hanging prominently over the receptionist’s desk. In the picture, Bell stands beside a workbench or table, white-haired and beneficent-looking, gazing thoughtfully into the distance. The front office also had elegant, modern glass displays lining the walls that held choice artifacts from the history of technology. One display case held a negative from an early Roentgen X-ray machine. Another featured an early Morse telegraph in mint condition. Sitting near it was a handsomely bound period copy of Bell’s first public speech about the telephone. The caliber of the well-chosen artifacts telegraphed its own message: lest there was any doubt, this place took the subject of invention seriously.

  It was comforting to see Bell, the subject of my research, so visibly affirmed in the institute’s front office, because almost all of my colleagues for the year were academic historians and I was aware from the first of my status as an outsider to the ivory tower.

  Not long after my arrival, George Smith, the acting director of the program, knocked on my office door. Professor Smith, a warmhearted, erudite scholar with big glasses and a shy smile, had helped design jet engines as a young engineer. Qualms of conscience about his role in military research led him to the field of philosophy. After many years of scholarly work and teaching, he had acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of science and technology and emerged as one of the world’s leading experts on the life and work of Sir Isaac Newton.

  Smith welcomed me and he even graciously cited several of my writings. He said he was particularly pleased by a book I had written on the early history of aviation because he felt it rightly emphasized the work of a pioneer too often neglected. Plus, he said, he was happy to have someone at the institute who wrote for an audience beyond the narrow world of academic historians.

  Smith was quick to note, however, that not everyone shared his views. In an oddly friendly warning, he told me that I would have to prove myself to some of the historians at the institute.

  “Quite frankly,” he said, “you should know that there are a lot of people who don’t think you should be here.”

  ON THE NIGHT I was paging through Bell’s notebook, though, I wasn’t worried about what anyone else thought. I was simply engrossed in Bell’s research. The first thing I noticed was its sensible progression. Day after day, Bell made incremental changes in his experiments using the same elements: electromagnets, vibrating reeds, and tuning forks. The work was clear, tangible, elegant. And compared to a lot of the modern-day science I have covered as a reporter, I felt I understood what Bell was doing and maybe even what he was thinking about.

  For the most part, he was not thinking about the device we now call the telephone, which of course did not yet exist. Rather, Bell, like many other inventors of his day, was primarily trying to solve a problem then plaguing the burgeoning telegraph industry: how to send more than one message at a time over a wire. Bell didn’t know too much about the relatively new fields of electricity and magnetism, but he was a well-schooled teacher of the deaf and, as such, he did know a good deal about sound. Bell’s idea for what he called a “multiple telegraph” was to try to send and receive messages at different musical pitches, or frequencies. If he could build devices tuned to send and receive messages at one single musical pitch, he reasoned, he might be able to send multiple messages over the same telegraph wires simultaneously without having them interfere with one another.

  Toward that end, Bell was systematically trying to build a series of telegraphlike devices that would be receptive only to a signal sent at a particular pitch, or frequency. He tried batteries of different strengths. He tried magnets in different arrangements. He even built a cylinder line
d with bar magnets that could be spun at different speeds to adjust the pitch of the vibrating reeds in his circuit.

  Of course, in addition to this commercial goal, Bell was interested in many other things, too. He had a sharp, restless mind and a great imagination. He was fascinated by the possibility of transmitting vocal sounds over telegraph wires. And he was so interested in the way people perceived sound that, with the help of Clarence Blake, a local doctor, he even experimented on the ear of a human corpse as part of his work during this period. Bell’s grasp of acoustics and his focus on trying to send differently pitched sounds over the telegraph wires would quickly lead him to envision a device that could successfully transmit the human voice.

  I lost track of how late it was getting. Somewhere around midnight, I reached Bell’s accounts from March 1876, the period of his momentous breakthrough with the telephone. One entry jumped out at me.

  Bell’s research notes on March 8 shift to some strikingly new ideas after months of slow, incremental work. On that day, for the first time, Bell inexplicably adds to his experiments a dish of water laced with sulfuric acid. He still uses a reed and a magnet at one end of the circuit he is building, but, seemingly from nowhere, he introduces a striking new contraption: a diaphragm with a needle sticking through it into the acidic water to complete the electrical circuit. From that entry on, some liquid or another becomes a feature in a quick succession of experiments. And, of course, just a day and a half after introducing this new scheme, Bell has his amazing success calling to Watson next door.

  After following many months’ worth of Bell’s steady and methodical work, I couldn’t help but be struck by his sudden conceptual leap. He had recorded nothing like it over the course of the preceding year. What made Bell think of dipping a needle into liquid in his transmitter, I wondered, after a steady diet for more than a year of reeds, magnets, and batteries in widely varied configurations?

  I viewed the shift as a sign of Bell’s genius. I made a note to that effect in my own handwritten journal that night.

  I was especially struck by this shift in Bell’s thinking because I’ve found that a kind of magic often seems to inhabit the moment of discovery: that instant when something formerly unknowable, beyond reach, becomes forever clear. The element that makes such a shift possible—the fleeting insight or fortuitous accident—is often hard, if not impossible, to explain or capture. I’m as excited by such moments as a prospector might be to unearth a rich vein, or a book collector to stumble upon a vanishingly rare first edition.

  Wilbur Wright’s pathbreaking idea for bending the wings of an airplane to give it control in the air purportedly came to him in his bicycle shop while he idly twisted a box that had held an inner tube. Alexander Fleming, excellent scientist that he was, became fascinated by the mold that had crept in from the damp London air to ruin his experiment growing colonies of Staphylococcus bacteria in culture. Thankfully, Fleming studied the mold instead of tossing the tainted samples, and penicillin was the world-changing result.

  Musing on the account in Bell’s notebook of his experience at the threshold of his discovery, I had a little “eureka moment” of my own. I noticed that there was a twelve-day gap between Bell’s entries at the end of February and those beginning in March. With consecutive entries on every page, notebooks often make work appear relatively seamless; but in this case, Bell left his experiments on February 24 and didn’t resume them for nearly two weeks. He mentions the fact clearly himself on chapter 3, the day before he introduces his new transmitter idea, with this succinct notation:

  Returned from Washington March 7th, 1876.

  It seemed immediately clear that Bell’s absence from his lab spurred him in a new direction. I wanted to find out more about the trip to Washington and what might have led him to change his work so noticeably upon his return.

  This, I imagined, was precisely the kind of challenge my historian colleagues engaged in routinely. For me, though, it was new. A primary source document had suggested a small, historical puzzle. And I was fortunate enough to have the time and resources available to explore such an open-ended lead. I doubted the question had much to do with Bell’s rivalry with Thomas Edison. But I was curious, nonetheless. I never for a moment suspected what would happen next.

  3

  ON THE HOOK

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, February 26, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell’s train pulled into the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad station in downtown Washington, D.C., with a loud hiss and metallic squeal. Bell was agitated as he hurriedly stepped down onto the station platform. He was keenly aware that his fortune hinged on the outcome of the events before him—almost all of which were beyond his control.

  Aleck Bell, as he was then known, was days away from his twenty-ninth birthday, an intensely driven and serious young man with wavy black hair and a scruffy beard. A teacher of the deaf and an associate professor at fledgling Boston University, Bell was a man of meager means but grand ambitions. Acquaintances in this period remember Aleck Bell’s studied manners and speech. They recall, too, that his formal demeanor—from his straight-backed posture to his schooled diction—made him seem much older than he actually was.

  Leather suitcase in hand, Bell made his way to the station entrance. It was a pivotal moment for Bell and an exciting time for a nation nearing its centennial year, with an unsettling, frontierlike quality to many of the changes under way. As Bell knew well, nothing illustrated the point better than the railroads themselves. In the past four years alone the United States had laid an astonishing 12,000 miles of track, speeding the nation headlong into a new era. And everyone, just like Bell himself, seemed to be disembarking into a bewildering and exciting new world of mechanical and electrical devices, from sewing machines to fire alarms; of grand new scientific ideas like Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory. A world beset by hucksters like P. T. Barnum with his “Greatest Show on Earth” by crooks like William “Boss” Tweed, who had plundered New York City as its elected official and recently escaped jail to flee the country; and even outlaws like Jesse James and his gang, who had not long ago held up passengers in an audacious raid on the Rock Island Line.

  Outside the station, the weather was unseasonably warm. A fine carriage and driver met Bell to deliver him to the home of his wealthy and powerful patent attorney, Anthony Pollok. Bell would be Pollok’s guest during his visit.

  Out the window of Bell’s carriage, the nation’s capital had an unfinished and rough-edged air, especially compared with his adopted hometown of Boston. The broad avenues were sparsely settled; cheap and shabby hotels and shops stood near grand government buildings. Many roads had yet to be paved. When Charles Dickens had toured Washington a few decades earlier, he declared it little more than a pretentious village, calling it the “city of magnificent intentions.”

  The capital had doubled in population since then, but now, at the tail end of President Ulysses S. Grant’s second term, Dickens’s words still echoed. As if to reinforce the sentiment, the half-finished Washington Monument rose from the center of town like an unsightly exclamation point, its construction stalled for nearly three decades since before the Civil War. President James Polk had famously laid the cornerstone in 1848; but now, in 1876, the monument still stood like an oversized broken-off chimney, replete with a makeshift roof pitched over the top to keep the rain out.

  Unlike the provisional feel of many parts of the city, however, Bell found Pollok’s home to be opulent. As Bell wrote his father during his stay:

  Mr. Pollok has the most palatial residence of any that I have ever seen. It is certainly the finest and best appointed of any in Washington.

  Among its amenities, Pollok’s Gilded Age mansion boasted granite pillars, fifteen-foot-high ceilings, and, Bell noted, a large staff of “colored servants.” During Bell’s stay, Pollok would introduce him to many people in Washington’s high society and even host a party in his honor.

  Bell was too preoccupied with his own affairs, though, to dwell
much upon any of this. As he confided to his father,

  You can hardly understand the state of uncertainty and suspense in which I am now.

  As Bell put it, his entire future rested on the outcome of the “patent muddle” he had come to Washington to sort out. The stakes were high. Bell’s telephone patent—a claim that would come to be known as the most lucrative patent in history—had been threatened with a formal declaration of “interference,” the term the U.S. Patent Office uses when two or more inventors apply for patents on overlapping inventions at the same time. Now, the patent examiner thought he might have found more overlap between Bell’s claims and those of others. The finding raised the prospect of potentially protracted and expensive interference proceedings.

  Bell knew that such a dispute was to be avoided at all cost. It could drag on for years, during which it would stall his ability to reap any financial reward from his work for himself and his financial backers. Only a clear and unfettered patent would allow Bell, a relatively unknown outsider to the telegraph industry, to successfully commercialize his research.

  Bell laid out the situation clearly in a letter to his father from Washington. He saw it as a key turning point in his life. Bell wrote that if he lost his patent bid, he would abandon his electrical research altogether and devote himself full time once again to teaching the deaf. But if he succeeded in winning his patent claim, he would feel confident enough to marry the wealthy young woman to whom he had recently become engaged. As he put it excitedly, with the emphasis as it appears in his letter: