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

by Seth Shulman

  If I succeed in securing that patent without interference from the others, the whole thing is mine…and I am sure of fame, fortune, and success if I can only persevere in perfecting my apparatus.

  OVER THE NEXT few days, in a binge of my own work, I puzzled over a complex knot of irregularities about Bell’s life-altering visit to Washington, D.C. To begin with, the timing of the trip seemed more than a little odd. Bell filed his telephone patent on February 14, 1876, but, according to his laboratory notebook, he did not successfully transmit intelligible speech over a telephone until March 10. Was it true that, in the lingo of the Patent Office, Bell had yet to “reduce his invention to practice” at the time he filed his patent application? That, in other words, Bell patented an invention he had never actually made?

  Even the logistics of this question were mystifying. I knew from reporting on disputes over intellectual property that working models of inventions were required by the U.S. Patent Office in the 1800s. It took only a little digging to learn that on February 14, 1876—the very day Bell filed his telephone patent—a U.S. Senate committee held hearings on a bill calling for the agency to do away with this requirement. Supporters of the bill, proposed by Connecticut senator James E. English, testified that the Patent Office’s attic coffers were literally overflowing and that there was no space to put the roughly twenty thousand new models the agency expected to receive in the coming year.

  Of course, there would have been no point for the Senate to debate the issue unless, by February 1876, the Patent Office at least technically continued to require working models to accompany patent applications. Why, then, hadn’t the patent examiner in Bell’s case required him to submit a functioning model of his telephone?

  Equally baffling was the Patent Office’s decision to swiftly grant Bell his telephone patent before he had even returned to his lab in Boston on March 7, 1876. How was it, I wondered, that one of the most momentous patents in history was issued in just three weeks? When I looked up other patents filed or issued around the same time, they all seemed to have taken months, if not years, to issue. Timothy Stebins, another little-known Boston-based inventor, had filed a patent for a hydraulic elevator on March 2, 1876, but it wasn’t granted until more than five months later, on August 15. William Gates, a New Haven–based inventor with a newfangled electric fire alarm, found that his patent application took almost two years to process. It was filed on April 1, 1874, but the patent wasn’t issued until the time of Bell’s visit on February 29, 1876. A little more research offered a likely explanation: in 1876, the U.S. Patent Office employed just a few dozen patent examiners to process the tens of thousands of applications the agency received each year.

  The U.S. Patent Office’s speedy work to approve Bell’s patent seemed all the more extraordinary because, on February 19, 1876, the patent examiner had notified Bell that his patent would be “suspended” for three months, after which time, the letter said, the office would formally decide whether to declare so-called interference proceedings. Such interference disputes almost always include formal hearings to determine which inventor can rightfully claim “priority of conception.” Sorting out the interference claims on inventor Emile Berliner’s 1877 patent application on the microphone, for instance, ended up taking more than thirteen years. That was, of course, an extreme case, but even the more common interference proceedings were likely to last for one or more years.

  There was no question about it: the swiftness of the U.S. Patent Office’s actions seemed highly unusual. I wondered what had made patent officials change their minds so quickly about their contention that the claims of others overlapped with Bell’s. For that matter, I wondered exactly what those other claims were.

  Thanks to the Dibner Institute’s extraordinary library at MIT, I could easily answer the second question. The filing that conflicted with Bell’s telephone patent came from an electrical researcher named Elisha Gray.

  TODAY, IF HE is remembered at all, Elisha Gray is known as a technological footnote: the unlucky sap whose patent claim for a telephone arrived just hours after that of Alexander Graham Bell.

  History is harsh in ascribing winners and losers.

  As I soon learned once I started looking, there is a good deal of information to be had about the fight between Bell and Gray over rights to the telephone. The battle dragged on through the courts, in one form or another, for more than a decade. But it is not much remembered today. After all, there is little question about who prevailed in the end.

  Ironically, though, back in 1876, Gray was far better known than Bell. Some twelve years Bell’s senior, Gray was recognized, at least in scientific circles, as one of the leading electrical researchers in the country. He had already received enough money and acclaim for his work to devote himself full time to inventing, and had received many of the roughly seventy patents around the world he would ultimately garner for his inventions—far more than Bell would ever claim.

  Gray was born in 1835 on an Ohio farm; when he was twelve, his father died, plunging the family into poverty. Gray had to quit school to go to work. Despite his lack of formal education, though, he became fascinated by the seemingly magical new possibilities promised by electricity in the mid-1800s. Coupling his fascination with resolve, Gray managed to support himself as a carpenter while completing preparatory school and two further years of study at Oberlin College, near his home. Then, in 1868, at age thirty-three, Gray received his first patent—for an improved telegraph relay. Initially, Gray conducted his electrical experiments in addition to farming. Building upon his patent’s success, however, he soon helped start a firm called Barton & Gray to manufacture telegraphic equipment and he launched a full-time career as a manufacturer and inventor.

  Before long, Western Union, the vast U.S. company that held a near monopoly over the telegraph, recognized the impressive caliber of Gray’s work. In 1872, the company bought a one-third interest in Gray’s firm, making him a wealthy man. Gray’s company changed its name to Western Electric, moved to Chicago, and soon became the leading developer and supplier of equipment to Western Union.

  By 1876, the quality of Western Electric’s products was universally admired in the emerging field. For instance, Bell’s assistant Thomas Watson vividly recalls how he and the others in the Charles Williams machine shop (where Watson crafted Bell’s telegraph inventions) looked upon Gray’s work with at least a tinge of envy:

  Gray was electrician for the Western Electric Company of Chicago, the largest manufacturer of electrical machinery in the country at that time. His shop had better tools and did finer work than Williams’. Whenever a piece of Western Electric machinery came into our shop for repairs, the beauty of its design and the quality of its workmanship made it an object of admiration to all of us, and made most of Williams’ instruments look crude.

  In the case of the telephone, I learned, Gray had filed what the Patent Office then called a “caveat.” Although the government subsequently dropped the option by 1910, a caveat issued by the U.S. Patent Office provided an inventor up to a year with an exclusive right to turn his or her idea into a working, patentable invention. In those days an inventor who had conceived of a device but had yet to build it could use a caveat to warn away would-be competitors. Once it was granted, a caveat afforded all the same rights as a patent during the provisional year while the applicant worked to complete the invention in question. Gray’s caveat described an “instrument for transmitting and receiving vocal sounds telegraphically.” In what is normally described as a strange twist of fate, Gray filed his claim on February 14, 1876—the very same day Bell filed his patent application.

  As I inspected the caveat document, reprinted in a book on the history of the telephone, I learned that Gray proposed to use a liquid in his telephone transmitter: water with acid in it. That fact alone seemed like a remarkable coincidence.

  But Gray’s sketch for his invention, on frontmatter of his patent claim, hit me almost like a shock from the electric curr
ent it described. I recognized immediately that I had just seen a virtually identical drawing—in Bell’s lab notebook.

  The implication was instantly clear. Unless I was somehow mistaken, Bell must have returned to his lab in Boston from his trip to Washington, dropped his prior line of inquiry, and drawn an almost perfect replica of his competitor’s invention in his own notebook.

  As I stared incredulously at the drawing in Gray’s caveat, I tried to make sense of the chain of events. Gray had filed a confidential caveat at the U.S. Patent Office, clearly outlining his prescient idea for a machine to transmit speech, an invention he had envisioned fully but had yet to build. Bell, on the other hand, returned from a visit to the nation’s capital in possession of a U.S. patent on an invention that had never yet transmitted speech. Upon his return to Boston, Bell scrapped his former efforts and sketched an unmistakable picture of his competitor’s idea for a liquid transmitter in his own laboratory notebook, passing it off as his own discovery. Next, in his laboratory in a boardinghouse on Exeter Street, Bell built and used this machine—Gray’s machine—to carry on what would forever be immortalized as the world’s first telephone conversation.

  I was dumbfounded. Could Bell have committed such a blatant, wholesale act of plagiarism? If he did, I wondered, how could no one have noticed it before? After all, however long ago it may have occurred, this was an act of tremendous historical consequence. The telephone sits high atop any list of the most important modern inventions, and Alexander Graham Bell is surely one of the best-known inventors of all time. Even beyond issues of fame and historical accuracy, Bell’s seemingly iron-clad patent claim to the telephone led directly to a company, American Telephone & Telegraph, that would become one of the largest and most lucrative monopolies the world has ever known.

  I know it sounds improbable that Alexander Graham Bell, almost universally canonized as the inventor of the telephone, might be undeserving of the title. Or that I, in a relatively casual reading of Bell’s notebook, might have discovered something that had eluded generations of historians. So, before going on with my tale, let me pause a moment for those who, reasonably enough, suspect that my account is fictionalized or embroidered. Here, for your own inspection, are the documents that first set me upon the strange quest to track down the true story about Alexander Graham Bell:

  The drawings left me little room for doubt about where Bell’s idea for a liquid transmitter had come from. But, in so doing, they suggested a historical intrigue so at odds with the conventional story of the telephone’s invention that I could hardly think where to begin to try to unravel it. I had come to MIT to explore the rivalry between Bell and Edison. But now Thomas Alva would have to wait. I had happened upon a stunning fissure in the polished facade of Bell’s legacy; I couldn’t help but try to pry the history open from the beginning.

  4

  CALLING HOME

  ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL was never one of those mechanically inclined children who excel at taking apart and fixing things. In his later years he told a story, apocryphal or not, that when his father had asked to have his pocketwatch cleaned, young Bell took it apart and washed the pieces with soap and water. As Bell put it, his father was “not enthusiastic over the result.”

  Bell remained famously clumsy with mechanical devices throughout his life. But he was always exceptionally proficient in the conceptual realm. A bright and dutiful child, he inherited his fascination with speech, sound, and the emerging field of acoustics much as one would inherit a trade. Bell was born in 1847 in Edinburgh, at the beginning of the second decade of the rule of Queen Victoria. Britain was entering an age of industrial expansion. Science and rationality were ascendant. And Bell’s family had built the scientific study of speech into a kind of Victorian-era cottage industry.

  Bell’s paternal grandfather and namesake, Alexander Bell, taught elocution. So did Bell’s uncle David Bell, and his father, Alexander Melville Bell, who published enormously popular texts on the subject and even developed a system called “Visible Speech” that became world-renowned in its day. Visible Speech, in wonderfully grand, Victorian style, attempted to systematically catalog all possible human vocal sounds by assigning each a written symbol that represented the placement of the tongue and lips as the particular sound was uttered.

  If the idea sounds vaguely familiar, perhaps it is because George Bernard Shaw, a family acquaintance, immortalized Melville Bell’s system in his play Pygmalion (the basis of the subsequent musical My Fair Lady). Shaw’s preface to the play even mentions “the illustrious Alexander Melville Bell, the inventor of Visible Speech.” And, coincidentally or not, Shaw gives his memorable character Professor Henry Higgins an address just minutes away from the actual spot on Harrington Square in London where Grandfather Alexander Bell tutored students.

  Shaw’s Professor Higgins—as erudite as he is overbearing—surely draws upon the tendency toward grandiosity and stern reverence for science displayed by the real-life patriarchs of the Bell family. Grandfather Bell taught an eclectic assortment of adults with stammers and other speech impediments as well as children whose upwardly mobile families wanted them to improve their elocution. Young Aleck Bell himself was carefully schooled in elocution and high-society etiquette at the hands of both his father and grandfather—not entirely unlike Higgins’s pupil Liza Doolittle, Shaw’s protagonist in Pygmalion.

  At the age of fifteen, for instance, the family sent Aleck from their home in Edinburgh to live for a year with his grandfather in London. Bell invariably thereafter called the experience a turning point in his life. During his stay, Aleck worked intensively under his grandfather’s tutelage to polish his diction and accent by reading Shakespeare aloud. And elocution lessons were just part of his training. Grandfather Alexander also required him to don a suit jacket and top hat, and even to carry a cane—a teenaged caricature of a dapper Englishman, much like one Shaw himself might have conjured.

  Around this time, Melville Bell’s system of Visible Speech was attracting interest throughout Britain. It fit the times perfectly, melding a grandiose scientific approach with the appealing, egalitarian prospect of self-betterment. Aleck, as a teenager, became one of its most well-versed practitioners and even took part in his father’s frequent lectures. Like a showman’s sidekick, Aleck would wait offstage and out of ear-shot while his father asked members of the audience to suggest difficult or unusual sounds—including words in any language—writing on a chalkboard the distinctive phonetic symbols he had invented for the sounds. Aleck would then return and pronounce sounds he had never heard to illustrate the viability of his father’s linguistic scheme.

  As Bell later recalled, the symbols at one such lecture called for him to blow a puff of air while the tip of his tongue touched the roof of his mouth. Following his father’s written instruction, Aleck made the odd sound and drew a great round of applause in response. A linguist in the audience, Bell later wrote, had suggested to the assembled crowd that the sound—which he called the “Sanskrit cerebral T”—was one of the hardest for an English speaker to utter. Needless to say, the linguist was deeply impressed when Aleck, working only from his father’s notations, pronounced it correctly on the first try.

  The training in etiquette, elocution, and public speaking that Bell received from his father and grandfather would serve him exceedingly well throughout his life. Much later, for instance, Thomas Watson put Bell’s vocal abilities first among the many rewards of having been his assistant, noting:

  The best thing Bell did for me—spiritually—was to emphasize my love for the music of the speaking voice. He was himself a master of expressive speech. The tones of his voice seemed vividly to color his words. His clear, crisp articulation delighted me and made other men’s speech seem uncouth.

  Watson, introverted and tongue-tied prior to his association with Bell, was immensely taken by his colleague’s vocal command and flair for public speaking. Long after the telephone brought fame and fortune to both of them, Watson eve
n joined a Shakespearean repertory theater troupe.

  Rivaling Bell’s vocal gifts was his natural ear for music. One of three brothers, Bell was a sensitive middle child and a gifted musician, studying piano first with his mother and then with a well-known concert pianist, August Benoit Bertini. From the youngest age, Bell could both improvise and play difficult pieces by ear, and he would be captivated by music throughout his life. In his early teens, Bell recalled later, he even dreamt of following Signor Bertini’s model and becoming a glamorous, performing musician.

  Bell shared his love of music in his close relationship with his mother, Eliza Symonds Bell, a bright and cheerful woman who could hear only with the aid of a Victorian-era speaking horn held up to her ear. Aleck would often play music for his mother as she pressed the horn against the piano’s sounding board. The experience was no doubt formative for Bell. Not only would he continue to play the piano for the decades to follow, his concern for the deaf would become a defining and lifelong passion.

  ALECK BELL AND his two brothers, Melville (Melly) and Edward, all planned to follow the career path laid out by their father and grandfather. But this latest generation of Bells entered a markedly different field: a renaissance in the science of acoustics was yielding dramatically new ways to study and explore the production, transmission, and perception of sounds. The telegraph had opened up not only a new world of instantaneous telecommunication but also vast new areas of research. Among the major practitioners in this emerging field was Sir Charles Wheatstone, a largely self-taught British scientist whose early work included experiments on the transmission of sound, and who by the mid-1800s held some of England’s most lucrative telegraph patents.