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

by Seth Shulman

  At the time, after having lived in the city for several years, Bell had accepted an offer from the wealthy family of one of his students—young George Sanders—for free room and board at their stately home in Salem, Massachusetts, in exchange for his tutoring services.

  Bell commuted into Boston by train, and initially set up a room for his acoustic experiments at the Sanderses’ home. Thomas Sanders soon agreed to help underwrite Bell’s experiments in exchange for a share of the profits should the work prove commercially viable. Before long, Bell would make an additional, similar arrangement with another parent of a deaf student, the wealthy and worldly Gardiner Greene Hubbard.

  Before meeting Bell, Watson had been an enterprising, earnest teenager with little formal education, who had worked for a living since he was thirteen years old. In July 1872, at the age of eighteen, Watson landed a job at the Charles Williams machine shop on Court Street. As Watson recalls, it was a thrilling place for a young man like him—a hub for visionary inventors attempting to build all sorts of machines that tapped the potential of the exciting and little-understood “power of electricity.”

  Among these young inventors was Thomas Edison, who, in the late 1860s, set up his office in the same building as the Williams shop to best avail himself of its services. It was here, in fact, that Edison won his first patent—for an electrical vote recorder—only to realize that no one would buy the machine. Perhaps, given today’s controversies over voting technology, Edison’s invention simply came a century and a half ahead of its time. Nonetheless, it was, Edison said later, the last time he would invent anything without first making sure there was a market for it.

  As a machinist, Watson’s job was to make prototypes to the specifications of the shop’s patrons, including people like Edison and Moses Farmer, another respected electrical researcher of the day. As Watson memorably recalls in his autobiography, Exploring Life (1926), no one in the Williams shop ever knew what to expect. Watson certainly did not expect the dramatic arrival of a man who would change his life:

  One day early in 1874 when I was hard at work for Mr. Farmer on his apparatus for exploding submarine mines by electricity and wondering what was coming next, there came rushing out of the office door and through the shop to my workbench a tall, slender, quick-motioned young man with a pale face, black side-whiskers and drooping mustache, big nose and high, sloping forehead crowned with bushy jet-black hair. It was Alexander Graham Bell, a young professor in Boston University, whom I then saw for the first time.

  Bell stormed into the shop holding two small instruments Watson had crafted for him. Breaking with normal procedure, he headed straight onto the shop floor to complain directly to Watson that the machines had not been built according to his instructions. Bell’s demeanor was exceedingly formal; but he was also frequently hot-tempered, and in this case, he got right to the point, demanding that Watson correct his mistakes. Watson was happy to comply. He listened with interest to Bell’s explanations about the strange contraptions he had constructed with no idea what they were intended for.

  The pair of instruments Watson pledged to rebuild descended directly from Bell’s tuning fork experiments in Scotland. Since moving to Boston, Bell believed he had found a practical application for his ideas about sympathetic vibration. He knew the telegraph industry was having difficulty keeping pace with the voluminous number of telegrams being sent. More and more unsightly wires were rapidly being strung on telegraph poles that, at considerable expense to the industry, were proliferating across the continent. In parts of some cities like Boston, the tangle of overhead telegraph wires was becoming oppressive, all but blocking out the sky. As a result, Western Union had announced that it was willing to pay up to $1 million to the inventor who could ease the congestion by allowing telegraph wires to carry multiple messages simultaneously.

  One researcher and patron of the Williams shop named Joseph Stearns had recently invented a “duplex telegraph” that allowed a single telegraph wire to carry both an outgoing and an incoming message simultaneously. Stearn’s scheme used a parallel circuit at each end of the main telegraph line that would blot out only the outgoing messages from that end of the line, leaving the telegraph device free to accurately receive incoming messages at the same time. It was an important advance. But Bell thought he had an even better solution with what he called his “harmonic, multiple telegraph.”

  Bell’s concept was simple. Using the principle of sympathetic vibration, he hoped to develop a paired transmitter and receiver that could be tuned to a particular pitch. That way, it might be possible to send multiple messages—at different pitches—over a wire simultaneously. In Bell’s conception, the telegraph receivers would only vibrate in concert with the messages sent by the transmitters they were tuned to.

  Bell had asked Watson to build an early prototype of the multiple telegraph design. The transmitter used a “reed” made out of a small, thin strip of steel that was mounted above an electromagnet with an adjustable contact screw like that found on an electric buzzer. When Bell attached the transmitter to a battery, the steel reed would vibrate and emit a sound; by moving the reed in and out of contact with the electromagnet, he could create an intermittent current that corresponded to the pitch of the reed. According to Bell’s plan, this vibrating, intermittent current would pass through the telegraph wire and set a reed in a distant receiver into sympathetic vibration—just as the sound waves from Bell’s voice had vibrated a tuning fork held in front of his mouth. It was a line of thinking that would, before long, lead Bell directly to what we now know as the telephone.

  AFTER WANDERING ALL afternoon in search of Bell’s history in Boston, I was exhausted when I made my way back to MIT. With little tangible evidence to hang on to, I wondered gloomily whether historical questions like mine could ever be answered definitively. It was already evening by the time I reached the long, carpeted corridor to my office.

  The building was quiet, but the door to the office next to mine was open and the light was on. Inside, David Cahan sat engrossed before his computer. Cahan, a friendly man with a big midwestern smile and slightly stooped shoulders that made him seem at once warm and professorial, taught the history of science at the University of Nebraska. He was also, as fate would have it, one of the world’s leading scholars on the life and work of Hermann von Helmholtz. For nearly fifteen years, Cahan had been working on a definitive biography of Helmholtz, and his office shelves, piled with stacks of notes and manuscript pages, reflected his long labors. He glanced up and greeted me warmly, presumably happy not to be the only one still toiling.

  Once in my office, I sunk into my desk chair and pulled out my notebook. I couldn’t help but think of my neighbor next door. I thought of all the historical mysteries that must surely have flummoxed Cahan in his career. And yet there he sat, undaunted even after long years of doggedly sifting fact from fiction about Helmholtz’s life. I wasn’t confident that I could uncover enough detail about what had transpired at the birth of the telephone to explain how Gray’s secret design seemed to have wound up in Bell’s notebook. But, for the year at least, I realized I was literally surrounded by historians brimming with expertise, people like Cahan who were devoting their lives to studying and understanding the history of science and technology. There was no question about it: I would just have to enlist their help to unearth what I could about the real story behind the telephone’s invention.

  6

  OPERATOR ASSISTANCE

  ON A LATE OCTOBER afternoon in 1874, Alexander Graham Bell paid a fateful visit to the Hubbard residence in Cambridge’s wealthiest neighborhood. For the past year, Bell had been tutoring Mabel, the Hubbards’ sweet and vivacious sixteen-year-old daughter, who had been deaf since a bout of scarlet fever when she was five years old. Now Bell had been invited to join the family for tea. As he approached the house at 146 Brattle Street, Bell paused to admire its grandeur. The impressive Italianate mansion overlooked the Charles River. Surrounded by formal gardens, a
stable, and a greenhouse, it stood just down the road from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s equally luxurious Colonial-style estate.

  Since arriving in Boston, Bell had traveled in some fancy circles. The well-heeled Sanders family, for instance, had included him in many social gatherings. They lived in a large house dating from the Colonial period topped with a Captain’s Walk that overlooked the Atlantic. But the tasteful grandeur of the Hubbard residence was striking by almost any comparison. Bell had already noticed how beautifully dressed, supremely well mannered, and bright Mabel was. She was easily the most winning student he had ever tutored. Mabel’s home even more clearly reflected her family’s wealth and upper-class pedigree.

  Mabel’s father, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, an attorney and entrepreneur, had offices in both Boston and Washington. His father, Samuel Hubbard, had sat on the Massachusetts Supreme Court. His maternal grandfather and namesake, Gardiner Greene, was reputed in his day to be the wealthiest man in Boston. And the Hubbards’ Boston roots went deep. For example, Hubbard attended Harvard Law School in the early 1840s; his first American ancestor, William Hubbard, a notable Massachusetts pastor, had graduated from Harvard College some two hundred years earlier, in 1642.

  Bell had already met Gardiner Hubbard professionally in conjunction with Hubbard’s impressive work on behalf of the deaf. After Mabel lost her hearing, Hubbard refused to relegate one of his four charming daughters to an asylum, as was the custom of the day. Instead, he devoted himself to creating opportunities not only for Mabel but for other deaf children as well. Among his accomplishments in this regard, Hubbard was a founder and first president of the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts—an institution that would gain world renown for its innovative methods of teaching the deaf to speak and helping them integrate into the hearing world.

  Thanks to Hubbard’s efforts and his daughter’s natural talent, Mabel became an accomplished lip reader, and her comprehension was impeccable. By the age of twelve, she was attending classes in a regular school with hearing children two and three years her senior. Nonetheless, Hubbard felt her speech could be improved. In August 1873, he sought out Bell’s services shortly after his daughter’s return from an extended sojourn in Europe with her mother and sisters.

  Now, some fourteen months later, Bell drank up the hospitality and attention of the Hubbard family. Mabel’s mother, who fully rivaled her husband in her energetic nature and rarefied background, charmed him from the start. Gertrude McCurdy Hubbard was the daughter of an established and well-to-do New York family. Her father, Robert Henry McCurdy, was a trustee and founder of the vast Mutual Life Insurance Company.

  Not only did Gertrude Hubbard oversee a busy residence and social schedule in Cambridge, New York, and Washington; she was also highly educated and self-directed. When Mabel was small, for instance, she took it upon herself to learn Hebrew so she could read the Old Testament in its original language. More recently, when Gertrude Hubbard traveled with her family to Europe, her husband returned home after several months to tend to business. Mrs. Hubbard, however, remained abroad for two more years to single-handedly tour her four daughters through Geneva, Vienna, Rome, Florence, Paris, and London.

  In the Hubbards’ formal drawing room, which was decorated in High Victorian style, with red velvet wallpaper, gilded drapes, and gaslights with crystal fixtures, Bell entertained his hosts on the family’s grand piano.

  After playing a favorite sonata, Bell seized the opportunity to tell Gardiner Hubbard about his telegraphic research. As the two men stood together by the piano, Bell gave Hubbard a demonstration that stemmed directly from his original experiments with tuning forks in Scotland: he showed how, by stepping on the sustain pedal and bending over its open top, he could make the instrument’s undamped strings vibrate sympathetically with whatever note he sang. Sure enough, Hubbard saw, the piano strings echoed the precise pitch of Bell’s singing.

  Bell explained that the effect was part of his research. Instead of using air, he could get the same effect by carrying the vibrations over a wire. That way, he should be able to make a string or reed sound from hundreds of miles away. Using the technique, Bell said, he believed he could build a multiple telegraph capable of sending six, eight, or even more messages over a single telegraph wire simultaneously.

  Bell’s report visibly and uncharacteristically excited his host. Hubbard was a serious, formal patrician, who invariably wore his dark suit buttoned and his graying beard long and untrimmed. “I brought the subject before the Hon. Gardiner G. Hubbard,” Bell wrote home to his family soon after his visit.

  I explained the system to him in confidence and was surprised at the way in which he, an undemonstrative man, received the explanation. He called his wife and made me explain it all to her, and when she raised some objection to one point, he answered it himself saying “don’t you see there is only one air and so there need be but one wire!”

  From earlier letters home, it is clear that Bell knew of Gardiner Hubbard’s interest in the telegraph long before visiting the Hubbard household. A letter in March 1874, for instance—months before Bell’s visit—mentions the so-called Hubbard Bill introduced in the U.S. Congress to dismantle the Western Union monopoly and nationalize the telegraph industry. Bell tells his parents about tutoring Mabel and muses on the possibility of writing to her father about his telegraphic research given Hubbard’s high-profile position in the telegraph business.

  Despite whatever plans Bell may have laid in advance, though, he could not have expected the swiftness with which his work would capture Hubbard’s entrepreneurial imagination. Hubbard instantly recognized the potential of the invention Bell outlined. That October day in Hubbard’s elegant parlor, Bell’s demonstration set in motion an extraordinary chain of events. Almost immediately Hubbard began to use his own wealth, connections, legal expertise, and political savvy to shape Bell’s fledgling telegraphic research.

  Bell wrote home on October 20, 1874, after his visit to the Hubbards:

  I am tonight a happy man. Success seems to meet me on every hand…. After my last interview with [Hubbard] he had gone down to Washington and searched the Patent Office to find whether my idea had been taken up by anyone else—and he now offers to provide me with funds for the purpose of experimenting if we go into the scheme as partners.

  AS A LAWYER specializing in patents, Gardiner Hubbard was naturally interested in inventions. In his legal practice he had helped to secure patent protection for everything from new machines used in the manufacture of shoes to specialized saws for milling lumber. But Hubbard had his own reasons for so quickly and enthusiastically backing Bell’s research: he had become intimately involved with the politics of the U.S. government’s efforts to regulate the lucrative and growing telegraph industry.

  For at least six years before Bell’s visit, Hubbard had devoted much time and energy to a campaign calling for the government to assume control of the telegraph industry and bring it under the purview of the U.S. Post Office. In 1868, at the request of the Postmaster General, Hubbard had compiled a report on the postal-telegraph systems in other countries, most of which were under government control. In the countries Hubbard reviewed, the growth of the telegraph infrastructure and escalating telegram volume had led to reduced prices. But Hubbard’s analysis showed that in the United States, Western Union, with its near monopoly control of the telegraph lines, had frequently raised its rates despite the growth of its business.

  In a widely read article in the Atlantic Monthly on the subject, Hubbard wrote that the population of Britain spent some $5 million to send roughly 18 million telegrams. In the United States, customers spent close to twice that much to send just 13 million telegrams. The size of the country, Hubbard believed, could not fully account for the difference. Rather, he contended, Western Union was overcharging its customers and thereby hurting the U.S. economy.

  Congress debated the merits of the Hubbard Bill on several occasions. The plan was intriguing. Hubba
rd did not call for the U.S. Post Office to actually take over the telegraph industry. Instead, he proposed that Congress authorize the capital to create a private corporation—to be known as the United States Postal Telegraph Company—that would enter into a contract with the Post Office. This private corporation would build and oversee a new telegraph network in the service of the federal government. And perhaps most notable of all: it would be run by a consortium led by Hubbard and his business associates.

  In Congress, Hubbard’s proposal caused controversy. Some representatives viewed the plan as the work of a public-spirited patriot; others saw it as the scheme of an overzealous entrepreneur. Either way, in his efforts to persuade Congress, Hubbard was repeatedly outmaneuvered by William Orton, the hard-driving and politically well connected head of Western Union. For instance, around the time of the debate over the Hubbard Bill, Orton offered all U.S. congressmembers the equivalent of the “franking” privileges offered by the Post Office, issuing them a card with which they could walk into any telegraph office and send an unlimited number of messages for free. In the face of such political tactics, the Hubbard Bill never gained nearly enough political traction to be enacted.