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

by Seth Shulman

  Of course, Orton’s tactics were relatively tame by the standards of the day. Political corruption would reach a kind of high-water mark in the coming 1876 presidential election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and his Democratic challenger Samuel Tilden, the governor of New York. In that remarkable contest, Tilden, running as a reformer who had broken up the corrupt, New York–based political machine of “Boss” Tweed, would win the popular vote by a considerable margin. But controversy over fraud and intimidation in Florida and several other southern states would push the nation to the brink of a constitutional crisis: a special electoral commission with a one-vote Republican majority would throw out enough contested Tilden ballots to hand Hayes a slim and highly questionable Electoral College victory.

  Hubbard’s experience in the midst of a political climate pervaded by patronage and corruption had only deepened his antipathy toward Western Union. Little wonder, then, that when Bell unexpectedly outlined an invention with the promise of revolutionizing the telegraph industry, Hubbard immediately saw an opportunity. With Bell’s multiple telegraph, Hubbard reasoned, he could either return to Congress to champion a telegraph network built around Bell’s efficient new technology, or he could use patent protection to found a telegraph company himself. Bell’s kernel of an idea for a harmonic, multiple telegraph, Hubbard figured, might—just possibly—allow him to launch a new telecommunications network to rival Western Union after all.

  THE MORE I learned about Hubbard’s role in Bell’s early efforts to commercialize his telegraph research, the more intrigued I became. For one thing, I was struck by how successful Hubbard had been with several similar ventures closer to home.

  Thanks largely to Hubbard’s energy and resources, for example, the city of Cambridge installed gas streetlights and a system to deliver clean water years before any other municipality in the Boston area. Hubbard helped to organize the Cambridge Gas company in 1853 and the Cambridge Waterworks two years later, serving as the latter’s first president. Even more remarkably, Hubbard helped create a horse-drawn trolley system between Cambridge and Boston. With Hubbard’s active backing, the so-called Cambridge Railroad Company was both operational and popular by 1856, disproving the many people who had argued that it would never attract enough passengers to be viable. It was the first municipal trolley of its kind constructed anywhere in the United States outside of New York City, an astonishing feat for a town with just 15,000 residents.

  These successful ventures shared an important feature: each combined a heavy dose of public-spirited action with unvarnished self-interest. Although Hubbard had inherited a fortune, he had lost a good deal of it in the 1840s speculating on wheat. Nonetheless, he still had his legal practice, and, even more important, he owned a great deal of prime Cambridge real estate, much of which he would eventually develop into single-family homes. Providing municipal services that made Cambridge a more desirable place to live improved life for Hubbard and his neighbors—and bolstered the potential return from his real estate holdings.

  In fact, Hubbard’s reputation as a “public man” in these kinds of endeavors was such that Thomas Sanders, Bell’s benefactor, landlord, and mentor, was concerned when he first learned that Bell had told Hubbard of his research. Sanders, of course, had already been offering a modest amount of financial support for Bell’s work and he wasn’t sure he trusted Hubbard. As Bell wrote to his family,

  Mr. Thomas Sanders said he thought it was unwise to have told the idea to Mr. Hubbard. Public men are so corrupt and the idea will be worth thousands of dollars to Mr. Hubbard if he succeeds in buying out the companies. Whereas, if the prior companies were to use the plan—the effect would be to raise the value of all the lines and the government would have to pay more in order to buy them out. Altogether Mr. Sanders thought I should at once protect myself.

  At Sanders’s urging, he and Bell visited a Boston patent lawyer named Joseph Adams. Their plan was to file a caveat with the U.S. Patent Office on Bell’s idea for a multiple telegraph. As Bell tried to perfect a workable prototype, they hoped the caveat would protect his rights to the invention he envisioned. Sanders agreed to pay the legal expenses just as he had so far provided funds for Bell’s research.

  Despite Sanders’s reservations and his push for legal protection, he also realized that Hubbard could be a great asset to the success of Bell’s endeavors. Hubbard quickly came in on the deal, and the three men formed a team. They decided to divide any profits from the invention three ways, with Sanders and Hubbard sharing the cost of Bell’s experiments and legal fees. In addition, the investors offered to pay for an assistant to help with the experiments, paving the way for Bell’s close association with Thomas Watson.

  Hubbard’s connections, energy, and savvy were on display from the start. He convinced the team to switch to his powerful associates at the Washington, D.C.–based law firm of Pollok & Bailey for legal advice. Anthony Pollok, one of the most politically powerful attorneys of his day, had worked with Hubbard on many projects. Among these, he had been chosen by Hubbard as part of the consortium outlined in the Hubbard Bill to oversee the proposed United States Postal Telegraph Company.

  With Pollok’s help, Hubbard also immediately convinced Sanders and Bell to withdraw their efforts to seek a caveat. The reason is telling. Even as early as the fall of 1874, Hubbard had learned that Elisha Gray, the well-known electrical researcher, had already filed a patent for a multiple-message telegraph system that overlapped with Bell’s idea. Rather than tip their hand and lose priority with a caveat, Hubbard urged Bell to work as fast as possible and file a patent directly. That way, he and Pollok reasoned, they could try to undermine Gray’s claim by arguing that Bell’s conception for the invention had come prior to the filing of Gray’s caveat.

  By the fall of 1874, almost all the major players were in place and the stage set for the invention of the telephone. Bell quickly took Hubbard’s advice to heart. He clearly recognized that to succeed he must produce his multiple telegraph before Gray did. As he put it on November 23, 1874:

  It is a neck and neck race between Mr. Gray and myself who shall complete our apparatus first. He has the advantage over me in being a practical electrician—but I have reason to believe that I am better acquainted with the phenomena of sound than he is—so that I have an advantage there…. I feel I shall be seriously ill should I fail in this now I am so thoroughly wrought up.

  Of course, it is important to remember that the all-out race with Gray that Bell describes is not one for a telephone, but for the so-called multiple telegraph, capable of sending multiple messages simultaneously. Interestingly, though, it was around this time, in November of 1874, that the conception began taking shape in Bell’s mind for a device to actually transmit speech. At first, Bell envisioned a receiver that was much like a sophisticated version of the talking machine he had built as a teenager with his brother Melly. Watson remembers that when Bell first spoke to him about the idea for a telegraph that could transmit speech, he described it as a machine, perhaps as big as an upright piano, that would simulate the transmitted vocal sounds using a multitude of tuned strings, reeds, and other vibrating mechanisms.

  Not surprisingly, however, Gardiner Hubbard kept his gaze focused intently on the multiple telegraph, insisting that Bell focus on it exclusively. According to Watson’s later account, no doubt colored to some extent by the benefit of hindsight, Hubbard told Bell to

  perfect his telegraph, assuring him that then he would have money and time enough to play with his speech-by-telegraph vagary all he pleased. So we pegged away at the telegraph and dreamed about the other vastly more wonderful thing.

  WITH HUBBARD AND Pollok directing the operation, Bell would file his first patent related to his research on the multiple telegraph on March 6, 1875. Hubbard’s strategic hand was everywhere to be seen in Bell’s dealings with the U.S. Patent Office. But, as I researched Hubbard’s role in Bell’s patents, I learned that Hubbard’s handling of Bell’s later patent, f
or “Improvements in Telegraphy”—the one that would come to be known as the telephone patent—stood out in particular.

  Some of the most detailed information about Bell’s path to the telephone actually comes from legal testimony in patent lawsuits over the telephone’s first decade. Bell, Hubbard, and others, fighting off legal challenges to Bell’s patent, gave detailed testimony to substantiate their right to an exclusive claim over the telephone. Often their comments came in response to pointed questions about what had transpired. Bell’s book-length deposition in one such case—now an exceedingly rare volume—was even published in 1908 by the Bell Telephone Company in an edition the firm described as the most complete account ever given of the telephone’s development.

  Unfortunately, historians have too often failed to mine these rich legal documents adequately. Bell’s biographer Robert Bruce is something of an exception, but even he dismissively explains in the note accompanying his bibliography that

  Most of the 149 volumes of printed testimony in litigation unsuccessfully challenging the Bell telephone patents deal with alleged inventions of the telephone independent of and prior to Bell and so has [sic] no bearing on his story.

  There is little question that these volumes of testimony make for often slow and painstaking reading, and I certainly cannot claim to have looked at most of their pages. But, based on the resources at my fingertips at the Dibner Institute’s library, I soon found that the testimony of Bell, Hubbard, and others often had momentous bearing on the story of the telephone. In one lawsuit challenging the invention, for instance, Bell made a most extraordinary admission under oath about the timing of his patent: he testified that on February 14, 1876, Hubbard had filed the telephone patent himself, against Bell’s specific wishes and directions.

  Bell explains that he had explicitly directed Hubbard and his lawyers to wait while Bell sent an emissary and family friend—George Brown, an editor at the Toronto Globe—to file for a patent in Britain. At the time, the British Patent Office would issue a patent only if the specified technology had not already been patented in other countries.

  The British patent was important to Bell: not only was he, at the time, a subject of the British crown, but such British rights were not covered by his agreement with Hubbard and Sanders. Thus, Bell worked out a separate agreement with the Brown brothers, George and Gordon, under which he stood to control a full half of the profit his technology might bring if it could be successfully commercialized in Great Britain.

  George Brown had left by ship for Britain on January 25, 1876. On February 14, he had yet to cable about the matter. In Hubbard’s testimony in one case, he claims that Bell:

  did not hear from Mr. Brown as he expected, and finally wrote to me that if he did not hear by a certain day, that I might file it.

  In the voluminous archives of telephone arcana, no record survives of such a communication from Bell to Hubbard. More important, though, Bell’s own testimony on the matter tells a notably different story. As Bell explains in his deposition:

  Mr. Hubbard, becoming impatient at the delay, privately instructed my solicitors to file the specification in the American Patent Office, and on the fourteenth day of February, 1876, it was so filed without my knowledge or consent.

  Hubbard’s involvement had intrigued me from the first. But this discovery, perhaps more than any other, confirmed my commitment—no matter what the effort—to unravel the true story of the telephone’s development. Hubbard knew Bell had a formal, written agreement concerning his patent strategy in England. In fact, Hubbard was present at a meeting with Bell and George Brown during which they drew up a note to reflect their agreement. It read, in part:

  It is understood that Mr. Bell will not perfect his applications in the American Patent Office until he hears from Mr. Brown, that he may do so without interfering with European patents.

  As a lawyer, Hubbard would surely have been unlikely to take it upon himself to break Bell’s agreement lightly or frivolously. And yet, if Bell’s testimony is to be believed, Hubbard never consulted Bell about the matter. Nor, if he was merely impatient, is there any evidence to indicate that Hubbard tried to take the simple step of sending a cable to Brown to inquire about the delay.

  What prompted Hubbard to summarily negate Bell’s prior agreement without his consent? The most likely explanation is that Hubbard felt it was urgent to file when he did. Especially given the Bell team’s long-standing “neck and neck” competition with Gray, it strains credulity to imagine that Hubbard’s hurried, unilateral action came only coincidentally on the exact day that Gray’s caveat was filed.

  As I pondered the information, it seemed far more likely that Hubbard was somehow tipped off about Gray’s intention to file a caveat. The vague outlines of Hubbard and Pollok’s clever telephone gambit were just starting to emerge, but many unanswered questions remained. If Hubbard was tipped off, how did he get the information? And why wouldn’t Gray have objected once the Bell team’s actions came to light? I lacked answers, but I knew one thing for sure: the timing of Bell’s and Gray’s telephone claims is normally portrayed as mere coincidence, but Hubbard’s apparent rush to file—behind Bell’s back, no less—strongly suggests otherwise.

  7

  CLEAR RECEPTION

  BY LATE FALL OF 2004, I had amassed a growing number of questions about the invention of the telephone. I had listed them in my handwritten notebook, typed them into my laptop computer, and written them on notecards. My office came with a white board—the kind with erasable Magic Markers—and one day, on a whim, I used it to jot down some of my questions in the hope that, by looking at them together in one place, I could develop a more coherent research strategy:

  Why didn’t the U.S. Patent Office require Bell to submit a working model of his invention?

  Why didn’t the truth about Bell’s apparent plagiarism come out in years of bitter court battles?

  Why didn’t Elisha Gray pursue his claim?

  Before I knew it, I had nearly filled the entire board with questions like these when David Cahan, my colleague from the next office, knocked on my door.

  “You busy?” he asked, glancing quizzically at the scribbling on my white board.

  “No, no. Come in.”

  Cahan had come bearing a gift. He handed me a sheet of paper.

  “I have no idea whether this is of interest,” he began, “but I came across evidence that Bell and Helmholtz actually did meet face to face when Helmholtz visited the U.S. late in his life. I thought you might want to see it.”

  It was a photocopy of a newspaper article he had unearthed from the New York Daily Tribune dated October 4, 1893. According to the report, Bell had come immediately from Nova Scotia upon receiving word that Helmholtz, who had so inspired his work on the telephone, was in America. Ironically enough, the aged Helmholtz had decided to make the trip primarily to attend an International Electrical Congress organized and led by Elisha Gray. But, as the article reported, Bell did manage to meet his mentor in New York. The two men had lunch, after which Bell attended a lecture by Helmholtz and a reception held in his honor.

  I was touched by Cahan’s gesture of finding a link between his research and mine. I thanked him for thinking of me and he took a seat in the overstuffed chair across from my desk. He told me he was almost done writing a journal article about the impact of Helmholtz’s visit to the United States. I told him I would be interested to read it.

  “Listen,” I said, in an impulsive overture that was doubtless long overdue. “I’m not ready to share this widely yet, but if you have a minute, there is something I’d love to get your advice about.” Shuffling through the papers on my desk, I placed the photocopies of Gray’s caveat and Bell’s version of the liquid transmitter side by side on the corner of my desk and explained how I had happened upon them.

  Cahan listened attentively and scrutinized the copies closely. Then he was silent for a long time.

  “These are very intriguing documents,” he s
aid. “If the facts are just as you say, it would seem that you really could have something here.” He paused again. “Of course, there is more I would want to know. The key thing that comes to my mind is the danger of Whiggism. Do you know about Whiggism?”

  Seeing the blank look on my face as I struggled to imagine what Tories and Whigs had to do with the invention of the telephone, Cahan proceeded in his soft-spoken and collegial way to offer me a learned thumbnail on historiography—the study of the study of history. “Whiggism,” Cahan said, was the historical pitfall of not seeing things in their own context but rather judging the past by the norms or standards of the present. The term likely derived from the penchant of certain politically allegiant historians in Britain to write history in terms that favored their own party. In the history of science and technology, Cahan explained, “Whiggism” meant assuming knowledge that one’s historical subjects would have lacked: giving undue credence to a theory, for instance, because you know it was ultimately proven true, or otherwise casting historical subjects as having acted for anachronistic reasons. As another colleague would later put it, “It’s hard to avoid, but whenever possible you need to guard against reading history backwards.”