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

by Seth Shulman

  As Cahan continued: “What could be going on here—I’m not saying it is likely but it is possible—is that Bell and Gray both depicted their inventions this way because at the time it was a standard way of doing so.”

  Unlikely or not, the thought had not crossed my mind.

  “To avoid any threat of Whiggism creeping into your analysis, I’d recommend scouring through the textbooks of the day to make sure that a picture of a man’s head leaning over like that wasn’t some kind of a standard way of depicting any number of new inventions. At any rate, it’s a base that I would want to cover on something like this.”

  Cahan, a specialist in this particular period, didn’t hesitate before offering some highly specific recommendations.

  “I’m pretty certain that Helmholtz’s works never included diagrams like this,” he said. “But I’d look particularly at the work of Lord Rayleigh, who was widely read in America. Also any primers on electricity and magnetism from the period.

  “I’ll certainly keep this to myself,” he added, going to the door, “but please do keep me posted on what you come up with. You’ll want to try to rule out any alternative explanation you can think of. But there’s no question this is a very interesting find. Thanks for sharing it.”

  And with that, he returned to his office.

  Before the week was out, I followed Cahan’s suggestion. I flipped through Lord Rayleigh’s classic Theory of Sound and many other period texts. There were no similar diagrams. I paged particularly carefully through Daniel Davis’s Manual of Magnetism (1842) and J. Baile’s Wonders of Electricity (1872). Bell and Watson mention both books as sources of inspiration and, delving into their texts, I could easily see why. Among other fascinating things, Baile’s work actually predicts the invention of what it called an “acoustic telegraph,” noting:

  Some years hence, for all we know, we may be able to transmit the vocal message itself with the very inflection, tone and accent of the speaker.

  Still, for all the illustrations I found of electrical contraptions, people were hardly, if ever, depicted. Several of Davis’s detailed illustrations include a disembodied hand resting upon a device, but none depict a person’s head as Bell and Gray had done in their drawings.

  I gradually became more confident that Bell and Gray had not appropriated some common form of diagram from the period. The more I scrutinized the two drawings, the more certain I became that they were primary documents that represented that rarity: a “smoking gun” that forces us to reevaluate our received understanding of a historical event. In this case, the drawings, now more than a century old, revealed a clear and discernible act of plagiarism—committed by Bell in his private laboratory notebook on the crucial eve of his success with the telephone.

  MORE THAN THE fear of Whiggism, what continued to nag at me was the widespread evidence of Bell’s upstanding reputation. Those who knew Bell generally portray him as a gentleman of integrity with a keen sense of justice. In the preface to her biography, for instance, Bell’s longtime assistant Catherine MacKenzie describes Bell as “honest, courageous” and “scornful of double-dealing.” As MacKenzie writes,

  The search for truth was the one really important thing in Bell’s life. It is the irony of his story that the malicious charges of fraud, widespread against him during the long and determined effort to wrest the telephone from him, were in complete contradiction to everything essential in his character.

  MacKenzie, a close friend, assistant, and confidante of Bell’s, could never be considered an unbiased source. Yet, while the passage made me all the more curious that charges of fraud against Bell were “widespread” in his day, my reading of Bell’s notebooks and correspondence gave me no reason to doubt MacKenzie’s fundamental assessment of his character.

  I considered the possibility that Bell might have been unwittingly manipulated by Hubbard or his other advisers. But such a theory couldn’t explain away the fact that the picture of Gray’s transmitter had been drawn in Bell’s own hand. At the very least, I reasoned, Bell must have cooperated with a plan to steal Gray’s design even if he didn’t instigate it. Given Bell’s reputation for honesty, I couldn’t help but wonder why.

  Watson’s autobiography offers a few potential clues. As with MacKenzie, there is no mistaking Watson’s admiration for Bell. As he puts it:

  No finer influence than Graham Bell ever came into my life. He was the first educated man I had ever known intimately and many of his ways delighted me.

  In their several years of close collaboration, the teacher opened up many horizons for his assistant. From the first, Bell encouraged Watson to learn algebra and introduced him to works by many of the leading scientists of the day, including Helmholtz. But, as Watson recalls, Bell’s mentoring went far beyond the professional sphere. From Bell, Watson also learned how to comport himself like a gentleman, including everything from elocution to table manners.

  Watson’s abundant affection for Bell, like MacKenzie’s, makes his autobiography rightly suspect in the eyes of most historians. So does the fact that it was written in 1926, toward the end of Watson’s life, decades after the key facts it relates about the invention of the telephone. Despite these significant shortcomings, though, Watson’s account is revealing for the detail he offers about Bell’s unremitting frustration in his quest to build a multiple, or “harmonic” telegraph in 1874 and 1875. Try as they might, Watson and Bell could not make the device work. In Watson’s words:

  We accomplished little of practical value in spite of our hard work, the chief result attained being to prove to Bell that the harmonic telegraph was not as simple as it seemed.

  As Watson recalls, when the two rigged up the system in Bell’s workshop in the attic above the Williams shop, the receiver would not respond to the signal reliably. Or it would respond when it wasn’t supposed to. At best, the instruments were exceedingly difficult to tune to one another. According to Watson, things eventually got so bad that

  my faith in the harmonic telegraph had vanished and, at last, after months of hard work on it, Bell’s magnificent courage began to flag. I knew he was losing his enthusiasm for now I seldom heard his favorite expression, “Watson, we are on the verge of a great discovery,” which, uttered, as it always had been, in a tone of conviction, would spur me on to renewed exertions to get improved apparatus finished and ready to try.

  Watson, in his account, emphasizes the strain on Bell from the arrangements he had made with his financial backers and the pressure Bell felt to succeed on their behalf. Sometime later, Bell himself wrote in one letter that he “never would have continued” in his research if not for his wish that Sanders and Hubbard “be repaid for the money they expended upon patents and upon my experiments.”

  In Watson’s account, Bell’s frustration and disappointment are palpable. But still I wondered: could the pressure have been great enough to lead Bell to steal a competitor’s work? It certainly seemed at odds with Watson’s glowing assessment of Bell’s character and with most else I’d learned about him. As I soon came to appreciate, though, there was another aspect of the story to consider.

  8

  PERSON-TO-PERSON

  IN THE WINTER OF 1874, Bell became a frequent visitor to the Hubbard home and a regular guest at the family’s midday Sunday dinner. It was an elegant affair. Usually, the Hubbards served generous helpings of roast beef, followed by “floating island” for dessert—an almond-flavored meringue in a custard sauce that was particularly favored by Gertrude Hubbard. Bell no doubt relished the surroundings and the cuisine, but he welcomed the company even more. He soon found himself—awkwardly and privately—becoming increasingly infatuated with his winsome student Mabel Hubbard.

  Bell’s feelings for Mabel had begun to surface during their tutoring sessions. With Gardiner Hubbard often away for weeks or even months at a time in Washington, working on matters relating to the Hubbard Bill, and Gertrude Hubbard frequently accompanying her aging parents in New York, Mabel was often le
ft with her older cousin, Mary Blatchford, in Cambridge. As an energetic and enterprising girl nearing her sixteenth birthday, Mabel would make her way from Cambridge to Boston by the horse-drawn streetcar for lessons with Bell or his teaching assistant Abby Locke in his office on Beacon Hill. Mabel recounts in her journal that when she first met Bell, she had found him interesting but “did not think him exactly a gentleman.” His clothes were not fashionable, Mabel noted, and he dressed carelessly. At first, she had also guessed that Bell was over forty when he was, in fact, twenty-six years old. As the lessons progressed, though, Mabel’s occasional letters to her mother show that she clearly warmed to her tutor.

  Mabel wrote that Bell seemed to enjoy talking with her. He was full of so many ideas, Mabel said, that she rarely took her eyes off his face; she didn’t want to miss any of them. As for Bell, Mabel charmed him from the first, and, on at least a few occasions, he found an excuse to walk with her to her ride after their class. Once, after a heavy snowfall, Mabel recounted, Bell

  insisted on taking me to the streetcar. We had a grand time running downhill through deep snow. I was nearly up to my knees in snow but it was so dry I didn’t get wet and the run kept me warmer than I generally am. I would have been almost sorry to get to the apothecary’s but that I was quite out of breath; besides my waterproof and veil were flying about me and it was all I could do to hold on to them.

  In a postscript to another letter, Mabel writes:

  What do you think, I have been told I am beautiful!

  And in another she tells her mother,

  Mr. Bell said today my voice was naturally sweet. Think of that! If I can only learn to use it properly, perhaps I will yet rival you in sweetness of voice. He continues pleased with me. He said today that he could make me do anything he chose. I enjoy my lessons very much and am glad you want me to stay.

  With more opportunities to see Mabel outside of the classroom, Bell quickly came to view her less as his deaf pupil and more as the charming and appealing object of his affection. Shortly after Mabel turned sixteen, for instance, Bell attended a dance party held in her honor at the Hubbard’s home. Despite the handicap of her deafness, Mabel hosted Bell and some twenty other young men and women with poise and grace, even though she was crestfallen to learn at the last minute that her dear friends Edith and Annie, daughters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, were both sick and couldn’t come.

  Gardiner Hubbard was away in Washington at the time, so Gertrude wrote him a full account of the party, describing what a striking young woman his daughter had become. As Gertrude recounted, Mabel received and introduced her guests

  with the greatest ease and self possession…and one look at her face told how happy she was. I wish you could have seen her so fresh, so full of enjoyment and so very pretty. She wore her peach silk and looked her loveliest.

  With the first signs of spring in 1875, Bell was distracted and mystified by Mabel’s growing hold on his affections. In a characteristic move, he started a special journal to help him sort out his feelings and chronicle their changing relationship. In it, he agonized over his situation and his emotions. Mabel was eleven years his junior. And Bell had been her teacher. He feared that she viewed him only in that capacity and would never accept him as a suitor. He fretted that a great gulf existed between his meager income and Mabel’s affluent upbringing. He worried, too, that it would be improper for him to confide his feelings to one so young.

  “I do not know how or why it is that Mabel has so won my heart,” Bell wrote.

  Had my mind chosen—or had others chosen for me—all would have been different. I should probably have sought one more mature than she is—one who could share with me those scientific pursuits that have always been my delight. However—my heart has chosen—and I cannot but think it is for the best—at least so far as I am concerned.

  If the cause of his affections was a mystery, Bell had no difficulty finding the quality in Mabel that he admired most. As he put it,

  I value a gentle loving heart above all other things in this world—and I know that hers is such a one.

  ON JUNE 2, 1875, with the future of Bell’s love life still very unresolved, he finally made a significant breakthrough in his telegraphic research after many months of frustration. Working in two adjoining rooms up in the attic of the Williams shop, Bell and Watson had set up a series of linked transmitters and receivers to test their latest version of the multiple telegraph. The circuit they built had three separate buzzerlike transmitters tuned to distinct pitches. Bell and Watson had also built six separate receivers, two for each transmitter; they placed three of them in Bell’s room and three in the room next door. If things went according to plan, when Bell triggered a transmitter, the corresponding tuned receivers in each room—and only these corresponding receivers—would sound in sympathetic vibration.

  After successfully tuning two of the transmitters to their matching receivers, Bell began work on the third set. But he could not get the corresponding receiver in the next room to function. Suspecting that its vibrating reed might have frozen against its contact, Bell removed the battery-driven transmitters from the circuit and called to Watson next door to pluck the transmitter’s reed by hand to free it. Amazingly, even without the battery, Bell heard the reed in the receiver before him vibrate in concert with the one Watson had plucked. Bell yelled out to Watson next door to keep plucking all the reeds and, sure enough, Bell heard each of their distinct tones through the receivers in his room.

  It was a momentous accident. Bell guessed correctly that the residual magnetism in the circuit had allowed the reeds to create just the kind of “tuned” electrical current he had been seeking for the multiple telegraph. If that were the case, it meant that his theory was largely correct, and that their repeated failures had resulted mainly from grossly overestimating the amount of vibration needed to send a message.

  That day, as he listened to Watson pluck the reeds, Bell also realized something even more portentous. With his keen musical ear, Bell recognized that he could hear not just the pure tones created by the reeds’ vibration, but also the overtones that gave them their particular timbre. As Bell would later contend, the discovery made him even more confident that it would be possible to send speech over a wire—if he could only figure out how to transmit it in the first place.

  Bell was coming tantalizingly close to the invention of a telephone. Around this time, a letter to his parents clearly captures his sense of excitement and continued uncertainty:

  I am like a man in a fog who is sure of his latitude and longitude. I know that I am close to the land for which I am bound and when the fog lifts I shall see it right before me.

  Unfortunately for Bell, the fog would linger for some time yet. Meanwhile, amid the important progress in his work, Mabel Hubbard occupied Bell’s thoughts more than ever. And Watson began to notice the change in Bell, as he recounted much later in his autobiography:

  I hadn’t been in love since the time I was ten years old and had forgotten what an upsetting malady it could be until I observed its effect at this time on the professor. He was quite incapacitated for work much of the time….

  At the end of June 1875, Bell was dismayed to learn that Mabel planned to vacation on Nantucket for the summer with her older cousin Mary Blatchford. The thought that Mabel would leave before Bell could confess his affection so troubled him that he resolved to take action. Alone in his Salem apartment, not knowing how else to handle the situation, Bell composed a letter to Mabel’s mother. He wrote:

  Pardon me for the liberty I take in addressing you at this time. I am in deep trouble, and can only go to you for advice.

  As Bell tried to delicately explain,

  I have discovered that my interest in my dear pupil—Mabel—has ripened into a far deeper feeling…. I have learned to love her.

  Bell confided to Gertrude Hubbard that he wanted to tell Mabel of his feelings and learn whether she might reciprocate them. But he was well aware of Mabel’
s youth and, despite his strong feelings, he would do nothing against her parents’ wishes. As Bell wrote,

  Of course, I cannot tell what favour I may meet with in her eyes. But this I do know—that if devotion on my part can make her life any the happier—I am ready and willing to give my whole heart to her…. I am willing to be guided entirely by your advice, for I know that a mother’s love will surely decide for the best interests of her child.

  Bell’s letter prompted an immediate meeting with Gertrude Hubbard. Mrs. Hubbard liked Bell and undoubtedly tried to be kind and gentle. But she told him that she felt Mabel was too young to entertain thoughts of marriage. She believed her daughter needed time to mature, and she urged Bell to wait a year before telling Mabel herself of his feelings.

  Several days later, upon returning from one of his many business trips to Washington, Gardiner Hubbard was even more adamant on the subject. As Bell summarized in his journal entry of June 27, 1875:

  Called on Mr. Hubbard. Referred to my note of the 24th. Thought Mabel much too young. Did not want thoughts of love and marriage put into her head. If Mrs. Hubbard had not said one year, he would have said two.

  Having vowed to obey her parents’ wishes, Bell now found himself in an emotionally excruciating predicament. He wanted more than ever to spend time with Mabel, but was explicitly constrained from betraying his true feelings to her.