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

by Seth Shulman

  Shortly before Mabel’s planned departure to Nantucket, Bell’s promise was put to an upsetting test. On a lovely June evening, he was strolling in the garden at the Hubbard’s house with Mabel, her younger sister Berta, and an even younger cousin named Lina McCurdy. Berta and Lina were telling fortunes by pulling petals off a flower. When Bell’s fortune came up “love,” the girls teased him to confess who it was that had captured his heart. Flustered, but bound by his agreement to remain silent, Bell stiffly declined to answer. The dreadful result, Bell wrote later, was that he feared he had led Mabel to conclude he loved another and did not wish to tell her about it.

  Once Mabel departed for her vacation, Bell’s worry and regret about the incident grew to obsessive proportions. At the beginning of August, unable to bear it any longer, Bell went again to Mrs. Hubbard to announce his decision: he would go to Mabel in Nantucket and profess his love unless her parents explicitly forbade it. Mr. and Mrs. Hubbard tried to persuade him to wait at least until Mabel’s return. But, just then, Mary Blatchford got wind of the news and took it upon herself to apprise Mabel of the situation.

  On August 4, 1875, Mrs. Hubbard met once more with Bell. She explained that, just as she and her husband were hoping to discourage Bell again from acting precipitously, she had received a letter from Mabel which, she said, embarrassed her and left her “undecided how to act.” By way of explanation, Gertrude Hubbard read out a portion of her daughter’s letter to Bell. In it, Mabel asked pointedly whether Bell had requested her hand in marriage:

  I think I am old enough to have a right to know if he spoke about it to you and papa. I know I am not much of a woman yet, but I feel very very much what this is to have as it were, my whole future life in my hands.

  Most impressive to Bell was the maturity evident in Mabel’s letter. While she marveled at the prospect of Bell’s affections and said she wasn’t sure how she felt toward him, Mabel clearly relished the notion of making decisions for herself. As she wrote,

  Oh it is such a grand thing to be a woman, a thinking, feeling and acting woman. But it is strange I don’t feel at all as if I had won a man’s love. Even if Mr. Bell does ask me, I shall not feel as if he did it through love.

  Mabel’s apparent maturity bolstered Bell’s resolve. He realized that his discussions with Mr. and Mrs. Hubbard, however well intentioned, had been unfair to Mabel herself. He pointed out to Mrs. Hubbard that

  The letter which was read to me yesterday was not the production of a girl—but of a true noble-hearted woman—and she should be treated as such.

  As Bell put it, Mabel’s wishes alone “should in future guide my actions.” With that in mind, despite Gardiner Hubbard’s warning that he would “regret this new burst of passion,” Bell decided to go to Nantucket—with or without the Hubbards’ blessing.

  Traveling the whole day, Bell reached the Ocean House Inn in Nantucket by late afternoon. But a huge rainstorm made the island virtually impassable. So, in his hotel room, Bell penned a long, confessional letter to Mabel describing both his ardor and his promise to her parents to try to suppress his feelings until she was older.

  You did not know, Mabel—you were utterly unconscious that I had long before learned to respect and to love you…. I have loved you with a passionate attachment that you cannot understand, and that is to myself new and incomprehensible.

  The next day, Cousin Mary informed Bell that Mabel would prefer not to see him but would be happy to accept his letter. Bell graciously acquiesced, glad to have at least written of his feelings so openly and at such length. After the tumultuous voyage, Bell headed home, still uncertain of Mabel’s heart but feeling nonetheless unburdened.

  Finally, at the end of the month, after Mabel’s return to Cambridge on August 26, Bell got his long-sought chance to speak freely and privately with her. In the greenhouse behind her home, the two talked intimately and at length. Mabel told Bell she did not feel love for him or anyone—at least not what she described as the “hot” kind of love Bell had professed. But Mabel told Bell that she admired many things about him, did not dislike him, and welcomed the chance to get to know him better.

  Bell could hardly have been more relieved and elated by the news. That very evening he closed out his journal by chronicling his feelings about Mabel, explaining:

  Shall not record any more here. I feel that I have at last got to the end of all my troubles—and whatever happens I may now safely write: FINIS!

  BELL HAD DISPELLED his anxiety over his secret feelings for Mabel by bringing them into the open. But he had also, at this crucial juncture in his research, greatly complicated his business relationship with Gardiner Hubbard. There is little doubt of Bell’s sincere love for Mabel. It is evidenced clearly in the way it literally drove Bell to distraction in the summer of 1875 and, even more, by Bell’s later continued devotion to Mabel throughout the course of their eventual lifelong marriage. After the emotional summer of 1875, however, Bell had to worry not only about satisfying the hard-driving Hubbard in his telegraphic research, but also about staying in Hubbard’s good graces in the hopes that he might one day become his son-in-law.

  The task was not always easy.

  In the fall of 1875, after an extended and recuperative visit with his family in Canada, Bell returned to Boston resolved to pay more attention to his ongoing work as a teacher of the deaf. His decision, no doubt influenced by his father, stemmed at least in part from his financial situation. Sanders and Hubbard had been supporting Bell’s research and paying Watson’s modest salary. But Bell had never asked his backers to help cover his living expenses, despite the fact that his research had cut deeply into the time he had available to earn a living.

  Bell’s decision greatly displeased Gardiner Hubbard. “I have been sorry to see how little interest you seem to take in telegraph matters,” Hubbard wrote him that October, adding that Bell’s behavior was “a very great disappointment” and “a sore trial.”

  Bell explained his need for income. And yet, given his newfound status as a suitor of Hubbard’s daughter, he would not entertain any suggestion of a handout. As Bell wrote explicitly to Hubbard:

  You are Mabel’s father and I will not urge you to give—nor will I accept it if it is offered, any pecuniary assistance other than that we agreed upon before my affection for Mabel was known.

  Bell’s pride aside, Hubbard was acutely aware that speed was essential if Bell was to beat out his competitors with his new telegraphic invention. So Hubbard used all the leverage at his disposal. He heatedly told Bell that, if he wanted to marry Mabel, he must give up his teaching and devote himself full time to research on the telegraph.

  Well intended or not, Hubbard’s ultimatum ignited Bell’s temper and caused him to fire off an indignant response. As he wrote Hubbard,

  I shall certainly not relinquish my profession until I find something more profitable (which will be difficult) nor until I have qualified others to work in the same field.

  Should Mabel come to love him in the way he loved her, she would surely accept him in any profession or business, provided it was “honorable and profitable.”

  Despite those strong words, Bell did redouble his efforts on his telegraphic research. Hubbard’s bald threat may have been out of line, but Bell must surely have realized that a veiled version of it always remained: to further his relationship with Mabel, Bell would do best to carefully heed her father’s business advice.

  On November 25, 1875, Thanksgiving Day and the date of Mabel’s eighteenth birthday, the two decided to become formally engaged. Bell, of course, was elated. But the decision no doubt raised some practical concerns for him as well. Bell certainly recognized the lavish lifestyle to which Mabel was accustomed and the huge gap between that lifestyle and his own means to provide it. He had euphemistically alluded to the problem in his initial confessional letter to Mrs. Hubbard, when he noted:

  I know how young [Mabel] is and how many points of dissimilarity there are between us.

&n
bsp; To be sure, a paramount “point of dissimilarity” was the divergence between Bell’s and Mabel’s relative economic standing. That fact was exceedingly plain to Watson, who later wrote that

  Professor Bell had a special trouble all to himself…he had fallen in love, wanted to get married and didn’t have money enough.

  Mabel was “a charming girl,” Watson added, and he could easily see why Bell fell in love with her. But

  The important question with Bell was, where could he get the money that would enable him to marry?

  9

  INTERFERENCE

  SO FAR, THE STRANDS of evidence all seemed to point in one direction. Bell was frustrated and discouraged in his effort to build a functional multiple telegraph system. He saw himself in an uncomfortably tight, high-stakes race with Elisha Gray. He was beholden, both financially and emotionally, to his hard-driving business partner and prospective father-in-law Gardiner Hubbard. And he was desperate to succeed financially to win wealthy young Mabel Hubbard as his bride. All these well-documented circumstances gave Bell ample motive to take unfair advantage of Gray, his competitor in the race to secure exclusive rights to the telephone.

  Of course, establishing a motive is a far cry from proving complicity in a crime. The deeper I probed, the more I came to recognize that letters, contemporaneous accounts, and other primary sources offer powerful glimpses of past events, but paint a picture that is almost always incomplete. Motivations are often elusive, and the task of discerning them more than a century after the fact can feel almost impossible.

  Bell’s archive at the U.S. Library of Congress includes 147,000 documents—many of which are his voluminous personal correspondence. Yet despite the size of this trove of information, if Bell and his team had made a concerted effort to steal Gray’s telephone design and falsely claim the credit for its invention, they probably would not have written explicitly to one another about the plan. And if by some chance they did, they would have been unlikely to retain the record of such correspondence. No, they would certainly have handled the matter as secretively as possible and destroyed all the evidence they could of any such actions.

  How could I hope to overcome that obstacle?

  “It is not an easy job,” my friend and colleague Conevery Valencius counseled when I took up the issue with her, “but context is very important. You have to educate yourself enough to have the confidence to contextualize. For instance, in your case, it is valuable to know something about nineteenth-century letters, like the fact that, relative to today, there was tremendous circumspection and decorum in the way people expressed emotion.” Conevery’s office stood just down the hall from mine. Trained at Stanford and Harvard, she is an extraordinary historian, whose book The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land deservedly won an academic prize as the best environmental history of 2002. I had particularly sought out her help not just because of her credentials, but because of her disarming verve and lack of pretension. I had noticed at our group’s regular seminars that she asked some of the most incisive and direct questions, while still managing to remain unflaggingly constructive and encouraging about her colleagues’ research. In our small, rarefied group of researchers, Conevery, a native of Arkansas, often seemed to be the life of a very sedate party.

  As I tried to make sense of the information I had found so far about Bell, I arranged to meet Conevery in her office to get her advice about how historians move from conjecture to proof in their interpretations of historical events. She was at work on a project about early Americans’ understanding of geology; we sat amid large historical and topographical maps spread open on the floor. I told Conevery about my research and some of the pieces of evidence I had found. She modestly told me that she could suggest a number of colleagues who knew more about my material than she did, but I explained to her that it was not her factual knowledge I sought so much as her judgment as a researcher.

  “Well, I guess what I’d say is that reading carefully is the main job of a historian,” Conevery began. “And part of that means educating your own historical intuition so when you come across something unusual you can feel confident to say, ‘This document or letter or journal entry seems different.’”

  She offered an example of how intuition had paid off for her. In a close reading of the journals chronicling the explorations of Lewis and Clark, Conevery had spotted an intriguing passage recounting the fact that the legendary Indian guide Sacagawea—the only woman on the expedition—had become ill. Something about the passage seemed unusual to Conevery, and her historical intuition was especially piqued when she read Meriwether Lewis’s entry noting that Sacagawea’s illness occurred “in consequence of taking could.” She had read enough letters from the eighteenth century to know that “taking a cold” was sometimes a euphemism for becoming pregnant. Conevery’s hunch was that Sacagawea had a miscarriage. After finding supporting evidence, she wrote a paper along with a colleague offering this new interpretation. The theory helped explain many formerly mysterious things, such as why William Clark had inexplicably written that, if Sacagawea had died, it would have been the fault of her husband.

  “Sometimes, when you consider an alternative interpretation for a historical event, a lot of disparate pieces that never held together well seem to fall more neatly into place,” Conevery observed. “That said, though, as a historian you have to stick with and be true to your primary sources. They are your evidentiary core.”

  “In Bell’s case,” I told her, “I keep coming back to that incriminating sketch in his notebook. I could explain away many of my hunches about Bell’s possible motivations, but I can’t explain away that sketch.” I pulled the copies of Bell’s and Gray’s drawings out of my briefcase.

  “What I know is this: the transmitter design depicted in Bell’s drawing led him straight to a working telephone. I’ve tried, but I can only come up with one satisfactory explanation for its unmistakable likeness to Elisha Gray’s proposed invention: and that is that Bell copied it from memory. If that’s true, Bell must have seen Gray’s confidential patent filing during his trip to Washington at the end of February 1876. I feel certain about it,” I said. “But how can I hope to prove it?”

  Conevery mused on the question for a moment and then peered at me, smiling.

  “It seems like you’re really asking two questions,” she said. “First of all, my students often come to me and ask, ‘Who am I to challenge the received wisdom about a historical event?’ So I’ll tell you what I tell them: ‘That’s your job. It’s a big part of your job as a historian to interrogate your material and to trust your informed judgment about it.’ It sounds to me like a part of your question is asking about your own authority here, and I would say you just have to believe in that and investigate this thing as honestly and thoroughly as you can.

  “As for the more practical part, I might not be as much help. But it seems to me the key question you’ve laid out is a lot about patents. Bell’s access to his competitor’s material, from the sound of it, would likely have come either from his patent attorneys or someone at the Patent Office. If it were me, I’d probably start with the official documents and surviving supporting material about the patenting process itself.”

  I WAS GRATEFUL for Conevery’s vote of confidence and her research advice. The patent angle was an obvious lead, and many of the documents to follow up on it were readily available. My natural starting point was to compare the actual patent claims filed by Bell and Gray on February 14, 1876. The distinction between them is stark indeed.

  The caveat filed by Elisha Gray on February 14, 1876, is entitled “Instruments for Transmitting and Receiving Vocal Sounds Telegraphically.” After the boilerplate introduction listing Gray’s name and address, the caveat opens clearly and directly:

  It is the object of my invention to transmit the tones of the human voice through a telegraphic circuit, and reproduce them at the receiving end of the line, so that actual conversations c
an be carried on by persons at a long distance apart.

  Now consider U.S. Patent No. 174,465—the famous telephone patent—filed by Alexander Graham Bell on the same day. Bell’s patent is entitled “Improvements in Telegraphy.” There is no question about its thrust: this patent describes Bell’s efforts to create a telegraph system capable of sending multiple messages at the same time. As the patent states,

  My present invention consists in the employment of a vibratory or undulatory current of electricity, in contradistinction to a merely intermittent or pulsatory current, and of a method of, and apparatus for, producing electrical undulations upon the line wire.

  After describing the benefits of this undulatory scheme in detail, Bell’s patent explains:

  Hence by these instruments two or more telegraphic signals or messages may be sent simultaneously over the same circuit without interfering with one another.

  In addition to this main purpose of the invention, however, Bell also notes:

  I desire here to remark that there are many other uses to which these instruments may be put, such as the simultaneous transmission of musical notes, differing in loudness as well as pitch, and the telegraphic transmission of noises or sounds of any kind [emphasis added].

  Remarkably, this passage discussing “the telegraphic transmission of noises” is as close as the main body of the patent’s text comes to describing a modern telephone. It makes no specific mention of transmitting speech—likely because, at the time of filing, Bell had no machine capable of doing so.