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

by Seth Shulman

  With Bell’s understandable focus on academic experimenters in his speech at the American Academy, though, he neglects to mention a particularly important conceptual breakthrough: an 1854 article by the Belgian-born engineer Charles Bourseul. Bourseul’s article, “Transmission électrique de la parole” (“The Electric Transmission of Speech”), appeared in a French magazine called L’Illustration, offering what most historians believe to be the world’s first published description of the telephone. “I have,” Bourseul writes,

  asked myself whether speech itself may be transmitted by electricity—in a word, if what is spoken in Vienna may not be heard in Paris.

  Bourseul didn’t merely propose the notion of long-distance communication. He outlined the rudiments of how the system might actually work, describing an adaptation of the telegraph that he believed would allow it to transmit the human voice. As he explains:

  Suppose that a man speaks near a movable disk, sufficiently flexible to lose none of the vibrations of the voice, that this disk alternately makes and breaks the currents from a battery: you may have at a distance another disk, which will simultaneously execute the same vibrations.

  Aside from the faulty, telegraph-influenced notion that vocal sounds could be transmitted by “making and breaking” an electrical circuit, Bourseul presents a remarkably accurate description of the telephone’s underlying principle: that sound waves on one end of a wire could be carried via an electric current and replicated on the other. He never attempted to build the system he described, but his article was widely read in scientific and engineering circles, and it inspired a number of researchers to pursue the idea. At the time of its publication, Alexander Graham Bell was seven years old.

  “WELL, THERE’S SOMEONE up to no good.”

  I was crouched over my laptop computer at a Cambridge café when my colleague Dave Pantalony came by my table with a characteristic greeting. Pleased for the company, I asked him to join me.

  Pantalony, an energetic and jocular postdoctoral fellow, was spending the year at the Dibner Institute after receiving his Ph.D. in history from the University of Toronto. Passionate about historic machines, he had already done a stint as a curator of a major U.S. collection of scientific instruments at Dartmouth College and he hoped for more such opportunities in the future. He asked what I was working on. I told him about my efforts to tease apart the intellectual history of the telephone.

  “We’ve got to go together to inspect some of these early telephone devices,” he said eagerly. Enthusiasm was a Pantalony hallmark.

  “I’d love that.”

  I had spent enough time with folks at the Dibner to know that the field had long since fractured into two distinct camps: devotees of the history of science versus those who studied the history of technology. Although the distinction was hard for me to fathom, each group had its own associations, conventions, and journals. For his part, Pantalony was a strong proponent of the study of tools, instruments, and techniques. In a field dominated by philosophers tracing the development of theoretical knowledge, Pantalony took an almost archaeological approach. He believed that his colleagues would do well to pay more attention to scientific instruments and devices, rather than focus exclusively on documents.

  In the course of his doctoral research, Pantalony had found an interesting way to further this view by focusing on Rudolph Koenig, one of the most skilled and meticulous instrument makers of the nineteenth century. Pantalony documented how Koenig, with a high-profile shop in Paris, made a discernible mark on numerous scientific fields by building instruments for scientific giants throughout Europe and North America, from Hermann von Helmholtz in Germany to Joseph Henry in the United States.

  “The intellectual history of ideas can be like quicksand,” Pantalony said. “But the machines—the instruments themselves—they tell their stories in such a concrete way. It’s amazing how much you want to know is wrapped up in their design, materials, and construction.”

  We talked about a lot of things that afternoon, certainly more than we had in our many brief exchanges at the copy machine or office coffeemaker. And while we never did organize a joint visit to look at early telephone prototypes, I sought out Pantalony’s expertise on several occasions as my research progressed. More important, though, I tried to take to heart his straightforward approach of emphasizing the tangible.

  As a result of our chance encounter that day, I decided to take a trip to the Science Museum in London, which houses an unparalleled telecommunications collection that includes some of the world’s earliest telephone prototypes. The pilgrimage seemed a far cry from my initial stroll around Boston in pursuit of physical traces of Bell’s past. There was no escaping the fact that I had become deeply immersed into trying to unravel what I could about the telephone’s inception.

  When I arrived at the museum, John Liffen, curator of the communications collection, was my spry and knowledgeable guide. After meeting at his office in South Kensington, he whisked me away on an unforgettable journey to a vast warehouse on the outskirts of London. It was hard to keep up with both his whirlwind pace and his rapid-fire references to disparate topics in the history of technology. Liffen was encyclopedic, especially on details of the history of the telephone and telegraph.

  When we reached the vast, unmarked brick building, once a postal facility, Liffen flashed his badge and chatted with the guard at the entrance. Then, as I scrambled along behind him, he swiftly climbed two flights of stairs to the rooms containing early telecommunications equipment. Through thick fire doors, we entered a vast warehouse filled with tall rows of heavy-duty metal shelves. They held the largest and most astonishing array of items I have ever seen.

  We wove our way past many aisles. Some held aging architectural models of early factories and scientific instruments that looked like early vacuum chambers and static electricity generators. One aisle even featured a gangly and eerie assortment of historic prosthetic limbs made from wood, metal, and plastic. All told, it was a phenomenal graveyard of inventions, each a touchstone for little-known stories of human initiative and ingenuity. As a longtime casual collector of old tools and scientific instruments, I was enthralled by the surroundings. Despite regular visits, Liffen clearly sustained a similar passion.

  “I never want to leave once I get here,” he said.

  We finally arrived at a cavernous wing of the warehouse devoted to communications devices. Our pace slowed a bit and I noticed that Liffen began to gaze at the collection as we walked past, as though fighting the temptation to explore and digress from our intended focus on the telephone. He was a specialist on the early telegraph, particularly the rare, very early “needle telegraphs” designed by the British team of William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone. The Science Museum has an unmatched collection of these remarkable devices, and, as we walked by, Liffen couldn’t resist stopping briefly.

  Sitting side by side on a waist-high shelf were a half dozen beautiful and intriguing needle telegraph machines. Encased in polished wood, with hand-carved detail, they looked like strange, Victorian-era clocks that might have once adorned somebody’s mantelpiece. It was hard to imagine that, in their day, in the late 1830s, these radically new and avant-garde machines were the world’s very first commercial electric telecommunication devices. Predating the simplicity of Morse code, the needle telegraphs made use of a fabulously idiosyncratic scheme in which telegraphic signals moved compass needles to spell out words by pointing to letters on a dial. Each machine had five compass needles with twenty letters arrayed around them in a diamond-shaped grid. The positions of the needles indicated a particular letter on the grid. As for the six letters of the alphabet missing from the grid, Liffen explained with a chuckle, the sender was out of luck; those letters simply had to be omitted from messages.

  The needle telegraph machines were first employed for communication by trained technicians working at Britain’s newly developing railways. By 1838 they were used to send telegrams between London and outlying town
s. “On the one hand, given the advent of Morse code, these machines were obviously a dead end,” Liffen mused. “And yet, on the other hand, what an extraordinary accomplishment they represent. They really can be seen to have paved the way for every telecommunications device that came after them.”

  Around the corner, Liffen paused briefly to pull down a length of now-fraying cable. It was a piece cut from the first transatlantic telegraph cable, laid in 1858, opening up the prospect of telegraphic communication between Europe and North America. The humble-looking cable, a little over an inch in diameter, was the physical representation of a truly enormous development in the history of human communication, shrinking the time it took to send a message from America to Europe from some two weeks by ship to a matter of mere minutes. We were working our way chronologically through the history of telecommunications, and the next aisle was devoted exclusively to the telephone.

  I scanned the contents of the aisle as we approached, thinking immediately of Dave Pantalony’s energetic passion for the artifact and the almost overpowering assemblage of clues contained here about the telephone’s history. Floor to ceiling on either side of us were telephones and telephone-related paraphernalia. Some large pieces of switchboards caught my eye, as did a bright pink princess telephone from the 1950s. The museum’s collection even included the “Osborne telephone” that Bell used in 1878 to demonstrate his invention to Queen Victoria (who was then staying at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight).

  “I believe this is what you will be most interested in,” Liffen said finally, pulling a compact wooden box off a shoulder-high shelf. He handed me a device designed by a German schoolteacher called Philipp Reis in 1863, when Bell was sixteen years old. “This,” Liffen said, “is surely one of the very oldest telephones ever built.”

  I gingerly held the strange contraption to inspect it. Liffen was, of course, right. It was the item in the collection I had wanted most to see.

  PHILIPP REIS’S STORY is intriguing. Other inventors may well have built early telephones that predated Bell’s work, but none had a case as clear and well documented as Reis’s. He taught physics at the Garnier Institute in the town of Friedrichsdorf, Germany, until his death at the age of forty, and during his lifetime, he remained largely outside the German scientific and technical elite. According to several accounts, Reis was most likely inspired to begin his research on a speaking telegraph device after reading Bourseul’s article, either in its original 1854 version (Reis was fluent in French) or in a popular German translation published later that same year. Regardless of his inspiration, Reis also drew heavily, especially in his receiver design, upon the work of Charles Grafton Page. Reis had some rudimentary success sending sounds over telegraph wires as early as 1858, and dubbed his machine das Telephon from the Greek for “distance” (tele) and “sound” (phon), coining the term for the newfangled telecommunications device.

  Over the next few years, Reis made a number of improvements to his device; by 1861, he had a telephone prototype that could reliably transmit music and at least some speech. He demonstrated it widely but never sought a patent on his invention.

  Today, we know a good deal about Reis’s story mostly because Silvanus Thompson, a respected English physics professor at the University of Bristol, wrote a detailed, book-length monograph celebrating Reis’s work in 1883, some nine years after his death. It is unambiguously titled Philipp Reis: Inventor of the Telephone. Thompson examined Reis’s telephone devices and writings with the analytical eye of a scientist and concluded that they were produced by the true inventor of the telephone. Notably, Thompson even tracked down witnesses who had seen and heard Reis’s machine work during his lifetime.

  One such witness was Heinrich Friedrich Peter, a music teacher at the Garnier Institute who was particularly interested in Reis’s research. Peter visited Reis regularly in 1861, the year in which Reis first publicly demonstrated his telephone. Peter recounts that on October 26, 1861, he played the English horn while another colleague sang in a demonstration before a number of academics. He recalls that Reis’s colleagues read sentences from a work by Adolf Spiess entitled the Book of Gymnastics. Reis, listening at the receiver, repeated the sentences to the audience as he heard them. When audience members protested that Reis must surely have known the sentences by heart, Herr Peter recalls that he personally

  went up into the room where stood the telephone, and purposely uttered some nonsensical sentences, for instance: “Die Sonne is von Kupfer” (The sun is made of copper), which Reis understood as “Die Sonne ist von Zucker” (The sun is made of sugar) and “Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat” (The horse eats no cucumber-salad), which Reis understood [only] as “Das Pferd frisst.”

  Peter’s recollection is fascinating not only for its detail but also for what it shows of the limitations of Reis’s device. For instance, his receiver, which drew directly from Page’s research, was very weak and required the listener to place his or her ear up against the wooden box that held it. Even then, it was clearly hard to make out all the words. But Reis kept at it. One who witnessed his considerably improved model in action, according to Thompson’s testimonials, was Georg Quincke, a renowned professor of physics at the University of Heidelberg. Quincke writes:

  I was present at the Assembly of the German Naturalists’ Association (Naturforscher Versammlung) held in the year 1864 in Giessen, when Mr. Philipp Reis, at that time teacher in the Garnier Institute at Friedrichsdorf, near Frankfort-on-the-Main, showed and explained to the assembly the telephone which he had invented…. I listened at the latter part of the apparatus, and heard distinctly both singing and talking. I distinctly remember having heard the words of the German poem, “Ach! du lieber Augustin, Alles ist hin!” etc.

  Not surprisingly, the demonstration “astonished and delighted” the association’s members.

  The 1863 model that Reis demonstrated to Quincke and others was the same one Liffen had just handed to me. The transmitter was a finely crafted, polished square wooden box. Two such boxes stacked atop one another would be about the size of a half-gallon milk carton. Protruding at an angle off one side of the wooden box was a metal speaking tube. Recessed into the top of the box was a thin, round metal diaphragm that sat just below a V-shaped metal bracket holding an electrical contact point at its vertex.

  Liffen and I discussed the design. When the user spoke into the tube, it caused fluctuations in air pressure inside the box that would vibrate the metal diaphragm against the contact point on the bracket above. It was, in other words, a faithful realization of the machine Bourseul had envisioned a few years earlier. The reason it worked, however, was notably distinct from anything Bourseul had envisioned. When the machine was adjusted just right, the diaphragm would not “make and break” contact with the bracket but would, if correctly adjusted, remain in loose contact with it, thereby allowing the sound waves of the speaker’s voice to modulate the electric current from a battery and vary the resistance of the circuit.

  “Most people don’t believe that Reis fully understood what was going on in this device,” Liffen said. “And yet, remarkably, it ended up working just about as well as Bell’s model more than a decade later.”

  Reis demonstrated the 1863 model of his telephone fairly widely, and he sold at least seven machines to researchers in other countries. One, for instance, made its way to Stephen Yeates, a well-known instrument maker living in Dublin. Interestingly, Yeates not only successfully operated Reis’s machine but significantly improved it, completely redesigning the receiver. In fact, Yeates’s improved model, also part of the Science Museum’s early telephone collection, sat on the shelf right next to the Reis telephone.

  PANTALONY WAS RIGHT. The machines before me offered a refreshingly concrete starting point for any attempt to understand telephone history. I was holding in my hand a prototype reported to have transmitted music and speech while Bell was still a young teenager. Furthermore, it was distributed widely enough that knowledgeable practitioners
even improved upon it. If that were the case, then why has Reis’s contribution been virtually forgotten? More to the point: how much did Bell himself know about Reis’s work? After all, Bell had been intensely interested in this rarefied field for years, and had contacted and corresponded with Alexander John Ellis, Sir Charles Wheatstone, and many others in Britain who traveled in scientific circles that would likely have been familiar with Reis’s research.

  Sure enough, with a little digging, I established that Bell did know quite a bit about Reis and his telephone. Bell’s first public speech about the telephone at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences cites an article in which Reis discussed his telephonic research. Bell also cited a seminal article by Wilhelm von Legat, a Prussian engineer who described his experiments with Reis’s telephone, explaining its design in detail. According to Silvanus Thompson, these were merely two of no fewer than fifty contemporaneous articles published about Reis’s work. The chances are good that Bell read some of these in addition to the two he explicitly cited. For example, Bell could have learned all about Reis’s device from the 1867 textbook Electricity by Robert Ferguson at the Edinburgh Institute in his own hometown. Ferguson doesn’t just mention Reis in passing, he offers a picture of his telephone and a detailed two-page description of how the device operates.

  There is also evidence that Bell spoke with others about Reis’s work. In one important example, Charles Cross, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a colleague of Bell’s, recalled under oath that he believed he had spoken to Bell about Reis’s telephone on two occasions, including one as early as the spring of 1874, nearly two years before Bell’s telephone patent.