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

by Seth Shulman

  Even more intriguing is the evidence that Bell not only read or heard about Reis’s machine but that he saw it, perhaps as early as 1862, when he was fifteen years old. An 1886 article carefully tracing Reis’s work notes that one of his early model telephones was purchased and demonstrated that December by a dealer in a well-known Edinburgh shop handling scientific equipment. Although Bell had gone to live for several months with his grandfather in London around that time, Bell’s family was still based in Edinburgh. No concrete evidence survives about the matter in the voluminous Bell family correspondence, but one would imagine that Bell and his acoustically minded family would have been keenly interested in a well-publicized demonstration and sale of Reis’s dramatic, novel machine in their own city.

  Meanwhile, no imagining is needed to appreciate the fact that Bell received a firsthand demonstration of a Reis telephone in March 1875, almost a full year before filing his telephone patent. The incident occurred when Bell visited the laboratory of Joseph Henry at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. According to the standard Bell biographies, Henry, then one of the world’s eminent electrical researchers and a person who had played a major role in the invention of the telegraph, offered encouraging words when Bell paid him a call to demonstrate his early research on the multiple telegraph. In court, Bell admitted to having seen the device while visiting Henry’s office at the Smithsonian Institution, although he tried to downplay its significance. As he noted,

  Before March 7, 1876, I saw the complete Reis apparatus which Professor Henry had at the Smithsonian Institution. I had also read some publications referring to Reis, but I cannot say now what they were.

  All these connections, substantial and tenuous, leave little doubt that Bell was fully aware of Reis’s device, an invention that was famously finicky, but was widely known for years to have successfully transmitted music and speech. As Reis himself wrote in 1863 to William Ladd, a well-known instrument maker in London, in a set of instructions accompanying his Telephon:

  Any sound will be reproduced, if strong enough to set the membrane in motion.

  The extent to which knowledge of Reis’s work guided Bell’s thinking is unclear. There is no hard evidence, for instance, that Bell experimented directly with Reis’s telephone, as he did with many of the devices, such as the tuning fork sounder designed by Helmholtz. Still, at the very least, Bell’s knowledge of Reis’s work ought to have tempered his claims to being the first with a working telephone. But it did not. As Bell declared in one of the many court proceedings:

  I take the ground that all the experiments of Reis and others, and all the knowledge of persons skilled in the arts of acoustics and electricity, together with all the information contained in printed publications prior to March 7, 1876, as a matter of fact, failed to enable anyone to transmit intelligible speech with any apparatus at all, operated by electricity, until I showed how it could be done in my patent of March 7, 1876, No. 174,465.

  Amazingly, Bell seems to have prevailed with this self-serving view. On a key occasion in an early legal case when the issue of Reis’s priority came up and a demonstration in a U.S. courtroom was actually staged, no one present managed to get Reis’s instrument to successfully transmit speech.

  I wondered what to make of that failed courtroom demonstration, whether it lent credence to the possibility that Thompson and the many testimonials he collected overstated the case for Reis. How well did Reis’s machine work? There is no doubt that his device was finicky. But if the prevailing assessment of several experts is correct, Reis made a telephone in the 1860s that worked in spite of its incorrect conceptual reliance on the “make or break” conception spelled out by Bourseul. In communication via the telegraph, after all, the electrical circuit between the two ends of the communication is turned on and off and on in a pattern to spell out a message; hence, it is often called a “make or break” circuit. But such a connection cannot effectively transmit the sound of a voice. Rather, a working telephone (at least in Bell’s day, a century before digitization) required a constant connection in which sound waves from a human voice would, via some kind of transmitter, vary the resistance in a continuous electrical circuit.

  In his book, Silvanus Thompson argues that Reis must surely have possessed a working understanding of the principle we now call “variable resistance” in order to have built his machine. Thompson contends that Reis’s telephone itself displays such an understanding, even if Reis’s writings lack the vocabulary to effectively describe it.

  I wasn’t sure about Thompson’s assessment. Perhaps Bell, with his patent’s elaborate descriptions of “undulating current,” rightly deserved credit as the first to comprehend this principle. But I knew that Dave Pantalony would probably argue that all the theorizing in the world would be of little use compared with the obvious option of testing Reis’s device itself to determine how well it worked. After all, how much would Reis’s accomplishment be diminished if he had made a working telephone without a full command of the underlying principle on which it operated? It is commonplace for pathbreaking inventions—especially, say, in the pharmaceutical field—to precede a thorough scientific understanding of what makes them work.

  Despite the Reis telephone’s all-important failure in U.S. court, I thought I had read in Aitken’s book that the British Post Office in the 1930s had tested models of the Reis telephone and determined that they could, in fact, transmit intelligible speech. I asked Liffen about the matter over coffee in the employees’ lounge at the Science Museum’s warehouse, and the question seemed to make him uncomfortable. Eventually, he told me why.

  In September 2003, he said, he was looking through a file cabinet in the museum’s archives when he stumbled upon a document discussing the results of tests on the Reis telephone that had never been made public. In 1947, on the occasion of the centenary of Bell’s birth, the Science Museum in London had worked with the British firm Standard Telephones & Cables (STC) to conduct a detailed series of experiments on the museum’s Reis telephone. The company’s engineers judged Reis’s cigar-box receiver too weak to aid in their assessment, so they tested Reis’s transmitter with a modern, loudspeaker-type receiver. The STC engineers found that Reis’s finicky old transmitter worked perfectly. Next, simply amplifying the receiver, they found that it too received articulate speech clearly. Despite their initial intent to laud Bell on his 100th birthday, the report’s authors concluded, based on their tests, that Bell could not accurately be considered the first to have invented a telephone capable of transmitting speech.

  At the time, however, as Liffen explained, STC was negotiating a business deal with AT&T, the direct descendant of the original Bell Telephone Company. STC executives were evidently so afraid the study’s conclusions might upset their corporate deal that they shelved the report and prevailed upon the museum not to discuss the matter. Liffen’s predecessor at the Science Museum complained, but, presumably fearing to alienate a major corporate sponsor, he ultimately acquiesced in helping to hide the results. Despite the study’s historical and educational value, the museum made no mention of the experiment or the report. Once again, it seems, history conspired to deny Reis’s work the credit it deserved.

  “It was not the museum’s finest hour, I’m afraid,” Liffen noted sheepishly.

  11

  TAPPING THE PHONE

  THE LIBRARY AT the Dibner Institute generously allowed me to borrow most books in its collection for as long as I wished during the academic year. Some books, in its “vault” collection, however, were either so rare, old, or fragile that the library allowed access to them only in the reading room. Silvanus Thompson’s Philipp Reis: Inventor of the Telephone, published in London in 1883, was one such book. In my many hours poring over it, I thought a lot about Thompson’s vital role in spreading word of Reis’s achievement. His rare, aging volume seemed like a remarkably thin and fragile thread connecting Reis’s day to our own. Few copies of the book remain. Without Thompson, it is unclear how
much, if any, information about Reis would have survived to the present.

  Yet even with Thompson’s detailed and meticulous biography, it is easy to see how Reis’s circumstances limited the public attention and acclaim the humble schoolteacher received in his life and afterward. Reis was modest and relatively poor, and connected neither to those with political power nor to those with scientific expertise. And he died before his fortieth birthday.

  Still, what about Elisha Gray? If my hunch was right, Gray, with his liquid transmitter, was the first to knowingly incorporate the concept of variable resistance into his design, a vitally important development in the history of the telephone. Given such a contribution, I found it hard to understand how history might have come to slight Gray.

  He was, after all, one of the nation’s premier electrical engineers, well respected and well connected to the powerbrokers of his day. He kept a close eye on developments in the field of telegraphy, and had invented everything from an improved burglar alarm to a “telautograph,” a device we now know as a fax machine. Furthermore, by 1874, Gray was affluent enough to devote all his time to independent research and invention and to protect his work with the help of legal counsel. And he lived for many years after his pathbreaking work on the telephone—certainly long enough to have tended to his legacy.

  Gray’s lack of recognition was a mystery I found difficult to unravel, at least partly because a dearth of information has survived about him. I did, however, find some telling glimpses of Gray’s life and times. One came in a forty-three-page booklet—another of the Dibner’s “vault” holdings—commemorating a banquet held to honor Gray in 1878. Thrown by friends and admirers in his hometown, the affluent Chicago suburb of Highland Park, it was a lavish affair. Hundreds of guests attended, an orchestra played, and a host of flowery and long-winded speeches regaled the audience after the elegant sit-down dinner. Most notable was the banquet’s stated purpose: to laud Gray for his invention of the telephone. In his own day, at least, Gray seemed to have won some recognition.

  One Chicago newspaper editorialized:

  The citizens of Highland Park gave a banquet on last Friday evening in honor of Dr. Elisha Gray, the inventor of the telephone. …Dr. Gray has met the fate which has so often overtaken great discoverers, in the attempt made to deprive him of both the honor and profits of the achievement; but which, we are happy to say, will not be successful in this case.

  The evening’s toasts hit many similar notes. For instance, Gray’s friend, S. R. Bingham, a prominent Highland Park lawyer who helped organize the event, told the assembled guests:

  If the press and the public have been misled—either by the willingness of other men to wear borrowed laurels, or the reluctance of our modest friend to demand his own—it is high time that we give to the press and the public authenticated facts.

  Among the facts Bingham offered was a firsthand account of having learned of Gray’s “musical telephone” (which could transmit music but not yet intelligible speech) as early as the summer of 1874. In December of that year, Bingham recalled, he attended a public exhibition of Gray’s musical telephone at the Presbyterian church in Highland Park; astonished parishioners became the first sizable audience in America to listen to music electronically “piped in” from another room. At the time, Bell had barely begun his research on the telephone.

  The booklet about Gray’s banquet is also filled with excerpts from congratulatory telegrams that had arrived from all quarters to mark the occasion. Apparently, local friends like Bingham were not the only ones to credit Gray with the invention. In just one notable example, Western Union’s chief electrician, George Prescott, addressed his message to: “Elisha Gray, the inventor of the telephone and solver of the problem of the ages.”

  ONE OF THE pleasures I found to break the routine of working in the Dibner’s tranquil reading room was the chance for an occasional chat with the library’s research director, David McGee. A historian of science and technology with an impressive breadth of knowledge, McGee was irrepressibly cheerful and self-effacing. Hailing from Canada, he was also a self-described “Bell admirer.” Bell spent much of his time in his later years at his estate in Canada and is almost universally revered there. McGee liked to gently tease me that my research was likely to make me unpopular “back home” if I stressed the accomplishments of inventors other than Bell.

  Joking aside, McGee knew so much about Bell that he could eagerly and effectively rebut any but my most carefully researched doubts about Bell’s accomplishments. At one point, he even went to the trouble, in order to challenge some of the theories I had begun to develop, of typing up a detailed listing of Bell’s and Gray’s major, known actions between 1875 and 1877. It was a lucid and helpful document that must have taken him hours to compile; but, in characteristic fashion, McGee wrapped his gift with humor, playfully calling his document the “Bell Crime Labs Timeline.”

  McGee was poking light fun, of course, but his gibe also rang true. I was increasingly convinced that a crime had taken place—a blatant and immensely consequential one. And the actions of the victim—Elisha Gray—were particularly hard to understand. When Bell laid claim to an invention so nearly identical to Gray’s prior conception, why didn’t Gray cry foul?

  Bell admirers like McGee have emphasized, rightly, that Gray was too focused on improvements to the telegraph to appreciate the commercial potential of the telephone early on. To be sure, in 1875 and 1876, Gray’s attention, like Gardiner Hubbard’s, was directed intently upon the goal of commercializing the multiple-messaging telegraph. Perhaps because of this, Bell biographer Robert Bruce goes so far as to argue that

  in coming up with his telephone idea, Gray broke away more sharply from his current line of thought and research than had Bell. This fact adds probability to what was certainly possible as early as September 1875: that some general hints, if not details, of Bell’s new goal had reached Gray and vibrated in his mind like the sympathetic response of a tuned reed.

  THERE IS PLENTY of evidence that Bell and Gray kept tabs on each other’s research. But I was highly skeptical about Bruce’s inference, however poetically phrased, that Bell had led Gray to his research on the telephone. From what I had gleaned, the opposite was at least as likely to be true.

  According to Gray’s own account, his path to the telephone began early in 1874, when he found his nephew playing with some electrical equipment in the bathroom. At the time, many households had so-called vibrating rheotomes hooked up to the bulky batteries of the day, designed to administer electric shocks for treating everything from muscle pain to asthma. As was later shown, the treatments had no medical value, but in the 1870s “electrotherapy” machines were popular. Using such a setup, Gray’s nephew was “taking shocks” to entertain a small group of younger children (whether they were siblings, cousins, or friends is unclear from Gray’s account). For the demonstration, Gray’s nephew had hooked a wire from the machine’s induction coil to the zinc bathtub. He held the other lead in his hand, and then completed the circuit by rubbing his free hand against the tub.

  When Gray walked in on the show, he was fascinated: the vibrating induction coil emitted a sound when the boy touched the tub. Experimenting further along a line of inquiry once pioneered by Page, Gray found that he could change the tone emanating from the machine (what Page had dubbed “galvanic music”) by adjusting the rheotome’s frequency. Furthermore, he could make the sound louder by rubbing the metal tub harder and more quickly. Over the next few months, Gray experimented in earnest with the effect. Soon, he had built a strikingly modern version of a telephone receiver that could play musical tones. Gray used his discovery to transmit these sounds via a telegraph wire. In the spring of 1874, Gray showed the device to Western Union officials and to Joseph Henry and other scientists at the Smithsonian Institution.

  Word of Gray’s musical telephone was widely reported in newspapers that summer. As a practical inventor and entrepreneur who specialized in improvements to th
e telegraph, Gray naturally began to think of applications for his device. He quickly experimented to demonstrate that his receiver could pick up audible tones produced by signals carried for hundreds of miles over a telegraph wire. Like Bell, he realized he might be able to incorporate the phenomenon into a telegraph capable of carrying multiple messages simultaneously. And, much to Bell’s consternation, as demonstrated in his comment about the “neck and neck” race between the two, Gray patented his version of a harmonic, multiple telegraph slightly before Bell did in 1875.

  The idea of transmitting vocal sounds was a natural extension of Gray’s research. As I had learned from reading about Reis and others, the notion of a “speaking telephone” had been discussed for years in the scientific literature.

  Gray said that the specific impetus for his moving in that direction came in 1875, when he saw two boys in Milwaukee playing with a tin-can-and-thread telephone. When the boy at one end spoke into the can, the sound waves from his voice would mechanically travel along the string to the boy listening at the other end. As soon as he noticed it, Gray said, it dawned on him that the sound vibrations might be carried electrically. In his caveat of February 1876, leaping beyond the research of Reis and others, Gray became the first to describe a groundbreaking way to accomplish this.

  Gray’s idea for a liquid transmitter drew directly upon the concept of a “water rheostat” that his Western Electric Company had produced several years earlier. In this earlier invention, the resistance in an electric circuit could be decreased or increased by lowering or raising a platinum strip in a liquid solution.

  Still, the opinions of many historians like Bruce—highlighting Bell’s better-known work and belittling Gray’s contributions—convinced me that I needed to learn more about Gray for myself to determine the full extent of his claim to the invention of the modern telephone. Unlike Bell’s papers, though, which are superbly cataloged at the U.S. Library of Congress, documents pertaining to Gray’s work are far fewer in number and scattered around the country. Furthermore, in contrast to the countless biographies of Bell, little published work exists about Gray’s life and work.