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

by Seth Shulman

  Piecing together available biographical information, and tracing the notes and references in several secondary texts on the telephone, I learned that Oberlin College held a number of Gray’s papers. I assumed at first that Gray must have left them to his alma mater, but then I stumbled across a different explanation. In an intriguing passage, Lewis Coe, the author of the 1995 work, The Telephone and Its Several Inventors, notes that

  One of Gray’s staunchest supporters came forth in 1937 in the person of Dr. Lloyd W. Taylor, head of the physics department of Oberlin College. Dr. Taylor was convinced that Gray was the real inventor of the telephone, even though Bell held the legal claim.

  According to Coe, Taylor, a careful researcher, had personally tracked down many of Gray’s original documents and brought them to Oberlin. Coe even reprints Taylor’s one published article about Gray as an appendix to his book. Entitled “The Untold Story of the Telephone,” it appeared in the December 1937 issue of the American Physics Teacher. As soon as I read it, I felt a rush of excitement familiar to any historical researcher hot on a promising trail.

  Taylor authoritatively addressed many nagging questions about Elisha Gray. First of all, Taylor validated my hunch about the importance of Gray’s liquid transmitter. As Taylor put it, Gray’s 1876 caveat

  was the first embodiment of the principle of variable resistance applied to the telephone, and as such possesses an historical importance which can scarcely be overemphasized.

  Taylor closely evaluated the timing of Bell’s and Gray’s respective technical accomplishments, and I was impressed by his diligent scholarship. Among other things, he explains clearly that the transmitter Bell used to call Watson on March 10, 1876, was very different from the instrument described and illustrated in Bell’s patent. Furthermore, Taylor documents that the type of liquid transmitter Bell first used had previously been described by Gray

  in a confidential document about the contents of which Bell subsequently acknowledged having received information.

  Bell acknowledged having learned of Gray’s caveat? This assertion certainly piqued my interest. Even more tantalizing, according to Lewis Coe, Taylor had been at work on a book-length manuscript about Gray when he died in a mountain-climbing accident on Mount St. Helens in July 1948. As far as I could tell, Taylor’s unpublished manuscript and its source materials had collected dust at the Oberlin College Archives ever since. I couldn’t help but wonder whether Taylor’s research materials might offer the same kind of vital link to Gray that Silvanus Thompson’s had previously provided for Reis’s research. I decided on the spot to make the trip to Oberlin to examine Dr. Taylor’s unpublished manuscript and source materials in person.

  HISTORIC AND FIERCELY independent Oberlin College dominates the sleepy Ohio town that shares its name, a half hour southwest of Cleveland. The college’s archive is housed atop a squat, fortresslike library at the heart of the campus, accessible only by a special, keyed elevator behind the reference desk. I was excited to reach the place, but it seemed like an awfully remote and unlikely venue to hold a potential key to the story of the telephone’s invention.

  Curator Roland Baumann, a soft-spoken, avuncular historian who oversees the collection, was warm and welcoming. He’s been on the job for almost twenty years. After that amount of time, he said, “when you walk in those stacks, the documents talk back to you.”

  Despite the archive’s quiet and sequestered air, Baumann says his office fields some 1,700 to 1,800 research requests per year. Many of them pertain, in one way or another, to Oberlin’s extraordinary history as the first college in the nation to accept women (since its founding in 1833) and African Americans (since 1835). For many years prior to the Civil War, in fact, Oberlin was the only institution of higher learning in the nation a black woman could attend. Not surprisingly, given that history, Oberlin continued, until well after the Civil War, to educate more blacks than any other college in America.

  Baumann and I talked about the papers I had come to see. Baumann said he didn’t know the particular documents well, but he did know that many of the most important materials about Gray were filed with Taylor’s papers. This, he said, reflected how Gray’s documents had come into the archive’s collection. The issue of “provenance,” which Baumann pronounced with a studied French accent, “is vitally important to historians, and especially to archivists,” he said. By way of explanation, he pulled a notebook off a nearby shelf to show me the archive’s accession data. He could tell me, he said proudly, when each group of documents had come into the collection and under what circumstances.

  “We need to keep records on the chain of custody of these resources because historians are always looking for ‘smoking guns.’ They need to know where that document or letter comes from to help judge its authenticity. As I try to tell the administration here, ‘we are all about evidence.’ But I’m not sure they really understand that.”

  Ken Grossi, Baumann’s assistant, produced three boxes of papers and two compact discs of digitized holdings in the sizable Taylor collection to get me started. I had come a long way to read Taylor’s manuscript. Wading through his papers to get to it, I learned a good deal about Taylor himself.

  As the former head of the physics department, Lloyd W. Taylor taught at Oberlin College for more than two decades, from 1924 until his death in 1948. Over the course of many years, he had become seriously preoccupied with Elisha Gray. Reading through his papers, it occurred to me that Taylor personally identified with Gray. Both had been modest, straitlaced midwesterners. Gray held a long-standing position at the physics department of the Oberlin faculty, giving lectures there occasionally. Gray had been a religious man and a teetotaler. So was Taylor, whose wife was prominent in Ohio’s temperance movement during the era of Prohibition. Whatever the cause of his interest, though, Taylor’s meticulous historical research and his technical knowledge as a scientist give his analysis a good deal of credibility.

  Taylor was convinced that Bell had plagiarized Gray’s liquid transmitter design. He arrived at this conclusion after noting that Bell hardly mentioned the possibility of a liquid transmitter in his 1876 patent. By Taylor’s generous count, Bell’s oblique references to it make up just eight out of a total of about 190 printed lines. Furthermore, Taylor writes,

  There is no suggestion anywhere that up to this time Bell had ever made, or contemplated making a liquid transmitter.

  Taylor’s analysis goes considerably beyond the controversy over the liquid transmitter, however. In closely investigating Gray’s and Bell’s receiver designs, Taylor concludes definitively that Gray

  made and publicly used several types of telephone receiver many months before Bell constructed his first one.

  Many historians contend that Bell had priority in his invention of the telephone, including the telephone receiver. Taylor’s careful analysis effectively refutes this view. With primary evidence, including his own tests on some of Gray’s original devices themselves, Taylor makes a convincing case that Gray’s priority is perhaps even more pronounced in his receiver designs than it is with the liquid transmitter. As Taylor explains, Bell was concerned with trying to make receivers that would respond to only one frequency in his multiplex telegraph; as a result, it was not until the late spring and summer of 1875 that Bell first attempted to construct anything that could be considered a modern, electromagnetic telephone receiver.

  Gray, meanwhile, had constructed and publicly demonstrated relatively sophisticated receiver designs for his musical telephone in 1874 and early 1875, a year earlier than Bell. As Taylor explains,

  Gray had made and exhibited to some hundreds of witnesses who were qualified to comprehend their principle and importance, four types of telephone receiver, all of which possess thin metal diaphragms and hence anticipated the design of the modern telephone receiver much more closely than did the receiver which Bell first devised in 1875.

  At this time, Gray, like Bell, had yet to figure out how to transmit intelligible
speech. Importantly, though, Taylor’s analysis shows that three out of four of Gray’s receiver designs were fully capable of receiving speech. As a result, he concludes, Gray had clear priority over Bell in his designs for both a receiver and transmitter. Speaking of the modern telephone receiver and the vital liquid transmitter, Taylor writes:

  Gray’s loss of credit for these two major contributions to the development of the telephone was quite possibly due in part to his own ineptitude as a tactician. As to the facts of his priority in both fields there is little room for controversy.

  12

  BAD CONNECTION

  TAYLOR’S MANUSCRIPT, MOSTLY complete but never published, was a scholarly and illuminating read, but his source material was little short of a gold mine. Conducting his research in earnest in the 1930s, Taylor contacted Gray’s descendants and gained access to many formerly unavailable documents. He seemed to have thrown himself into the project over the course of many years. He corresponded with a variety of people who had known Gray or otherwise been connected to the inventor, and he tirelessly wrote to encyclopedias and other publications in an attempt to resuscitate Gray’s reputation. In response to his efforts, the editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica even agreed to commission Taylor to write a new entry on Gray for inclusion in their section on telephone history.

  Perhaps most fascinating, Taylor retrieved a long-forgotten trove of Gray’s papers from the attic of a house where Gray had once worked. As Taylor’s collected correspondence reveals, when he first got word of these newly unearthed documents, he appealed to Gray’s relatives to allow him to bring the papers to the Oberlin Archives.

  Among the gems of the collection is a revealing letter to Gray from Alexander Graham Bell, complete with a hand-addressed envelope, dated March 2, 1877. As I pieced together later, correspondence between the two had begun several days earlier, when Gray requested permission to demonstrate Bell’s telephone design, along with his own, at a public forum, while offering to give Bell full credit for its design. While the initial query from Gray testifies to his gentlemanly decorum, Bell’s hasty reply by telegram denies Gray permission unless he is willing to repudiate comments that had been printed in the Chicago Tribune questioning Bell’s priority as the telephone’s inventor.

  In this follow-up letter at the Oberlin Archives, however, Bell apologizes for the earlier telegram in which he had lashed out at Gray. By way of explanation for his temper, Bell claims, with at least some exaggeration, that his priority on the telephone results from the fact that his patent documents for the telephone had been completed “for months” as he waited to file in England. He also explicitly says that he knew nothing about Gray’s work to construct a telephone for the purpose of transmitting vocal sounds. Elaborating on this point, Bell makes a most revealing disclosure. He writes:

  I do not know the nature of the application for a caveat to which you have referred…except that it had something to do with the vibration of a wire in water—and therefore conflicted with my patent.

  As of March 1877, Gray’s filing was still not a public document; it had never been published. In this letter, Bell admits to Gray, presumably inadvertently, that he had knowledge of Gray’s work—and how could that knowledge have been anything but illicit? What’s more, Bell knew the most important detail about Gray’s liquid transmitter design, namely, the use of a needle in water to convert sound waves to changes in electrical resistance. Bell’s admission offers solid corroboration to go with the sketch in his notebook that he had intimate knowledge of the details of Gray’s confidential caveat.

  How did he get it?

  There in the boxes of the Taylor Papers, I found an astonishing answer in a formal-looking document, penned in blue ink on roughly a dozen bound, lined sheets of thick paper, notarized and bearing multiple signatures. The document had evidently come into Gray’s possession at some point and thus into Taylor’s hands. I was thankful for Baumann’s care with regard to issues of provenance, because this document was a smoking gun if ever there was one. It was an affidavit dated April 8, 1886, signed in Washington, D.C., by Zenas Fisk Wilber, the patent examiner in charge of telegraphy. Wilber had personally handled Bell’s telephone patent and Gray’s caveat.

  In a clear, neat hand the document states:

  Zenas Fisk Wilber being duly sworn deposes and says:

  I am the same Zenas Fisk Wilber who was the principal examiner in the United States Patent Office in charge of a division embracing all applications for patents relating to electrical inventions, during the years 1875, 1876 and till May 1st 1877 about which latter date I was promoted to be Examiner of interferences; that as such examiner in the applications of Alexander Graham Bell, upon which was granted to him Letters Patent of the United States No. 174,465, dated March 7th, 1876, for “Multiple Telegraphy,” was referred to me and was by me personally examined and passed to issue.

  Wilber also acknowledges that he has previously made sworn statements about his role in the matters he is about to discuss. In none of his previous statements, he says, had he previously told the entire truth about the circumstances connected with the issuance of Bell’s telephone patent.

  In order that justice may be vindicated and injustice rectified, I have concluded to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth…. I am fully aware that it may place me in an awkward position with some of my friends and possibly before the public, that it may even alienate some of my friends from me, nevertheless I have concluded to do as above stated, regardless of consequences without the hope or promise of reward or favor on the one hand, and without fear of results on the other hand. This affidavit is consequently the outcome of a changed mode of life and a desire on my part to aid in righting a great wrong done to an innocent man.

  There, in a sequestered archive in Ohio, I was more than intrigued by the document before me. I was transported. The document continued:

  I am convinced by my action while Examiner of Patents that Elisha Gray was deprived of proper opportunity to establish his right to the invention of the telephone and I now propose to tell how it was done.

  Wilber explains that he was an alcoholic and that he owed money to Marcellus Bailey, the second partner in the law firm that filed Bell’s patent. He says that he had known Bailey for some thirteen years. They served in the same regiment and as staff officers of the same brigade commander in the Union Army during the Civil War. After the war, both Wilber and Bailey came to Washington. Wilber began work at the U.S. Patent Office and Bailey enrolled in the Columbian College Law Department (now George Washington University Law School), graduating in its first class, in 1866, and going on to a successful patent law practice.

  In addition to their close personal acquaintance, Wilber notes, he had borrowed money from Bailey on several occasions, even though the commissioner of the Patent Office had explicitly prohibited such arrangements between patent examiners and the attorneys with whom they worked.

  Wilber says that when he first saw the collision between Bell’s patent and Gray’s caveat, he followed the appropriate rules by initially suspending Bell’s application. After sending the suspension letter on February 19, 1876, however, Wilber says that Bailey visited him to ask about the situation. Feeling beholden, Wilber says that, in a flagrant violation of Patent Office rules, he told Bailey the facts about Gray’s caveat, thereby helping him to immediately craft a protest against the suspension on Bell’s behalf. Then, also out of a feeling of indebtedness to Bailey, Wilber says, he neglected to undertake a thorough investigation, as requested by the acting patent commissioner, Ellis Spear, to determine which document had been filed first at the Patent Office. Instead, Wilber says, he simply settled on the notion that Bell’s patent had arrived first.

  Wilber then states that, in an act of even more historic consequence, Bailey pressured him to let Bell see Gray’s confidential caveat during Bell’s visit to Washington on February 26, 1876. As he explains,

  Professor Bell called upon me in person at the office,
and I showed him the original drawing of Gray’s caveat, and I fully explained Gray’s method of transmitting and receiving. Prof. Bell was with me an hour, when I showed him the drawing and explained Gray’s methods to him.

  In the affidavit, Wilber even adds a diagram depicting the layout of the office showing where everything in his version of events had transpired. Wilber claims that Bell returned to the office at two o’clock in the afternoon that same day and, in the hallway outside his examiners’ room, presented him with a hundred-dollar bill. Wilber notes:

  I am fully aware that this statement will be denied by Prof. Bell and that probably the statements I have made as to my relations with Maj. Bailey and his influence will be denied, but nevertheless they are true, and they are stated, subscribed and sworn to by me while my mind is clear and my conscience is active and bent on rectifying as far as possible any wrong I may have done.

  I SOON DISCOVERED that Wilber’s affidavit is extremely problematic both as a legal and a historical document. First of all, Wilber’s sworn statements, made in conjunction with the congressional investigation into irregularities in Bell’s patenting of the telephone, occurred long after most of the legal cases challenging Bell’s patent had worked their way through the courts. Even if Wilber had come forth earlier, though, it wouldn’t have changed the fact that the patent examiner had made a number of contradictory sworn statements on the matter. In fact, between July 30, 1885, and the final one signed on April 8, 1886, Wilber executed no fewer than five separate affidavits, and several of them directly contradict one another. That fact alone, coupled with Wilber’s admitted alcoholism, would have made his confession all but worthless in court.