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

by Seth Shulman

  In typically meticulous fashion, however, Lloyd Taylor analyzed all of Wilber’s extant statements and even offered several of them in an appendix. He shows that Wilber’s affidavits are not as contradictory as they might first appear. As Taylor explains, most of Wilber’s statements prior to his final affidavit merely leave out parts of a story he ultimately divulges. For example, all except one of Wilber’s statements at least mildly charge that Bell and his lawyers engaged in fraudulent activity. Wilber’s sworn statement of October 10, 1885, for instance, explains how Bell’s lawyers manipulated the normal delivery process to make it appear as though Bell’s application had reached the Patent Office before Gray’s did.

  One statement by Wilber, made on October 21, 1885, does take a notably different tack in defending himself against charges of wrong-doing, a fact that would certainly seem to undermine his credibility. Nevertheless, months later, in his final affidavit on April 8, 1886, Wilber explains the circumstances. On October 21, he says, a lawyer for the Bell Telephone Company had sought a statement from him. At the time, Wilber contends,

  my faculties were not in their normal condition and I was in effect duped to sign it, not fully realizing then, as I do now, the statements therein contained. I had been drinking, was mentally depressed, nervous and not in a fit condition for so important a matter.

  To be sure, Wilber, an alcoholic and an admittedly corrupt government official, is not the upstanding witness one might hope for to provide a definitive account of such a matter. His track record in making incomplete and contradictory statements raises even more questions about his reliability as a source. Nonetheless, it is hard, after reviewing Wilber’s statements, not to feel swayed by the heartfelt and confessional quality of his final affidavit. Zenas Wilber stood as the pivotal insider with the ability to facilitate Bell’s plagiarism. He certainly had nothing to gain from divulging such an incriminating story. More important, though, Wilber’s detailed final accounting of events, offered in April 1886, dovetails so closely with a veritable trove of other circumstantial evidence that it cannot be easily discounted. It offers, for instance, the first plausible explanation I had found for how a drawing of Gray’s liquid transmitter wound up in Bell’s notebook just days after his return from Washington, D.C.

  As for the provenance of the document, Taylor notes that he found it himself in 1933 in the attic of Elisha Gray’s old laboratory in Highland Park, Illinois. When he discovered it, Taylor explains in his notes, the original of Wilber’s last affidavit had a slip of paper clipped to it with the following comment written in pencil in handwriting he believed to be Elisha Gray’s:

  Extract from a letter dated Aug. 24, 1889 from a friend of Wilber’s (when boys) just after Wilber’s death.

  Dedicated sleuth that he was, Taylor even located the letter Gray’s note referred to. It had been stored separately in the attic of Gray’s house in Highland Park, and was first found by Frederick W. Cushing, a friend of the Gray family. The letter, dated August 24, 1889, had been sent to Gray by a Major Marion Van Horn after Wilber’s death, presumably along with the affidavit itself. The final lines of Wilber’s affidavit explain the situation:

  I have thus concluded after full frank consultation and conversation with my old college mate, comrade in arms and long time friend, Major Marion D. Van Horn and I shall entrust this document to him, hoping and trusting that I may yet be able to repair in some degree the wrongs done and I stand ready and shall always be ready and willing to verify this statement before any court or proper tribunal in the land.

  In the letter, addressed to Gray care of his company address, Van Horn stated that he felt Gray should have the original of the document. His letter ends:

  In conclusion I will state that Mr. Wilber, whether drunk or sober, always maintained that his [final] affidavit is a true story!

  13

  ON THE LINE

  WILBER’S AFFIDAVIT, PUBLISHED in The Washington Post on May 22, 1886, prompted a swift and adamant public denial. Three days later, on May 25, the newspaper printed Bell’s sworn retort:

  So far as my personal acts or knowledge are concerned I know that all proceedings in the filing and prosecution of the application for my part and in the grant of it were free from fraud and trickery and honest in all respects; and I believe that all the acts of others concerned were also in all respects honest.

  Bell categorically denied most of Wilber’s specific allegations. He said he had never given Wilber a hundred-dollar bill or any payment. And he added flatly:

  Mr. Wilber did not show me Gray’s caveat or the drawings of it or any portion of either.

  Wilber’s affidavits, coming nearly a decade after the fact, never played a role in any of the legal challenges to Bell’s claim to the telephone. But Wilber’s final affidavit, in particular, bears a close reading alongside those numerous other occasions when Bell spoke specifically about the matter.

  On several occasions, Bell simply denied having had any knowledge whatsoever of Gray’s caveat. One such comment, for instance, came late in Bell’s life, when his son-in-law Gilbert Grosvenor sought to write his authorized biography. Grosvenor embarked on the project in 1905 and pursued it for over a decade. During that time, he also served as the editor of National Geographic magazine and, given this and many other duties, he never managed to complete the book. Nevertheless, the Library of Congress contains one fascinating document, dating most likely from around 1910, in which Bell and his wife Mabel each offer extensive typed comments in response to an early, fragmentary draft from their son-in-law. Referring to Grosvenor’s handling of the controversy surrounding Gray’s caveat, Bell writes:

  I knew that some interference with my patent had been declared through some misunderstanding—but this interference had been withdrawn before I reached Washington, and I could not find anything out about it, as a caveat was a confidential document. I shrewdly suspected Gray, for we were working on parallel lines in developing musical telegraphy at the time that the transmission of the human voice was concerned…. While I feared Gray might have struck vocal sounds in his caveat—I knew nothing of the contents of the documents until Gray himself referred to the matter in his letter asking permission to exhibit my apparatus [emphasis added].

  Of course, having previously reviewed the 1877 correspondence between Bell and Gray, I knew that Bell must have had some knowledge of Gray’s caveat because he wrote that he believed Gray’s claim had something to do with the “vibration of a wire in water.” Furthermore, as always, the picture of Gray’s device in Bell’s notebook nagged at me. After all, it had been drawn almost immediately upon Bell’s arrival home in Boston after having met with Wilber, Pollok, and Bailey in Washington. For me, Bell’s sketch hung like a cloud over all the various iterations of his story, casting many of his claims into deep shadow.

  Continuing to look closely into the matter, I found ever more inconsistencies. Perhaps the most troubling occurs in one of the first telephone patent cases, the Dowd case of 1879, which ultimately led to a historic settlement between the fledgling Bell Telephone Company and the established telegraph giant Western Union. In response to questions, Bell’s testimony offers a strikingly different version of events—one significantly closer to the story Wilber recounts in his final affidavit. Speaking under oath, Bell admits that he did discuss Gray’s caveat with Wilber. By way of explanation, Bell contends that, during his visit to the patent office in February 1876, Wilber had pointed to a particular paragraph in Bell’s own patent application to explain the overlap between his and Gray’s claims. According to Bell,

  As I knew nothing of the matter, I asked the Examiner what the point of interference had been. He [Wilber] told me that a caveat was a confidential document, and therefore declined to show it to me, and I did not see the caveat nor any part of it, but the Examiner indicated in a general way the point of interference by pointing to a paragraph in my application of February 14, 1876, with which I understood him to say the caveat had conflicted [empha
sis added].

  In particular, Bell says,

  It was a paragraph in the body of the specification, and read as follows: “Undulations are caused in a continuous voltaic current by the vibration or motion of bodies capable of inductive action; or by the vibration of the conducting wire itself in the neighborhood of such bodies…. The external resistance may also be varied. For instance, let mercury or some other liquid form part of a voltaic circuit, the more deeply the conducting wire is immersed in the mercury or other liquid, the less resistance does the liquid offer to the passage of the current.”

  The paragraph Bell mentions in his testimony—the one he says Wilber pointed to—does seem to anticipate the principle, now known as variable resistance, that makes Gray’s transmitter work. With its reference to a wire immersed in a liquid, it also appears to anticipate the very method used in Gray’s liquid transmitter. Like so many other aspects of the telephone patent saga, it seems suspiciously coincidental that Bell would have independently invented the very mechanism that made Gray’s telephone work, especially because virtually nothing in Bell’s laboratory notebook suggests that he had experimented with the notion prior to filing his patent application.

  Nevertheless, taking Bell at his word that Wilber had only pointed out a paragraph in Bell’s own patent, the passage above still stands as a most remarkable admission. In it, Bell acknowledges under oath that he received specific, confidential information about Gray’s work before he had ever successfully transmitted intelligible speech via the telephone.

  Given the benefit of hindsight, Bell’s account of the hint Wilber gave him appears even more questionable in light of information that emerged in the Dowd case: in Bell’s original file copy of his patent application, the particular paragraph in question regarding the concept of so-called variable resistance—the one Bell claims Wilber pointed to—is written into the margin of the document, presumably added sometime after the rest of the application had already been written.

  Once again, because truth is, as they say, stranger than fiction, I offer below a picture to persuade the skeptical. Again, this version of the patent application, from the Library of Congress, is Bell’s original file copy. The version of Bell’s patent that went to the U.S. Patent Office was copied over by a professional copyist in Pollok & Bailey’s office before being formally submitted. In this original version, however, a paragraph is written into the left-hand margin seemingly in Bell’s handwriting. The passage contains Bell’s reference to variable resistance—the seminal claim that made the telephone possible and that ultimately swayed the courts to uphold Bell’s patent against the many legal challenges it faced in its first decade. This is also the paragraph Bell claims Wilber pointed out to explain where his application had conflicted with Gray’s caveat.

  Call it historical intuition, or just a journalist’s horse sense, but, to me, Bell’s testimony simply contains too many overlapping coincidences to be convincing. Given the central importance of variable resistance, is it plausible to believe that Bell left such a crucial passage out and then independently added it into the margin as an afterthought? As the British engineer John Kingsbury put it as early as 1915:

  Strange, isn’t it, that an inventor should omit till the last moment…the essential feature of his invention?

  Two decades later, William Aitken echoed the sentiment, likening Bell’s omission of the variable resistance clause to writing a play “without the leading character.”

  So, when did Bell pen the crucial addition into his patent application? The question goes to the heart of the central mystery: namely, how much did Bell independently know about variable resistance and how much did he actually learn from Gray’s caveat?

  The question leads into one of the deepest thickets yet.

  BELL SPENT THE evening of January 12, 1876, at the Hubbard’s house in Cambridge. That evening, Mabel, now Bell’s fiancée, was feeling ill. Her mother and sister were away for a social engagement and her father was attending business in Washington. As a result, Bell stayed at the house that night to make sure, as he put it in a letter to Gardiner Hubbard, “that burglars did not enter.” While Mabel rested upstairs, Bell worked late into the night in Hubbard’s mahogany-paneled library, finalizing his patent application. Bell had been toiling to complete the patent material since October, and had labored especially hard at the job over the past several weeks. He mentioned it frequently in his correspondence during the period.

  January 12 was, according to Bell, a crucial night in the telephone’s development because it represented his last chance to finalize his latest patent application—the one that would come to be known as the telephone patent. He had agreed to send it to Hubbard and Pollok in Washington the following day.

  Because of the many irregularities surrounding Bell’s patent, and the many lawsuits he would face, Bell had numerous opportunities to recount under oath his actions of that night. It was then, he says, on the eve of sending his application to Pollok & Bailey in Washington, that he realized he had inadvertently left out a crucial element—his conception of variable resistance. That is why, Bell claims, the concept is added in a lengthy note in the margin of the application and in an additional patent claim appended to the original text. As Bell explained in an 1879 deposition:

  Almost at the last moment before sending this specification to Washington to be engrossed, I discovered that I had neglected to include in it the variable-resistance mode of producing electrical undulations.

  The following day, Bell sent the patent application to Gardiner Hubbard to give to the attorneys in Washington. A copyist in Pollok & Bailey’s office reportedly drew up a “fair copy” for Bell to sign and notarize on January 20. Then, as the plan went, the application would sit, ready to be formally filed at the Patent Office as soon as Bell received word from George Brown, who was carrying it to England to file there first.

  In a letter to Mabel on January 19, Bell noted that Hubbard, Pollok, and Bailey had favorably received his application and that he still needed to finalize the papers for Brown to take to England. Bell wrote:

  I have so much copy work to do that I have employed a copyist but must still do a good deal myself—as I require three copies of each of my four specifications. One for the U.S. Patent Office, one for George Brown, and one for myself.

  The four specifications Bell refers to were all to be included in the package of patent applications he was readying for Brown, including: his first two U.S. patent filings on multiple telegraphy; his new patent application on “undulating currents” (the telephone patent); and a fourth application (never formally filed) for a device Bell called a “spark arrester,” designed to suppress sparks in telegraphic and other electrical devices.

  What is especially noteworthy in this passage, though, is Bell’s explanation that he is, at this date, in the process of making three identical copies of each of the documents.

  Five days later, on January 25, 1876, Bell, Hubbard, and Pollok met with Brown in New York City. Brown was to depart by ship to England the following day, carrying with him the package containing Bell’s original, handwritten patent applications. At the meeting, Bell and Brown formalized their agreement with one another, including the provision that Bell would not file his new patent application in the United States until he had heard from Brown.

  Here the mystery—already murky—deepens considerably. George Brown’s copy, presumably one of the original three Bell was copying on January 19, ultimately resurfaced in 1885, when the U.S. government was preparing a case to consider annulling Bell’s telephone patent on charges that it had been fraudulently won. As it turned out, Brown’s copy had been retrieved by Bell’s legal team years earlier, in 1878, for the Dowd patent case, but it had never been officially logged among that case’s documents, let alone presented as evidence. The disquieting fact is this: Brown’s copy of Bell’s patent application contains no marginalia about variable resistance, no additional patent claim about variable resistance, and no mention of
a wire immersed in liquid. All these items, so essential to Bell’s ultimate success in court, are simply left out of the Brown version entirely. As a result, the version reads much like a straightforward patent application for a multiple telegraph with only the vaguest references to the possibility of transmitting vocal sounds.

  When eventually confronted with this discrepancy, Bell and his legal team argued that the Brown copy that surfaced must have been an earlier draft that Bell had given to Brown months before in Canada. But the note accompanying Brown’s copy when he sent it to Bell’s legal team in 1878 in preparation for the Dowd case leaves little question about the matter. Brown states:

  I sailed for Liverpool on the Russia from New York on Wednesday 26, January 1876—received from Professor Bell the papers I have initialed shortly before sailing. They have never been out of my possession since then until now returned to Professor Bell.

  —George Brown, Toronto, 12 November 1878.