by Seth Shulman
Over the course of the year, I discussed the issue of historical myths on a number of occasions with George Smith, the director of the Dibner Institute, who was particularly interested in the topic. One day, he dropped by my office to share a draft of a preliminary proposal he had drawn up in discussions with a public television station for a program tentatively entitled “Myth versus Reality in the History of Science.” The proposal featured a number of examples, but one particularly caught my eye. Drawing specifically upon his expertise about the life and work of Sir Isaac Newton, Smith used the example of the myth which suggests that Newton’s theory of gravity was sparked by an apple falling in his mother’s garden. In one common version of the tale, believed to have originated in an account in 1839, more than 150 years after the fact, the apple story is embellished. In this still commonly repeated version, the apple didn’t just idly inspire Newton’s imagination, but even “struck him a smart blow on the head.”
Smith explained emphatically that there is absolutely no evidence in the historical record to suggest that Newton got his inspiration from an apple, not to mention getting hit by one. According to the myth, the event was supposed to have occurred some twenty years prior to Newton’s publication of his theory of gravity. But historians like Smith who have studied Newton’s papers and correspondence generally agree on the sequence of steps that led to Newton’s conception of gravity, and it involves no reference to falling fruit of any kind. Nonetheless, as Smith writes in his proposal,
The apple myth has become part of Western culture. The myth that Newton had his theory of gravity twenty years before publishing it continues to appear in textbooks, including a recent otherwise good text on general relativity.
Smith said he suspected that, when it came to topics like Newton’s apple, science textbook authors deserved a good deal of blame. “Textbook authors tend to put great effort into avoiding falsehoods in their portrayal of science,” he said, “but they often seem to simply recycle their historical remarks from other textbooks without bothering to check them against actual historical texts.”
SMITH’S STORY ABOUT the persistence of Newton’s apple gave me an idea for how I might retrace the way the story of the telephone has been told over the years. Tapping the extraordinary and still-emerging power of full-text book searching offered by Google and Amazon. com, I decided to search for incidences of the phrase “Watson, come here.” That way, I figured, I could quickly locate a good sampling of the published iterations of the well-known tale of the telephone’s invention.
Within seconds, my initial Google search yielded more than three hundred results, culling to my computer screen passages from books of every kind—from electronics textbooks and obsolete technical encyclopedias to children’s stories. Aside from a few stray passages from novels—including some by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—that contained a character named Watson, the results offered a kaleidoscopic collection of the way Bell’s “eureka moment” has been disseminated in print. Clicking through these entries, I could quickly skim the pertinent passages from many of these books. The first thing I noticed is that the iconic tale of Bell calling to Watson is often told in such a stripped-down, abbreviated way as to render it all but meaningless. Consider, as a prime example, Irving Fang’s textbook, A History of Mass Communication (1997), which notes:
On March 10, 1876, Bell said to his assistant from an adjoining room, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you,” and the telephone was born.
Passages like this can be taken as nothing more than an empty referent, unless we are to believe that Bell’s phrase somehow conjured the telephone into being. Tipping his hat to Bell, the author simply assumes we already know all about its invention.
Beyond these frequent passing mentions, the next surprise was the number of obvious errors that crept into the “Watson, come here” narrative. A wonderfully pretentious volume, The Nobel Book of Answers (2003), offers Nobel laureates’ answers to “some of life’s most intriguing questions.” Gerd Binning, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1986, does a serviceable job answering the question: “How Does the Telephone Work?”—with the exception of this rather stunning vignette:
According to popular accounts, the long-awaited breakthrough came only by coincidence: Bell’s assistant, Watson, had spilled some acid in the lab next door. In his distress he yelled, “Mr. Bell, come quickly!” Seconds later the door opened and Bell came hurrying in—he had heard his colleague, not through the wall, but through the experimental device that connected both rooms.
Binning’s error—describing Watson as the one doing the calling—was no doubt a simple mistake made, just as George Smith had described, because the author hadn’t bothered to double-check the history. More often, though, the errors were subtler, revealing deeper truths or points of controversy. For instance, a surprising number of texts got the date wrong. Ian McNeil, for example, writing in the Encyclopedia of the History of Technology (published by Routledge in 1996), recounts that
On 7 March 1876 [emphasis added] the famous command, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you!” was uttered by Bell to his assistant, who instead of only hearing Bell’s voice from the other room, heard it over the primitive induction device with which they were experimenting.
Curiously, the same incorrect date for this incident (March 7, as opposed to March 10) appeared in at least a half-dozen texts I reviewed, such as Scholastic Books’ Famous Americans: Twenty-two Short Plays for the Classroom (1995), in the form of a theatrical skit to be read aloud by elementary school students. Act 2, Scene 1 of the skit about Bell is presented as follows:
Narrator: On March 7 of the following year [1876], [emphasis added] Bell and Watson were experimenting in separate rooms, trying out a new transmitter. Suddenly, Bell spilled battery acid on his clothing.
Bell: Mr. Watson, come here! I want you!
Watson (rushes into room): Mr. Bell! It works! I heard your voice perfectly over the wire! You said, “Mr. Watson, come here! I want you!”
Bell: So human speech can travel by wire after all! My telephone works!
What makes these particular errors consequential is that March 7, 1876, is the day that the U.S. Patent Office officially granted Bell’s telephone patent. The texts that contain this particular error all neatly obliterate the dissonant fact that Bell had yet to successfully transmit intelligible speech on the day he received his patent.
The location of the Bell and Watson experiments is also frequently mistaken, and not just because, as I had learned on my Boston sojourn, the cityscape has changed. Rather, I traced the origin of this family of errors at least as far back as a widely read book from 1910 by Herbert Casson, The History of the Telephone. In his account, Casson forgets (or perhaps never knew) that, by the time of the “Watson come here” moment, Bell and Watson had moved their operations from the Williams shop at 109 Court Street where, upon occasion, Watson had tried to listen to Bell’s telegraph prototypes from the basement while Bell toiled in the attic. Of course, we know from Bell and Watson’s accounts that the scene occurred in adjoining rooms in Bell’s newer laboratory, in a boardinghouse at 5 Exeter Place. Casson, however, describes it this way:
“Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” Watson, who was at the lower end of the wire, in the basement, dropped the receiver and rushed with joy up three flights of stairs to tell the glad tidings to Bell. “I can hear you!” he shouted breathlessly. “I can hear the words.”
Casson’s error, introduced nearly a century ago, seems to have spawned confusion that lives on in many modern texts. The fourth edition (2001) of the textbook Understanding Telephone Electronics, for example, explicitly places the scene at 109 Court Street in Boston. So do at least four other texts I found. Many others leave out the location but retain the erroneous “upstairs-downstairs” element of the story. Consider, for instance, how Alexander Graham Bell (On My Own Biographies), a 2001 children’s book about Bell for beginning readers, preserves Casson’s confusion:
A pile of to
ols, wires, and battery acid surrounded him. Suddenly, Aleck spilled some acid. The acid burned. Aleck cried out, “Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you.” He forgot that Watson was too far away to hear him. To Aleck’s surprise, Watson came running upstairs. He burst into the room. “Mr. Bell, I heard you!” he said. “I heard every word!”
Were all historical accounts riddled with such problems, I mused. If historians and writers of every stripe could not agree on the place, date, or circumstances of a well-known and well-documented incident like the telephone’s invention, how much credence should we give to the standard renditions of any historical tale?
I was so busy puzzling over the odd inconsistencies in this story that I nearly overlooked something far more consequential: Casson’s bungled 1910 account was the earliest version of the famous scene that showed up in my search.
Looking further, I realized that, however unlikely it seemed, there were no contemporaneous versions of this story, no speeches about it, no newspaper accounts from the 1870s. Scouring all my sources, I discovered that Bell himself never publicly told this now-famous story. The discovery seemed hard to believe until I realized that dreaded Whiggism had crept into my analysis. Just as David Cahan had warned, I was reading history backwards. The scene is so closely associated with the telephone today, I found it hard to accept that it was virtually unknown at the time. After all, it does purport to recount the world’s first conversation over the telephone.
By all accounts, Bell loved nothing more than holding forth about his scientific research, and this was certainly his greatest breakthrough. It was hard to imagine that Bell would never have regaled people with the story of his first telephone call. Yet, as I concluded after a careful review, the story we now quote would probably be all but unknown today if it hadn’t been authoritatively and winningly recounted by Watson in his autobiography, Exploring Life, published in 1926—four years after Bell’s death.
The more I thought about it, the more consequential Bell’s silence seemed to be. In the story as Watson eventually recounts it, Bell calls out urgently after spilling acid on his pants. Even the basic storyline evokes Bell’s work with a liquid transmitter. Did Bell withhold any public mention of his success with a liquid transmitter to keep Elisha Gray in the dark about his foul play? Was that why he never told the story of his first success in transmitting intelligible speech? I wasn’t sure yet, but it certainly seemed like a plausible explanation.
The explanation gained further credence when I learned, to my amazement, that in the 1879 Dowd case—the only occasion when the claims of Bell and Gray came directly into conflict in court—Bell made no mention of his first transmission of speech with the liquid transmitter during his entire nine days on the witness stand.
The following year, in 1880, Bell does touch upon the story under questioning in the courtroom. And Watson gives a somewhat more detailed account during his testimony in August 1882. But aside from Casson’s flawed telling, the story does not come to widespread public attention until some four decades after the fact, when Watson recounts it in his autobiography. Only then does it begin to make its way into the history books, starting with Catherine MacKenzie’s Alexander Graham Bell: The Man Who Contracted Space, the first biography of Bell, published in 1928. MacKenzie’s book drew upon her close association with Bell as his assistant during the last eight years of his life. Despite Watson’s prior published account, one wonders about the extent to which MacKenzie’s rendition posthumously derives from Bell himself. As she tells it:
Watson dashed down the hall into the laboratory. Bell had upset the acid of a battery over his clothes. In his delight over Watson’s sudden appearance, Bell forgot all about the spreading acid stains on his trousers and flew to the other end of the wire, to hear Watson’s voice now coming clearly through.
ON A PARTICULARLY cold and wintry afternoon, I was heading out to have lunch in Cambridge with a colleague who taught in MIT’s graduate writing program. As I often did, I walked through the main reception area of the Dibner Institute to check my mailbox. My thoughts were occupied with the events of 1876 and Bell’s strange silence about his telephone breakthrough. On my way through the front office, I passed the handsome glass cases containing the assortment of familiar historical artifacts, when one of them suddenly grabbed my attention in a new way.
There, behind the glass, rested the handsomely marbled cover of a pamphlet from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dated May 22, 1876, it was a transcription of Alexander Graham Bell’s first public speech about the telephone. I had walked past it countless times without giving it much thought, but now it beckoned with a crucial clue. I realized that in a year of research I had been so focused on the details leading up to the invention of the telephone that I had overlooked Bell’s actions afterward. I had seen many references to Bell’s talk at the Academy and read excerpts of it, but I had never closely inspected the speech itself. Given Bell’s reticence about the “Watson come here” story, how exactly had he recounted the circumstances of his invention of the telephone when he first spoke of it in public?
Before heading off to lunch, I sped to my office to look online in the hope that I could locate a copy of Bell’s speech at one of MIT’s libraries. Sure enough, MIT’s Hayden Library in the heart of the campus contained a full set of the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, dating back to the organization’s founding in 1780.
I made for the library directly after my lunch meeting.
The works I sought were stored in a section in the basement, where the floor-to-ceiling shelves roll on tracks to close up solidly against one another, packing the walls of books and journals together like proverbial sardines. To retrieve a book, the intrepid researcher has to turn a crank, roll apart the walls of bookshelves, and create a passable aisle, then brave this new crevice to find what you are looking for.
The musty old volume from 1876 looked as if it hadn’t been touched for many decades. Making my way straight to the nearest carrel, I sat in the fluorescent glare to examine it.
Scholars normally describe Bell’s Academy speech as the first time he publicly disclosed his work on the telephone. And yet, looking back over the bound volume of the Academy’s Proceedings, I realized it was doubtful that Bell had actually demonstrated the transmission of speech at this oft-cited event. Without offering many specifics, Bell did mention that he had transmitted some intelligible speech with his invention. But he did not reveal the circumstances of his initial success, and he made only a passing conceptual reference to the liquid transmitter. Instead, Bell focused on, and presumably demonstrated for his colleagues, a far more primitive apparatus he had built that could transmit only musical tones.
Once again, I marveled that the truth seemed so at odds with the received history. Hot on this new trail, sitting in my office that evening, I looked further into the matter using the online collection of the Library of Congress. I quickly found a letter Bell had written to his parents immediately after giving his presentation at the Academy. It corroborated my suspicion:
The meeting at the Academy was a grand success. I had a telegraph wire from my rooms in Beacon Street to the Athenaeum building and my telegraphic organ was placed in my green reception room under the care of [Mabel’s twenty-six-year-old cousin] Willie Hubbard.
Bell wrote that he telegraphed Willie to play some music, “and in response came some rich chords.” But he made no mention of having tried to speak through his device. Sometime later I found that, as was so often the case, Bell’s legal testimony offered the most precise and revealing account. The following passage from Bell’s deposition in the 1879 Dowd case would seem to leave little doubt about the matter. The opposing counsel specifically asks Bell what electrical devices, if any, Bell exhibited during his speech at the American Academy. Bell responds:
I do not know that I can recall them all, but I remember some. I exhibited the membrane telephones referred to in section 12 of the paper. I also exhibited w
hat was called, in the former telephone cases, the “iron-box” receiver. I also showed, I think, circuit-breaking transmitters and tuned-reed receivers, and I think, also showed a liquid speaking telephone transmitter, like that referred to in section 13 of the paper, but I am not quite certain of this. If it was shown, as I think it was, it was not shown in operation [emphasis added].
Despite his marked and uncharacteristic vagueness in this answer, Bell seems notably certain about that last point. It is truly a remarkable admission. Consider the fact that Bell had made his breakthrough speaking to Watson with the liquid transmitter some two months earlier. It is possible to imagine that Bell might have perhaps been concerned that the liquid transmitter might not perform reliably and thus refrained from demonstrating it. But such a hypothesis seems unlikely. Bell had built a device capable of transmitting speech. And he had a U.S. patent giving him broad rights to it. His speech to his prestigious colleagues at the American Academy marked his moment to bask in their acclaim. Why, then, would he refrain from displaying his most successful and important breakthrough?
Reviewing Bell’s laboratory notebook once again, I realized that, during this period in the early spring of 1876, after Bell’s phenomenal success with the liquid transmitter, he quickly abandoned any effort to improve his liquid transmitter design. Instead, he switched his focus to developing an alternative method to transmit speech that evolved directly from his accident almost a year earlier in which Bell had heard Watson pluck the steel reed of his finicky multiple telegraph receiver.
In so doing, Bell switched to trying to develop a “magneto-electric” transmitter design. He had guessed from his earlier work that such a design would be possible. But, at the time he filed his patent, he provided no specific guidelines for how to build such a transmitter and, of course, he himself had never yet done so to successfully transmit articulate speech.
