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

by Seth Shulman

  Finally, it was Bell’s turn. Gray’s demonstration had been as polished and professional as Bell had feared; but Bell, unlike Gray, was a skilled orator. He knew he could captivate the judges—if his speaking telephone would operate successfully. Bell didn’t have a professor of George Barker’s stature to assist him, but he did have Mabel’s cousin, Willie Hubbard, who had helped with the demonstration at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He had come to Philadelphia with his uncle Gardiner for the event. Bell also had a stroke of luck in having recently met His Majesty Dom Pedro II during the emperor’s visit to Boston. Recognizing Bell, the emperor now greeted him warmly in anticipation of the important demonstration. Of course, the fact that Bell was personally acquainted with the Brazilian emperor was testament to more than Bell’s considerable reputation as a teacher of the deaf. It spoke to another key advantage he could parlay: a wealth of connections in academia and high society.

  Because Bell had failed to register for the exposition by the deadline, his exhibit was housed far less prominently than Gray’s. As a result, the delegation had to hike the length of the vast hall and then climb a flight of stairs to the remote East Gallery, where Bell’s devices sat on a plain wooden table. Following behind Bell and Emperor Dom Pedro II, the group, which consisted of Sir William Thomson, the Parisian instrument maker Rudolph Koenig, the astronomers James C. Watson of Ann Arbor and Henry Draper of New York, and many others—including Elisha Gray—made their way to Bell’s exhibit and huddled around his table. Several of the perspiring gentlemen collapsed gratefully into chairs that Bell had placed nearby.

  Bell began by explaining the theory of sympathetic vibrations that had led him to his multiple telegraph and telephone inventions. In a demonstration considerably more modest than Gray’s, he illustrated his multiple-messaging telegraph by showing that Sir William and His Majesty Dom Pedro II could telegraph simultaneously over one wire. As Bell recounted in a letter to his parents:

  I then explained the “Undulatory Theory” and offered to test the transmission of the human voice. I stated however that this was “an invention in embryo.” I trusted that they would recognize firstly that the pitch of the voice was audible and secondly that there was an effect of articulation.

  As planned, Bell then headed some 500 feet down the hall, leaving Willie Hubbard with the crowd at the telephone receiver. For the demonstration, Bell used a magneto-electric transmitter he had taken to calling a membrane transmitter. Its parchment diaphragm, with a small piece of metal glued to the back side, sat immediately in front of a magnet. For the receiver, Bell used his latest model, which he called an iron-box receiver. This device consisted of a small, hollow iron cylinder; running up its center was a metal rod wrapped in a coil of insulated copper wire. The iron tube was closed at the bottom; on the top it had a lid made from a loosely attached piece of sheet metal that vibrated to transmit sound when the current came through its electromagnet.

  Sir William Thomson sat attentively in a chair next to the table that held Bell’s devices. As Bell had directed, Sir William pressed the lid of the iron-box receiver against his ear. Then, excitedly, he began to repeat the words he heard coming from the little cylinder: “Do you understand what I say?” Sir William bellowed incredulously. As Willie Hubbard later recounted, Sir William jumped out of his seat, exclaiming: “Where is Mr. Bell? I must see Mr. Bell!” As Willie dutifully led him off in Bell’s direction, others took turns pressing their ears up against Bell’s receiver.

  Next in line at the receiver was His Majesty. “I hear, I hear!” he cried out, visibly startled and amazed. Bell, in a booming Shakespearean delivery that would surely have made his grandfather proud, had cleverly begun to recite the most famous—and easily recognizable—soliloquy from Hamlet.

  “To be or not to be!” the emperor called out, as the crowd craned closer.

  Elisha Gray then made his way to the small receiver. As he later testified about the incident in a deposition for the 1879 Dowd case:

  The Emperor had just been using the receiving instrument, and as he took it down from his ear and started away to the transmitting end, he said, “to be or not to be.” From this I took the cue as to what was being recited at the transmitting end. I listened intently for some moments, hearing a very faint, ghostly, ringing sort of a sound; but finally, I thought I caught the words, “Aye, there’s the rub.” I turned to the audience, repeating these words and they cheered.

  And so, according to Elisha Gray, the first words he ever heard over what we now call a telephone offered a commentary on his situation so apt only the Bard could have written it.

  Bell’s performance succeeded in impressing the judges and hiding the evidence of the intellectual debt he owed to Gray. As Gray would explain much later, in 1885,

  At the Centennial Mr. Bell exhibited a telephone which transmitted articulate speech. I witnessed the exhibition. He did not use a liquid transmitter on this occasion but used an instrument very nearly resembling the receiver of my invention…. I did not for a moment suspect anything wrong but supposed that in the eye of the law Bell had, as my counsel had advised me, every advantage.

  Persuaded that Bell had invented his speaking telephone independently, Gray was content to cede to Bell the rights and the glory for it. Always the gentleman, Gray had no cause to do otherwise. After all, Bell had built a working invention to transmit speech before he had. In truth, at the time, Gray was far more concerned with the fate of his multiple telegraph, which, he was happy to see, appeared vastly superior to Bell’s version. To Gray, with his close ties to the telegraph industry, the speaking telephone represented an interesting development, but the multiple-messaging telegraph was an invention that satisfied an important commercial need and could reap a handsome and immediate financial return.

  As the historian David Hounshell has persuasively explained, Gray, like so many others in his day, viewed the telephone as little more than “a scientific toy.” He did not seem to anticipate the extent to which the judges would find the transmission of speech even more exciting than the transmission of music. And, even more important, as Hounshell contends, Gray misjudged the telephone’s extraordinary long-term commercial potential, at least at first.

  There is no doubt that Hounshell’s interpretation is, at least to some extent, correct. The prevailing view of the telegraph industry in 1876 held that it was imperative to use existing wires more efficiently, sending ever more simultaneous messages at a time. As Gray wrote to his patent attorney around this time,

  Bell has talked so much and done so little practically…I am working on an Octoplex between Philadelphia and New York—four [messages] each way simultaneously—eight [messages] at once. I should like to see Bell do that with his apparatus [emphasis in the original].

  Judged from this perspective, given the wide availability of so-called duplex messaging by 1876, Bell’s telephone represented a kind of step backward. As hard as it is to imagine today, this industry perspective stemmed largely from the conceptual stumbling block that, at the time, telegrams were sent from telegraph offices. Around this period, for instance, one Western Union official in a particularly expansive mood explained to the New York Times that eventually telegraph operators might “transmit the sound of their own voice over the wires, and talk with one another instead of telegraphing.” Needless to say, the idea of telegraph operators talking to one another, however novel, was not viewed by many in the industry as a particularly commercial priority.

  Nonetheless, the fact that Gray may have initially underestimated the importance of the telephone does nothing to alter the fact that his liquid transmitter design had paved the way for Bell’s success. Over time, as more of the facts of the case emerged and the dazzling commercial potential of the telephone became clear, Gray realized that Bell had deceived him. Eventually, he would, in his stoic, midwestern way, become quietly outraged about the matter, as well he should have been. As Gray would put it in 1901,

  Recently, and long s
ince the oral statements were made and the letters referred to were written, and long since I gave my deposition in the Dowd case, facts came to my knowledge that convinced me I was wrong in assuming and believing Prof. Bell had fairly made his invention…. I supposed my discovery remained a secret at the Patent Office, as it should have done, and was not known to Mr. Bell. What I now state on the subject is made in view of information which satisfies me that Mr. Bell, having obtained my secrets, claimed my discovery as his own and by this means got credit for my invention.

  Thanks largely to Bell’s masterful performance at the Centennial Exposition, however, it would be many years before this realization would dawn on his unfortunate rival.

  WITH THE ORDEAL of the Centennial behind him, Bell’s spirits lifted markedly. Upon returning to Boston, he finished up his courses, graded his students’ exams, and continued to improve his telephone models. Meanwhile, as word of Bell’s accomplishment spread, people came to his small lab at 5 Exeter Place from all over to learn more about his device, including Sir William Thomson himself. Bell even gave Sir William a duplicate of his magneto-electric transmitter and iron-box receiver to bring back to England. During this period in the summer of 1876, as Watson later recalled,

  A list of the scientists who came to the boarding house to see the telephone would read like the roster of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. My old electrical mentor, Moses G. Farmer, called one day to see the latest improvements. He told me then with tears in his eyes when he first read a description of Bell’s telephone he couldn’t sleep for a week, he was so mad with himself for not discovering the thing years before.

  By the fall of 1876, Bell had improved his telephone enough that he and Watson could conduct the first two-way, “long-distance” conversation over a dedicated telegraph line between the offices and factory of the Walworth Manufacturing Company. After business hours on October 9, Bell sat in an office at the firm’s Boston headquarters and chatted with Watson two miles away at the company’s factory across the river in Cambridgeport. The Boston Advertiser reprinted the two men’s detailed and nearly identical notes of the conversation side by side as startling evidence of the new technology’s viability.

  Near the end of 1876, according to Watson’s autobiography, Gardiner Hubbard quietly approached Western Union with an offer to sell the exclusive rights to the Bell telephone patents for $100,000. Given Western Union’s near monopoly on existing telegraph lines, the deal offered the most obvious and swift strategy for commercializing the telephone. But Western Union president William Orton, no doubt still holding a grudge from his previous skirmishes over the Hubbard Bill several years earlier, flatly turned down the offer.

  Orton soon realized his mistake, but by then it was too late. He would forever be remembered by students of business as the man who made one of the worst corporate decisions of all time: passing up the rights to the most profitable invention in history when he could have bought them for a song.

  Meanwhile, Bell began to demonstrate his speaking telephone before paying audiences. At one of the first of these events, at the Lyceum Hall in Salem, Massachusetts, on February 23, 1877, an overflow audience paid fifty cents a head to see his new invention in operation. And Bell fulfilled their desires: he amazed the crowd by talking to Watson, who sat with a small group of witnesses at Bell’s Exeter Street laboratory in Boston, some eighteen miles away. According to a newspaper account, the Salem audience marveled that they were able not just to hear Watson speak, but also sing, cough, and laugh.

  Gertrude Hubbard protested around this time that such well-publicized events smacked too much of P. T. Barnum for her taste. But whatever emotions this stirred in his future mother-in-law, Bell’s share of that evening’s proceeds alone came to $149. It was the first money he had made from the telephone. He spent most of the wind-fall immediately—commissioning a silver brooch in the shape of a telephone to give to Mabel.

  Whatever compromises Bell may have made to secure rights to the telephone, his actions won him the prize he had sought most fervently. He and Mabel were married on July 11, 1877. It was a modest wedding at the Hubbard residence. The ceremony took place in the very room where Bell had demonstrated the notion of sympathetic vibration to Hubbard less than three years before by singing into the family piano.

  As a wedding present, Bell gave Mabel a silver cross inlaid with pearls. He also gave her all but ten shares of his stock in the newly formed Bell Telephone Company, a shockingly unconventional gesture for that era. Mabel’s 30 percent stake in the firm would eventually make her an immense fortune and allow the couple to live in comfortable splendor for the rest of their lives.

  16

  CONFERENCE CALL

  STANDING AT THE podium of the wood-paneled lecture hall, I readied my materials as the audience drifted in. Well into the second semester of the academic year, the time had come to present my work at a Dibner Institute seminar. By academic standards, these sessions were relatively fancy affairs, with oil portraits adorning the walls and a lunch buffet served on a sideboard. The lectures attracted a healthy number of backpack-toting graduate students, but the mainstays in the audience were historians of science at the Dibner Institute or on the faculty at MIT or Harvard.

  The first Dibner seminars I had attended struck me as needlessly obfuscating and arcane. The speakers, always deeply immersed in their subject matter, made few concessions to the prospect that audience members might not be experts in their narrow specialty. But the seminars, celebrating a seemingly old-fashioned blend of collegiality and rigorous scholarship, had a quirky kind of charm that had grown on me over the course of the year.

  George Smith, the acting director, seemed to especially enjoy his role as impresario. He invariably made a genial introduction that praised the speaker and lent some context to the day’s topic. The esoteric subject matter varied widely, but somehow, one or two audience members always seemed to possess astoundingly detailed knowledge about the subject at hand. At a seminar on the history of technology used to explore the ocean floor, for example, the audience included an engineer who had designed some of the equipment in question; another on the origins of quantum theory led several aging physicists in the audience to offer their own firsthand reminiscences on the history being discussed.

  My presentation was no exception. As seats began to fill, a distinguished-looking gentleman approached me carrying a box of beautifully crafted, working reproductions he had made of Bell’s early telephone models. If I was interested, he said, I was welcome to use them as visual aids in my presentation. I accepted them gratefully as promising tokens of the kind of knowledgeable and engaged audience I could expect. Before long, the room, which only held about fifty, was overflowing with the largest crowd of the year. My title, “Did Bell Steal the Telephone?,” had presumably piqued a bit more curiosity than usual.

  I opened my remarks, naturally enough, where the story had begun for me. On the screen in the seminar room, I displayed a number of pages from Bell’s notebook. I showed examples of his work in 1875 featuring varied arrangements of reeds, tuning forks, and electromagnets. I showed Bell’s unexpected decision, on March 8, 1876, to introduce a cup of acidic water into his experiments. And I showed the fateful sketch for a liquid transmitter Bell penned in his notebook on March 9—the very eve of his successful call to Watson. When I displayed Bell’s sketch side by side with the drawing Gray had previously filed in his caveat, the uncanny resemblance drew an audible gasp from the crowd.

  “We remember Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but a closer look reveals an intriguing story that stands at odds with the commonly accepted tale,” I said.

  “Based on my research so far,” I told the audience, “I can claim with a high degree of certainty that Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone transmitter he so famously used to call to Watson.

  “Rather, the evidence strongly suggests that Bell stole the design from his rival Elisha Gray.”

  The
audience, accustomed to a diet of dense academic discourse, seemed to relish a dish of intrigue. With the heady feeling familiar to any storyteller, I could sense from the preternatural silence that I had caught the full attention of everyone present. And to this receptive crowd, I proceeded to report what I had learned about how Bell plagiarized Gray’s design and how he managed to get away with it.

  I told them, in other words, the same story I have recounted in these pages: a story about a driven and talented young man who became caught up in a web of family ties, business pressures, and unsettling, unexpected love.

  I told them about a time, in the 1870s, when Victorian sensibilities collided with stunning new capabilities that were not yet fully understood; a horse-and-carriage era of hucksters and patent medicines that found itself contending with the power of the steam engine and the near-global reach of the telegraph. I explained that, with the telegraph industry’s exponential growth, its corporate owners desperately sought—and would pay handsomely for—a multiple-messaging telegraph, a goal that captured the minds of some of the greatest inventors of the day, including Thomas Edison, Elisha Gray, and, of course, Alexander Graham Bell.