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

by Seth Shulman

  The truth is, I had a good deal of ground to cover. After stumbling upon the incriminating sketch in Bell’s notebook, I had managed to piece together far more about Bell’s story than I could ever have imagined at first. I had found evidence that Bell’s patent was filed under highly irregular circumstances and that its original version had suspicious additions written into the margin that were never fully explained. I had found evidence clearly documenting that Bell knew about, but never fully acknowledged, the pioneering work of Philipp Reis, who had built a crude but functional telephone that antedated Bell’s own model by more than a decade.

  I had documented the way Bell withheld from the public—and from Gray—the truth about his path to the telephone, with actions that are all but inexplicable except as a skillful effort to cover his tracks so that Gray, distracted as he was with the invention of the multiple telegraph, wouldn’t realize what Bell had done. And, of course, my research had led me to the problematic confession of an official at the U.S. Patent Office who claimed to have facilitated Bell’s plagiarism and awarded him an airtight patent on an invention Bell had not, at the time, properly reduced to practice.

  Reviewing all this evidence, I told the assembled group that perhaps the most troubling finding is the likelihood—suggested but not definitively proven—that Bell stole from Gray more than just the design of the liquid transmitter: that Bell’s conception of varying resistance as a means to convert sound into an electrical signal only crystallized for him after he had seen Gray’s work. If true, this hypothesis, suggested by the fact that the only discussion in Bell’s patent of variable resistance occurs in addendums written into its margins, would significantly diminish Bell’s claim to the telephone by casting doubt on a key conceptual development that is widely attributed to him.

  IN AUGUST 1877, a month after their wedding, Alec and Mabel Bell left for an extended, fifteen-month trip to Europe. (She had convinced him his name was more dignified without the “k.”) To fund the trip, Bell sold a Providence, Rhode Island–based entrepreneur the rights to commercialize his telephone in Britain for $5,000 in cash. Ironically, in so doing, Bell forfeited the same rights he had held out so assiduously to try to secure in his failed arrangement with George and Gordon Brown.

  After marrying Mabel, Bell played virtually no further role in the technical development of the telephone. Bell’s biographers tend to downplay this remarkable fact as a simple reflection of his disinterest in business; but such an explanation has never sufficiently accounted for his actions, especially those in the first several years of his marriage.

  My year working alongside historians underscored for me that the reinterpretation of historical evidence can sometimes resolve outstanding questions in the historical record that have never been adequately explained. I believe this is such a case: that an understanding of Bell’s likely guilt and revulsion over his underhanded role in the race to secure his telephone patent sheds new light on the extraordinary way in which he shunned any role in the newly formed company that bore his name.

  Consider, for instance, the emotional language contained in a letter Bell wrote Mabel from London in September 1878, while he was on an excursion to visit a school for the deaf in Scotland:

  Of one thing I am quite determined and that is to waste no more time and money on the telephone…. I am sick of the telephone and have done with it—excepting as a plaything to amuse my leisure moments…. There is too much of the element of speculation in patents for me. A feverish anxious life like that I have been leading since our marriage would soon change my whole nature. Already it has begun injuring me and I feel myself growing irritable, feverish and disgusted with life.

  The catalyst for this outpouring is revealing. The Dowd lawsuit had begun, accompanied by questions in the press about Bell’s rightful claim to the telephone. In that case, Western Union had established a subsidiary (headed by Peter Dowd) which had begun offering telephone service, claiming the legal cover of a collection of telephone-related patents licensed to them by Elisha Gray, Thomas Edison, and several others. Protecting its interests, the Bell Telephone Company sought to shut down Western Union’s telephone operation. Toward this end, Bell Telephone sued Dowd—and by proxy Western Union—for patent infringement. The case was thus the first to bring the telephone-related claims of Bell and Gray into conflict in court.

  The legal rules of the day required all parties to make pretrial depositions, and by September 1878, while Bell was still abroad, Hubbard had begun nagging him to make one for the Dowd case. Bell, however, seemed nothing short of desperate to avoid testifying under oath about his role in the development of the telephone, and even avoided a meeting with Anthony Pollok in Paris that Hubbard tried to arrange.

  Bell’s state of mind can be seen clearly in the events that transpired later that fall. By then, the Bell Telephone Company was threatened with having to forfeit its case in Dowd unless it could convince Bell to make his sworn statement to bolster the company’s claim to exclusive rights on the telephone. But Bell never managed to find the time despite repeated reminders. That October, Bell wrote Hubbard to say that he, Mabel, and their new baby daughter, Elsie, would be returning from Europe. In a shocking snub to the Bell Telephone Company’s interests and to the Hubbards, however, Bell wrote that he and his young family would head straight to Ontario to see Bell’s family, bypassing Boston altogether.

  Hubbard, becoming desperate, wrote Bell’s father for help. Finally, in an effort to save the company, Hubbard even dispatched Watson to head off the young family upon their steamship’s arrival in Quebec. But when Bell, Mabel, Elsie, and a nursemaid arrived on November 10, Watson recounts,

  I found Bell even more dissatisfied with the telephone business than his letters had indicated. He told me he wasn’t going to have anything more to do with it, but was going to take up teaching again as soon as he could get a position.

  Eventually, the familiar coalition of Hubbard and Mabel, aided this time by Watson on the front lines, managed to persuade Bell at the last possible moment to go to Boston to make his sworn statement. Even so, Bell insisted on stopping first at his father’s house in Brantford, Ontario. Watson notably recounts that he opted to accompany Bell so as not to “run the risk of losing him.”

  It was clearly a difficult and pivotal moment. Ultimately, in a role she had played numerous times before, Mabel convinced Bell to return to Boston. He was ill when he left Ontario with Watson and eventually wrote out his statement for the lawsuit from the Massachusetts General Hospital where he was being treated for abscesses. Mabel and Elsie finally joined Bell in Boston. But before leaving her in-laws, Mabel wrote her mother about the matter:

  Oh, if I could only be with him as I am so worried for the whole responsibility of his going is mine; he would not have gone but that I felt so strongly about it.

  In this remarkable episode, eerily reminiscent of his reluctance over the Centennial Exposition, Bell was persuaded to defend his claim to the telephone only after dramatic appeals from his closest friends and family, and then Mabel’s intervention. In the ensuing decade, Bell would have to reprise his role in court repeatedly as the Bell Telephone Company aggressively fought its competitors in literally hundreds of legal actions designed to stamp out infringers and protect its patent-backed monopoly.

  Of course, aside from underwriting Bell’s comfortable lifestyle, the telephone would open countless opportunities. Bell clearly loved meeting the scientific elite of his day as a respected peer, just as he relished the chance to demonstrate personally the telephone to Queen Victoria in 1878, or to accept countless honors, such as the 50,000-franc Volta Prize from the French government in 1880.

  For all the glory, though, I believe that Bell remained, on some level, deeply ashamed about the circumstances that led to his patent on the telephone. His guilt can arguably be seen to have influenced many of his choices. It can help to explain why, for instance, Bell gave his financial stake in the Bell Telephone Company to Mabel and, as
ide from testifying on its behalf, never sought any substantive involvement in the firm.

  Bell’s guilt can be seen, too, as a factor in his decision to build a lavish retreat—Beinn Bhreagh—at a notably remote spot on Cape Breton Island in Canada. Mabel lends credence to the notion in the summer of 1885, the time of their first visit there, when she writes that Bell felt he needed to get “far away” from the controversy over his disputed role in the invention of the telephone. By that time, of course, the Bell Telephone Company had become wildly profitable; but legal battles continued to rage. The U.S. government was about to begin its own case to have Bell’s patent annulled on the charge that it had been obtained through fraudulent means, and Wilber’s incriminating affidavit had just been published. As Mabel put it, Bell felt besieged by the accusations, saying that he felt “his life has been shipwrecked.”

  Bell is often fondly cited as saying that he would rather be remembered as a teacher of the deaf than as the inventor of the telephone. A good example can be seen in a booklet, published by AT&T in 1947 to mark the centennial of Bell’s birth, which notes that,

  all through [Bell’s] life, he maintained a deep interest in the problems of the deaf. In fact, his modesty and humanity were such that he told his family he would rather be remembered as a teacher of the deaf than as the telephone’s inventor.

  Bell no doubt felt deservedly proud of his accomplishments as a teacher of the deaf. But even this sentiment, diminishing as it does his role in the birth of the telephone, can be seen in different light.

  Ultimately, in considering Bell’s testimony over the years, I imagine that he came to believe the versions of the story he told under oath which claimed, in essence, that he had never behaved improperly. There is no question that Bell had been on the right track in his telephone research; that he had made an important contribution with his theoretical understanding of the way “undulatory currents” could carry acoustic signals electrically; and that he believed in the telephone’s viability when few shared his vision. Surely, those facts must have helped to assuage whatever guilt he might have felt over the purloined liquid transmitter.

  Plus, Bell must certainly have taken comfort in his lifelong happiness with Mabel. The key episodes in the telephone’s invention had occurred when Bell was still in his twenties. Whatever ethical compromises he may have made in his dealings with Hubbard, Wilber, Pollok, and Bailey, Bell had mostly likely made them for love. As he wrote Mabel in 1878, on the cusp of the Dowd case,

  Why should it matter to the world who invented the telephone so long as the world gets the benefit of it? Why should it matter to me what the world says upon the subject so long as I have obtained the object for which I laboured and have got you my sweet sweet darling wife?

  If the secret in Bell’s notebook changes our estimation of him, it also highlights the brilliant technological innovations of his competitor, Elisha Gray. Gray’s work is now largely forgotten. But his contributions to the telephone stand up under close scrutiny as seminal and creative advances that made the invention possible.

  In his day, Gray was esteemed as an inventor by his peers and financially well rewarded. He was also always a proper gentleman. But he became increasingly outspoken about the telephone affair toward the end of his life as more of the details of Bell’s actions came to his attention.

  Even without the benefit of the smoking-gun evidence that lay hidden in Bell’s notebook, Gray pieced together much of the story from Bell’s own statements and from patent examiner Zenas Wilber’s remarkable confession. As Gray wrote in a letter to the journal Electrical World and Engineer that was published a week after his death in 1901:

  I became convinced, chiefly through Bell’s own testimony in the various suits, that I had shown him how to construct the telephone with which he obtained the first results [emphasis added].

  Gray wrote that he had chanced to meet Wilber on the street in New York, years before the former patent examiner’s final affidavit. As Gray recalled, Wilber told him:

  Gray, you invented the telephone, and if your damned lawyers had done their duty, you would have had it. But at that time I did not know you very well, and you had never given me any cigars or asked me out to take a drink.

  Sadly, as the evidence accumulated, Gray died embittered over the way he had been wronged. A handwritten note found among his belongings after his death poignantly summed up his resentment. Gray may well have been right when he lamented:

  The history of the telephone will never be fully written. It is partly hidden away in 20 or 30 thousand pages of testimony and partly lying on the hearts and consciences of a few whose lips are sealed—some in death and others by a golden clasp whose grip is even tighter.

  There was still a bit of unfinished business about Bell’s role in the telephone gambit. George Smith, who has experience serving as an expert witness in court, brought one vitally important practical matter to my attention on the day after my Dibner seminar. As Smith excitedly and rightly noted, the verdict in the Dowd case and subsequent lawsuits might well have gone against Bell had his laboratory notebook ever been subpoenaed. In Bell’s day, however, as evidenced in Bell’s foot-dragging in the Dowd case preliminaries, courts relied exclusively on pretrial statements and depositions to establish the facts of a case. The so-called rules of discovery we now take for granted as part of our legal system would have required Bell to hand over his notebooks—including the incriminating evidence they contained. But these rules were not uniformly adopted until 1938.

  Changes in the legal rules of discovery could explain why the secret in Bell’s notebook never factored in any of the court cases over the telephone. But what about since then? How could the incriminating sketch in Bell’s notebook have been overlooked by so many of the historians who must surely have pored over his work? As it turned out, the answer to this question was simpler than it seemed, but I would not find it until my year at the Dibner Institute was coming to an end.

  Spring had arrived, and the pace and excitement of the academic year seemed to quicken as the end of the semester drew near. I had been offered a chance to do some contemporary investigative work and, at least from the perspective of 1876, I welcomed the opportunity to get back to the future. The Dibner Institute kindly allowed me to continue to use the office through the summer; but with the term ending in May, my many dozens of books were due back to the library after the luxury of having them all within easy reach on my office shelves over the course of the entire academic year. I had tried to take notes and photocopy key passages but now faced the prospect of their disappearance with a sense of closure mixed with mild panic. After all, I hoped to write about Bell’s story, and some of these books were exceedingly rare old works that would not be easy for me to obtain again.

  One morning, as I was trying to systematically collect my research files, I came across a lingering list of questions I had made about the Bell case, one of many over the course of the year. It contained a question I still hadn’t answered about the provenance of Bell’s notebook itself. When, I had asked, had anyone besides Bell gotten a chance to look at it? My plan had been to search through the references of many of the books I had collected to find the earliest citations I could that mentioned it as a source. Now, with the books due, there wasn’t nearly enough time to complete such a task. Exasperated with myself, I did something we all routinely take for granted every day: I used the telephone.

  Thinking more like a journalist now, I called the switchboard at the Library of Congress and asked to speak with whomever was in charge of the Alexander Graham Bell Collection. I only hoped that the archivist I spoke with would be as concerned about issues of provenance as Roland Baumann at the Oberlin Archives had been.

  I was in luck. Leonard Bruno, a curator in the Library of Congress’s manuscript division, answered the phone. I began by thanking him and his library for having made the Bell Collection available online. I told him how helpful the documents had been in my work. Then I asked him what I
might find about exactly when Bell’s laboratory notebooks had become publicly available. Bruno told me he would look into the matter.

  Within the hour, Bruno called me back. According to the accession data, he said, the Bell family papers were not made available on an unrestricted basis until the family donated them to the Library of Congress in 1976. Prior to that, they had remained in the family’s possession in a special room at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. Even more impressively, Bruno had been able to locate a brief 1974 memo that went to the heart of my question. Written by Bruno’s predecessor as the accession was being negotiated, the note read:

  As far as I could determine, only one historian had ever used the papers on deposit there [at National Geographic] to any great extent.

  Hard as it was for me to believe, Bruno’s records indicated that Bell’s notebooks had been kept almost entirely hidden from public scrutiny for a full century; and after that, they really only became widely accessible in 1999, when they were finally posted online in digital form. Even today, Bell’s key laboratory notebook remains, at least to some extent, buried in plain sight as part of a vast collection of some 147,000 documents. The information Bruno gave me went far toward explaining why Bell’s incriminating sketch might never yet have received wider attention: only a relatively small number of people had ever read Bell’s notebooks closely before I happened to do so. Upon reflection, it seemed clear that the lone historian mentioned in the memo was Robert Bruce, who negotiated access to the collection with the Bell family and spent a decade on the research for his 1973 biography of Bell before the collection was donated to the Library of Congress. Bruce’s work offers a masterful handling of the kaleidoscopic details of Bell’s long and fruitful life. But Bruce became so partisan about the issue of Bell’s priority in inventing the telephone that it seems to have blinded him to the evidence before him. Convinced by scant data that Bell deserved sole credit, Bruce wrote in 1997, for instance,