The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) (13 page)

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,

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

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,

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:

T
AYLOR’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:

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:

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.

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

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,

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 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.

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,

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:

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:

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: