The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) (16 page)

I
HAD UNEARTHED
enough information so far to raise serious doubts about Bell as the sole inventor of the telephone. And yet, over a century later, this is largely how he is remembered. The image of Bell as the smiling, portly, white-haired “father of the telephone” lives on today in science textbooks, children’s stories, and scholarly works alike. I was not entirely sure how the myth of Bell’s single-handed invention of the telephone managed to survive unscathed in his own time in the face of the incriminating evidence against him that emerged in court—from the irregularities at the U.S. Patent Office to the suspiciously missing paragraph about variable resistance in the version of his patent application Bell sent to England. But I was even more mystified by the way Bell’s stature in the public imagination could have proved so unshakable given a steady onslaught of efforts by assorted researchers, including Silvanus Thompson, Lloyd Taylor, Burton Baker, A. Edward Evenson, and many others, over the course of more than a century to correct the record.

Clearly, one explanation is that history’s winners stand in the best position to control the way events are remembered. And the Bell Telephone Company, which began to amass immense profits from its monopoly position as the 1800s wore on, was certainly a winner. For a dramatic example of this phenomenon at work in the case of the telephone, consider the case of George Prescott.

In 1878, Prescott published a book entitled
The Speaking Telephone, Talking Phonograph and Other Novelties.
Prescott was a respected electrical researcher and author and a contemporary of Gray and Bell. In 1878, he served as Western Union’s chief engineer, which meant that he would have likely tended to ally himself more closely with Gray’s work than Bell’s. By then, Gray was working as an independent inventor, but he still licensed many of his inventions to Western Union and its subsidiary Western Electric. Despite Prescott’s corporate affiliation, though, he was also a prolific writer with a reputation for fairness and independence in his work. He was also certainly one of the most knowledgeable individuals of his day to report on the developments surrounding the introduction of the telephone.

In the first edition of Prescott’s book, written two years after Bell received his patent on the telephone, Prescott explicitly credits Gray with the invention. After reviewing the features of all the brand-new telephone models of his day, including Bell’s, he notes that

As it turns out, Prescott’s first edition is now exceedingly rare. When Western Union settled its
Dowd
lawsuit with the Bell Telephone Company in November 1879, the terms of the settlement dictated that Western Union had to unequivocally acknowledge Bell as the inventor of the telephone. Prescott, given his affiliation with Western Union, may have felt obligated to accede to the demand. One way or the other, however, the history of the telephone presented in his book was thoroughly rewritten in the subsequent 1884 edition. Consider the passage cited above, for instance. It was changed to read as follows:

Perhaps an even more revealing change was made to Prescott’s particular discussion of the liquid transmitter. In his first edition, Prescott presents a diagram of the liquid transmitter (labeled fig. 52) accompanied by the following note at the bottom of the page:

Prescott’s analysis in his first edition could hardly be more explicit. But, of course, this informative note is omitted entirely in subsequent editions. Fittingly, even the title of his book was changed. From 1884 on, it was published as
Bell’s Electric Speaking Telephone: Its Invention, Construction, Application, Modification and History.
Equally important, this whitewashed version of Prescott’s initial work would become a significant and widely read text, published most recently in a 1972 reprint by a former publishing subsidiary of the
New York Times
. As the saying goes, to the victor go the spoils.

Prescott’s case, fully exposed by previous writers of telephone history including Lloyd Taylor and A. Edward Evenson, is of course an extreme case. To be sure, many more subtle pressures must be at work to explain why certain kinds of erroneous historical myths seem to stubbornly survive all efforts to amend them.

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,

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:

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:

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

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:

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:

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: