The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) (19 page)

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:

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:

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,

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,

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,

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,

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.

S
TANDING 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.

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:

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,

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:

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, aside 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.”