The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) (3 page)

It seemed immediately clear that Bell’s absence from his lab spurred him in a new direction. I wanted to find out more about the trip to Washington and what might have led him to change his work so noticeably upon his return.

This, I imagined, was precisely the kind of challenge my historian colleagues engaged in routinely. For me, though, it was new. A primary source document had suggested a small, historical puzzle. And I was fortunate enough to have the time and resources available to explore such an open-ended lead. I doubted the question had much to do with Bell’s rivalry with Thomas Edison. But I was curious, nonetheless. I never for a moment suspected what would happen next.

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ATURDAY MORNING
, February 26, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell’s train pulled into the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad station in downtown Washington, D.C., with a loud hiss and metallic squeal. Bell was agitated as he hurriedly stepped down onto the station platform. He was keenly aware that his fortune hinged on the outcome of the events before him—almost all of which were beyond his control.

Aleck Bell, as he was then known, was days away from his twenty-ninth birthday, an intensely driven and serious young man with wavy black hair and a scruffy beard. A teacher of the deaf and an associate professor at fledgling Boston University, Bell was a man of meager means but grand ambitions. Acquaintances in this period remember Aleck Bell’s studied manners and speech. They recall, too, that his formal demeanor—from his straight-backed posture to his schooled diction—made him seem much older than he actually was.

Leather suitcase in hand, Bell made his way to the station entrance. It was a pivotal moment for Bell and an exciting time for a nation nearing its centennial year, with an unsettling, frontierlike quality to many of the changes under way. As Bell knew well, nothing illustrated the point better than the railroads themselves. In the past four years alone the United States had laid an astonishing 12,000 miles of track, speeding the nation headlong into a new era. And everyone, just like Bell himself, seemed to be disembarking into a bewildering and exciting new world of mechanical and electrical devices, from sewing machines to fire alarms; of grand new scientific ideas like Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory. A world beset by hucksters like P. T. Barnum with his “Greatest Show on Earth” by crooks like William “Boss” Tweed, who had plundered New York City as its elected official and recently escaped jail to flee the country; and even outlaws like Jesse James and his gang, who had not long ago held up passengers in an audacious raid on the Rock Island Line.

Outside the station, the weather was unseasonably warm. A fine carriage and driver met Bell to deliver him to the home of his wealthy and powerful patent attorney, Anthony Pollok. Bell would be Pollok’s guest during his visit.

Out the window of Bell’s carriage, the nation’s capital had an unfinished and rough-edged air, especially compared with his adopted hometown of Boston. The broad avenues were sparsely settled; cheap and shabby hotels and shops stood near grand government buildings. Many roads had yet to be paved. When Charles Dickens had toured Washington a few decades earlier, he declared it little more than a pretentious village, calling it the “city of magnificent intentions.”

The capital had doubled in population since then, but now, at the tail end of President Ulysses S. Grant’s second term, Dickens’s words still echoed. As if to reinforce the sentiment, the half-finished Washington Monument rose from the center of town like an unsightly exclamation point, its construction stalled for nearly three decades since before the Civil War. President James Polk had famously laid the cornerstone in 1848; but now, in 1876, the monument still stood like an oversized broken-off chimney, replete with a makeshift roof pitched over the top to keep the rain out.

Unlike the provisional feel of many parts of the city, however, Bell found Pollok’s home to be opulent. As Bell wrote his father during his stay:

Among its amenities, Pollok’s Gilded Age mansion boasted granite pillars, fifteen-foot-high ceilings, and, Bell noted, a large staff of “colored servants.” During Bell’s stay, Pollok would introduce him to many people in Washington’s high society and even host a party in his honor.

Bell was too preoccupied with his own affairs, though, to dwell much upon any of this. As he confided to his father,

As Bell put it, his entire future rested on the outcome of the “patent muddle” he had come to Washington to sort out. The stakes were high. Bell’s telephone patent—a claim that would come to be known as the most lucrative patent in history—had been threatened with a formal declaration of “interference,” the term the U.S. Patent Office uses when two or more inventors apply for patents on overlapping inventions at the same time. Now, the patent examiner thought he might have found more overlap between Bell’s claims and those of others. The finding raised the prospect of potentially protracted and expensive interference proceedings.

Bell knew that such a dispute was to be avoided at all cost. It could drag on for years, during which it would stall his ability to reap any financial reward from his work for himself and his financial backers. Only a clear and unfettered patent would allow Bell, a relatively unknown outsider to the telegraph industry, to successfully commercialize his research.

Bell laid out the situation clearly in a letter to his father from Washington. He saw it as a key turning point in his life. Bell wrote that if he lost his patent bid, he would abandon his electrical research altogether and devote himself full time once again to teaching the deaf. But if he succeeded in winning his patent claim, he would feel confident enough to marry the wealthy young woman to whom he had recently become engaged. As he put it excitedly, with the emphasis as it appears in his letter:

OVER THE NEXT
few days, in a binge of my own work, I puzzled over a complex knot of irregularities about Bell’s life-altering visit to Washington, D.C. To begin with, the timing of the trip seemed more than a little odd. Bell filed his telephone patent on February 14, 1876, but, according to his laboratory notebook, he did not successfully transmit intelligible speech over a telephone until March 10. Was it true that, in the lingo of the Patent Office, Bell had yet to “reduce his invention to practice” at the time he filed his patent application? That, in other words, Bell patented an invention he had never actually made?

Even the logistics of this question were mystifying. I knew from reporting on disputes over intellectual property that working models of inventions were required by the U.S. Patent Office in the 1800s. It took only a little digging to learn that on February 14, 1876—the very day Bell filed his telephone patent—a U.S. Senate committee held hearings on a bill calling for the agency to do away with this requirement. Supporters of the bill, proposed by Connecticut senator James E. English, testified that the Patent Office’s attic coffers were literally overflowing and that there was no space to put the roughly twenty thousand new models the agency expected to receive in the coming year.

Of course, there would have been no point for the Senate to debate the issue unless, by February 1876, the Patent Office at least technically continued to require working models to accompany patent applications. Why, then, hadn’t the patent examiner in Bell’s case required him to submit a functioning model of his telephone?

Equally baffling was the Patent Office’s decision to swiftly grant Bell his telephone patent before he had even returned to his lab in Boston on March 7, 1876. How was it, I wondered, that one of the most momentous patents in history was issued in just three weeks? When I looked up other patents filed or issued around the same time, they all seemed to have taken months, if not years, to issue. Timothy Stebins, another little-known Boston-based inventor, had filed a patent for a hydraulic elevator on March 2, 1876, but it wasn’t granted until more than five months later, on August 15. William Gates, a New Haven–based inventor with a newfangled electric fire alarm, found that his patent application took almost two years to process. It was filed on April 1, 1874, but the patent wasn’t issued until the time of Bell’s visit on February 29, 1876. A little more research offered a likely explanation: in 1876, the U.S. Patent Office employed just a few dozen patent examiners to process the
tens of thousands
of applications the agency received each year.

The U.S. Patent Office’s speedy work to approve Bell’s patent seemed all the more extraordinary because, on February 19, 1876, the patent examiner had notified Bell that his patent would be “suspended” for three months, after which time, the letter said, the office would formally decide whether to declare so-called interference proceedings. Such interference disputes almost always include formal hearings to determine which inventor can rightfully claim “priority of conception.” Sorting out the interference claims on inventor Emile Berliner’s 1877 patent application on the microphone, for instance, ended up taking more than thirteen years. That was, of course, an extreme case, but even the more common interference proceedings were likely to last for one or more years.

There was no question about it: the swiftness of the U.S. Patent Office’s actions seemed highly unusual. I wondered what had made patent officials change their minds so quickly about their contention that the claims of others overlapped with Bell’s. For that matter, I wondered exactly what those other claims were.

Thanks to the Dibner Institute’s extraordinary library at MIT, I could easily answer the second question. The filing that conflicted with Bell’s telephone patent came from an electrical researcher named Elisha Gray.

TODAY, IF HE
is remembered at all, Elisha Gray is known as a technological footnote: the unlucky sap whose patent claim for a telephone arrived just hours after that of Alexander Graham Bell.

History is harsh in ascribing winners and losers.

As I soon learned once I started looking, there is a good deal of information to be had about the fight between Bell and Gray over rights to the telephone. The battle dragged on through the courts, in one form or another, for more than a decade. But it is not much remembered today. After all, there is little question about who prevailed in the end.

Ironically, though, back in 1876, Gray was far better known than Bell. Some twelve years Bell’s senior, Gray was recognized, at least in scientific circles, as one of the leading electrical researchers in the country. He had already received enough money and acclaim for his work to devote himself full time to inventing, and had received many of the roughly seventy patents around the world he would ultimately garner for his inventions—far more than Bell would ever claim.

Gray was born in 1835 on an Ohio farm; when he was twelve, his father died, plunging the family into poverty. Gray had to quit school to go to work. Despite his lack of formal education, though, he became fascinated by the seemingly magical new possibilities promised by electricity in the mid-1800s. Coupling his fascination with resolve, Gray managed to support himself as a carpenter while completing preparatory school and two further years of study at Oberlin College, near his home. Then, in 1868, at age thirty-three, Gray received his first patent—for an improved telegraph relay. Initially, Gray conducted his electrical experiments in addition to farming. Building upon his patent’s success, however, he soon helped start a firm called Barton & Gray to manufacture telegraphic equipment and he launched a full-time career as a manufacturer and inventor.

Before long, Western Union, the vast U.S. company that held a near monopoly over the telegraph, recognized the impressive caliber of Gray’s work. In 1872, the company bought a one-third interest in Gray’s firm, making him a wealthy man. Gray’s company changed its name to Western Electric, moved to Chicago, and soon became the leading developer and supplier of equipment to Western Union.

By 1876, the quality of Western Electric’s products was universally admired in the emerging field. For instance, Bell’s assistant Thomas Watson vividly recalls how he and the others in the Charles Williams machine shop (where Watson crafted Bell’s telegraph inventions) looked upon Gray’s work with at least a tinge of envy:

In the case of the telephone, I learned, Gray had filed what the Patent Office then called a “caveat.” Although the government subsequently dropped the option by 1910, a caveat issued by the U.S. Patent Office provided an inventor up to a year with an exclusive right to turn his or her idea into a working, patentable invention. In those days an inventor who had conceived of a device but had yet to build it could use a caveat to warn away would-be competitors. Once it was granted, a caveat afforded all the same rights as a patent during the provisional year while the applicant worked to complete the invention in question. Gray’s caveat described an “instrument for transmitting and receiving vocal sounds telegraphically.” In what is normally described as a strange twist of fate, Gray filed his claim on February 14, 1876—the very same day Bell filed his patent application.

As I inspected the caveat document, reprinted in a book on the history of the telephone, I learned that Gray proposed to use a liquid in his telephone transmitter: water with acid in it. That fact alone seemed like a remarkable coincidence.

But Gray’s sketch for his invention, on frontmatter of his patent claim, hit me almost like a shock from the electric current it described. I recognized immediately that I had just seen a virtually identical drawing—in Bell’s lab notebook.