Read The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) Online
Authors: Seth Shulman
Tags: #History, #Biography & Autobiography, #Law, #Science, #Science & Technology, #Technology & Engineering, #Inventors, #Telecommunications, #Applied Sciences, #Telephone, #Intellectual Property, #Patent, #Inventions, #Experiments & Projects
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,
Though independently attested records state [Bell’s] basic idea in October 1874 and its vital supplement of variable resistance in May 1875, he was bedeviled by a rival [Gray] who contested his priority by claiming to have conceived both ideas in November 1875. And there still remain some, apparently believing in time travel or the occult, who suggest that Bell stole one or both ideas.
Bruce was the first historian with access to Bell’s notebooks. But he missed one of the most fascinating pieces of Bell’s story.
In the end, perhaps the most important failing is not Bell’s or Bruce’s, but our own. Bell’s notebook aside, the most striking thing about the whole case is how much was uncovered about it even in Bell’s day. Gray knew many of the details himself, and he concluded that Bell had stolen his design. And, in the intervening years, various capable people have reviewed the evidence and reached a similar conclusion. I have tried to credit the work of many of them in these pages.
None of these efforts, though, has ever managed to do much to pierce the seemingly invincible myth that Bell single-handedly invented the telephone. For many years, even after Bell’s death in 1922, this myth was skillfully nurtured and promoted by a monopoly whose interests it served.
I have no doubt that Elisha Gray’s contribution to the invention of the telephone is important and unduly neglected. But, in my obsession to get to the bottom of the story, my aim is not to supplant one myth with another. Bell may well have stolen Gray’s design for the breakthrough variable resistance liquid transmitter, yet there is little doubt that Gray, locked as he was into his shorter-term interest in the telegraph industry’s sought-after multiple telegraph, would probably have been slow to commercialize the telephone even if he did pioneer it. As I had learned from my research, both Bell and Gray owed a considerable debt to the pathbreaking work of Philipp Reis in Germany. And, to name just one of many other vital contributions, without the ensuing transmitter improvements made by Emile Berliner and Thomas Edison, the commercial, long-distance telephone industry could never possibly have gotten off the ground.
Despite the unscrupulous dealings on Bell’s behalf—at least some of which were almost certainly undertaken with his collusion and consent—Bell’s vision and his energy still stand out as a remarkable model. The telephone brought him world renown when he was still a young man. But in all the decades that followed, Bell never rested. He built flying machines, bred sheep to study heredity, and tried to learn what he could about the language of the Mohawk tribe who lived in Canada not far from his parents’ home in Brantford, Ontario. In just one of myriad examples of his foresight, Bell even fretted about the air pollution of his day in a manner that seems particularly prescient. The soot in the air would block some of the sun’s heat, Bell figured in 1917. But he reasoned that the earth, on balance, would gain some of the heat normally radiated into space, calling it “a sort of greenhouse effect.”
History is messy, and delving deeper doesn’t necessarily make it come much clearer. We can pin down many of the details of what happened in the past. But it is up to us what lessons we take away. Still, if I learned anything from my research into the invention of the telephone, it is that history needs to be constantly challenged and interrogated. To do anything less is to play a game of “telephone,” tacitly accepting the garbled story that is whispered from one generation to the next.
OUR CAPACITY TO
unearth any truths about the past depends upon the extent to which we have access to the records in question. In this regard, I want to especially acknowledge and commend the remarkable, pathbreaking job the manuscript division of the U.S. Library of Congress has done by digitizing and making freely available the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers. It is especially fitting that this collection should so demonstrate the modern marvels of telecommunications. The originals of most of the key documents cited in this book can be found in this accessible online archive, as can thousands upon thousands more. The collection immeasurably facilitated my research and sets a wonderful example for other archives around the world to emulate.
Meanwhile, anyone who uses primary source documents or artifacts in his or her work most certainly owes a debt to the painstaking and often thankless labors of many archivists, curators, and librarians. I want particularly to acknowledge several who helped me, including: David McGee, Ben Weiss, Philip Cronenwett, Anne Battis, Howard Kennett, and the rest of the staff at the Dibner Institute’s Burndy Library; John Liffen, curator of communications at the Science Museum in London; Roland Baumann, Ken Grossi, and Tamara Martin at the Oberlin College Archive; Leonard Bruno, curator in the manuscript division of the Library of Congress; Jeffrey Mifflin at the MIT Archive; and Charles Sullivan and Susan Maycock at the Cambridge Historical Commission.
I am indebted to my many friends and colleagues at MIT’s Dibner Institute, which is now sadly defunct after a falling out with its host university. (The Burndy Library collection, and some continuation of the Dibner’s related fellowship program, now resides at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.) The Dibner Institute provided the crucial support and home for my initial research. I especially thank George Smith and Bonnie Edwards, respectively the acting director and executive director of the Dibner Institute while I was there, for the special haven they fostered for this kind of research and their willingness in 2004 to make room at their “historians’ table” for a science writer. During my year at the Dibner, I was also helped enormously by the rest of the institute staff, including Trudy Kontoff and Rita Dempsey, who smoothed many bureaucratic and logistical edges for me. I benefited from contacts, discussions, and seminars with many of the scholars who overlapped with me at the Dibner Institute during the 2004–05 academic year, including Tom Archibald, Peter Bokulich, Alexander Brown, Claire Calcagno, Dane Daniel, Ford Doolittle, Gerard Fitzgerald, Olival Freire, Kristine Harper, Arne Hessenbruch, Giora Hon, Cesare Maffioli, Takashi Nishiyama, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Sam Schweber, Peter Shulman (no relation), Jenny Leigh Smith, Katrien Vander Straeten, Jim Voelkel, Sara Wermiel, and Chen-Pang Yeang. For special technical and moral support, I offer particularly sincere thanks to David Cahan and Conevery Valencius, both of whom went far above and beyond the call of duty to make extensive and tremendously helpful suggestions to an early draft of this manuscript. I learned a great deal from the impressive scholarship undertaken by all of these dedicated historians; but, of course, my thanks to them in no way implies their endorsement of my work. Despite their help, the interpretations and mistakes in the text, for better or worse, are mine alone.
I am particularly grateful to a number of others who also read the book in draft form and helped me to improve it in many ways, including Christopher Clarke, John Liffen, Nancy Marshall, David McGee, Dave Pantalony, and Jill Shulman. Still other friends and colleagues gave encouragement at various points along the way. Among these, I thank Dan Charles and Lewis Cohen for conversations that sparked new avenues in my research; Sarah Shulman and Tom Garrett for all their support throughout; Doug Starr at Boston University’s Science Journalism Program; Marcia Bartusiak, Rob Kanigel, and Tom Levinson at MIT’s Graduate Writing Program; Victor McElheny, longtime mentor and former director of MIT’s Knight Science Writing Fellowship; David Talbot at MIT’s
Technology Review
magazine; and Deborah Cramer, who succeeded me as the Dibner Institute’s second (and, sadly, last) science writer fellow at MIT.
Marc Miller was one of my very first magazine editors and, luckily for me, he has never managed to get free from my prose since. A prizewinning historian himself, Marc has earned the dubious distinction of editing each of the five books I have written. I can’t offer enough thanks for his generous and immeasurably helpful labors on my behalf any more than by calling him a dear and special friend.
My agent, Katinka Matson at Brockman, Inc., believed in this project from the start and, as usual, found a wonderful home for it. I thank Angela von der Lippe for her wise insights and editorial comments, as she, Lydia Fitzpatrick, and Sabine Eckle helped guide the book through production, and I am grateful for the sharp eye and keen judgment of Ann Adelman, who copy-edited the manuscript.
Words cannot express my gratitude to the members of my amazing family, who have once again so kindly cared for and put up with me as I wrestled a manuscript to the ground. I am a lucky father and I give my deepest thanks to Elise and Ben for everything, as well as to the rest of my extended family, especially my father, Roy Shulman, to whom this book is dedicated. As usual, I absolutely couldn’t have managed without the selfless support and love of my wife and soul mate Laura Reed. She gets extra special thanks for being such an insightful and active listener and muse on all those long car rides back and forth to Boston as I worked to envision the scope and shape of this project.
In keeping with the theme of this book, I want finally to acknowledge my debt to the many researchers over the years who, after combing through the archival material about the telephone’s origins, felt compelled, as I did, to try to revise the widely held misperception that Alexander Graham Bell was the telephone’s sole inventor. The list includes George B. Prescott in 1878; Silvanus Thompson in 1883; John Paul Bocock in 1900; William Aitken in 1923; Lloyd Taylor in 1937; Lewis Coe in 1995; Edward Evenson, and Burton Baker, both of whose works appeared in 2000. That some of these efforts date to the earliest days of the telephone points up the long-standing roots of the controversy over its invention and, of course, also underscores just how difficult it is to correct the record adequately in the face of persistent historical myths. Nonetheless, I have learned from and taken inspiration from these researchers’ efforts to ferret out the truth; each of them made contributions that have furthered the public understanding of a complex story. If, in my odyssey through this material, I have added to their labors, it is perhaps only by pointing out the significance of the information contained in Bell’s notebook itself, and by weaving and culling together disparate details, many of which one or more of these researchers had already sought to bring to light.