The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) (5 page)

In Bell’s estimation, then, his telephone research was spawned by a colossal misunderstanding. According to MacKenzie, Bell didn’t recognize his mistake until he was about to leave Great Britain in 1870 and finally read a copy of the French edition of Helmholtz’s work. Only then did Bell learn he had been trying to reproduce a feat Helmholtz himself had never actually accomplished.

Mistaken or not, there is little doubt Bell’s notions about Helmholtz’s work were of signal importance to the development of his thinking. By the time Bell headed to America, as MacKenzie notes, the idea of sending sounds over the telegraph had “rooted itself firmly” in his imagination.

THE BELL FAMILY’S
precipitous departure from Great Britain in 1870 came as a result of tragedy. Grandfather Alexander had died in 1865, and in the several following years, both of Bell’s brothers died of tuberculosis. Bell’s younger brother Edward succumbed to the disease in 1867, when he was just nineteen years old. When Melly died in 1870, at age twenty-five, his heartbroken parents decided to emigrate to North America to make a fresh start.

The move came at a difficult time for Aleck Graham Bell. He had begun to make a name for himself and hoped to complete his studies. In 1868, he had passed his entrance exams and matriculated as a student at the University of London. He had also begun to use his understanding of the mechanics of elocution to teach deaf children to speak, an effort that had met with remarkable success and won him growing recognition.

But Bell’s parents were certainly justified in worrying about the health of their surviving son. Throughout his early life, Aleck had suffered from chronic maladies and, as a young man, had repeatedly worked himself into a state of exhaustion. He would frequently complain of headaches severe enough to make reading impossible. Bell’s parents felt it imperative to find a healthier environment for him.

They also knew that Melville Bell’s reputation, though flagging in England, was ascendant in North America after word of the Visible Speech system had crossed the ocean. On a visit to Boston in 1868, for instance, Melville had given the prestigious Lowell Lectures to widespread acclaim; according to Melville’s own proud reports home, Harvard University president Thomas Hill was among the enthusiastic fans who had personally taught himself Visible Speech from Bell’s book.

Unmoored by the deaths in the family, and in the hopes of protecting their remaining son’s health, Bell’s parents chose to move to Brantford, Ontario, where family friends from Scotland had taken up residence. Aleck joined them, but as it turned out, in those years, at least, he would spend little time in Canada. Rather, trading once again on his father’s reputation, twenty-four-year-old Aleck Bell would find his fortune in Boston, teaching the deaf and lecturing at Boston University.

I
WISH
I
COULD
say that I jumped on the telephone case with the zeal of Bell’s literary contemporary Sherlock Holmes. But I did not. After eagerly making a photocopy of Gray’s caveat, I returned to my office and—I remember this part quite clearly—placed the document
underneath
a pile of papers on my desk. It sat there for over a week, buried physically and figuratively as I weighed it against the information contained in the many historical texts and biographies I had begun to collect about Bell.

At first, I think, I set the information aside because I didn’t want to learn something untoward about Bell. After all, I had been drawn to write about him because I admired him, not just as a creative inventor but as a humanitarian. The seemingly incriminating connection I had discovered was so at odds with the story I had planned to tell that I simply didn’t know what to make of it. To be sure, I had stumbled upon a tantalizing find. If it panned out, the accepted, almost ubiquitous historical tale of the telephone’s invention could be turned on its head. But, for better or worse, I wasn’t sure how to proceed. I didn’t know who would believe me or how I could prove it even if Bell
had
stolen the design for the telephone. How could a journalist hope to set straight such a high-profile historical record more than a century after the fact? Myths, erroneous or not, are powerful.

I knew that accusing Alexander Graham Bell of malfeasance or worse would mean embarking on a long, probably frustrating venture. It would mean confronting the failings of the U.S. legal system, which had heard and rejected numerous challenges to Bell’s claim to the telephone. It would mean questioning the work of generations of trained and respected historians. It would mean defying stacks of texts and reference books that credit Bell with the telephone’s invention. The prospect seemed more than a little daunting.

When I did start to grapple with the information I had found, the major secondary sources I consulted about Bell only made matters worse. Perhaps none of these was more confounding than Robert Bruce’s highly regarded 1973 biography,
Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude.
Bruce, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, goes so far as to cast the aspersion that Elisha Gray stole Bell’s idea. “Was it entirely a coincidence” that Gray filed his claim at the same time as Bell did, Bruce asks. As he writes:

Bruce’s tone is so assured and seemingly authoritative on the subject of Bell’s claim that it shook my confidence deeply. I thought I must be mistaken. For some time as I puzzled over the case, I even overlooked the obvious point that Gray’s pathbreaking design for a liquid transmitter is nowhere depicted in Bell’s patent. Even stretching to give Bruce the benefit of the doubt, Bell’s “notarized specifications” make only the most oblique and passing mention of such a possibility. Meanwhile, the liquid transmitter makes its first appearance in Bell’s notes—in a form virtually identical to Gray’s design—some three weeks
after
Gray filed his caveat. And Bell’s notebook offers no indication that he had ever experimented with such a transmitter prior to that time,
nor had he fully succeeded in transmitting intelligible speech with any other method.
Authoritative-sounding or not, Bruce’s conjecture simply does not fit the facts. But what
were
the facts? Could I hope to discern them after so much time had passed?

One aspect of the question tantalized me in particular. Alexander Graham Bell conducted his telephone research less than two miles from my office. He sought advice from MIT professors whose archival papers still resided nearby on campus. Bell made the world’s first public demonstration of the telephone in 1876 at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which was, at the time, located directly across the river in downtown Boston. And, in October 1876, when Bell and Watson first tested their machine “long distance” over a two-mile stretch of telegraph wire from Boston to Cambridgeport, Watson had sat in a warehouse that, as near as I could tell, once occupied the parking lot outside my building. The geographic proximity of the whole story made it seem maddeningly within reach, like a treasure buried somewhere beneath my feet.

It was a beautiful autumn in Boston, with striking fall foliage in oranges and reds. One especially sunny afternoon, about a week after finding Gray’s caveat, I put aside the stacks of biographical material and set out on a long, quixotic walk to learn more about Bell by retracing his steps in Boston. What I learned instead is that history’s physical traces can be infuriatingly ephemeral. I walked for many hours to parts of Boston I had rarely if ever visited. But I found little remaining evidence of the major landmarks of Bell’s life.

I headed first for Bell’s workshop at 5 Exeter Place, only to learn that it had long since fallen victim to urban renewal. A painting by W. A. Rogers, frequently reprinted in the secondary literature about Bell, depicts his workshop as it stood in March 1877. What comes across perhaps most notably is how dowdy, Victorian, and
ordinary
it was, with its coal stove, bare wood floor, and patterned wallpaper.

Today, however, the boardinghouse where Bell worked is hard to even imagine amid the city’s towering office buildings and the ongoing construction of Boston’s “Big Dig.” The only remnant of its former existence is a forlorn bronze plaque placed by a local historical society to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the telephone’s invention. Standing largely unnoticed near a sea of traffic on Boston’s central artery, the quaint and formal plaque reads:

Making my way through narrow side streets to the heart of the city, I tried next to locate the Charles Williams machine shop where almost all of Bell’s earliest telephone devices were constructed. In Bell’s day, Williams’s shop—employing roughly two dozen machinists—had buzzed and clattered with the din of lathes and metalworking tools as workers turned out prototypes for an array of strange new electrical devices, from telegraph relays to galvanometers.

As I soon learned, no trace of the shop remains today. Not only has the building been demolished, its address, 109 Court Street, no longer even exists. In the 1960s, the city shortened Court Street to make room for a new City Hall at Government Center. Today, not even a plaque marks the site of the Williams shop—once the world’s epicenter of telephone research and home for a time to Bell’s personal workshop. Instead, in one of history’s ironies, the spot, near as I could tell, is now occupied by an increasingly rare cluster of outdoor pay phones.

Finally, on Beacon Hill, near Boston’s statehouse with its magnificent Bulfinch dome, I found one of the few important sites from Bell’s time that has survived: the historic Boston Athenaeum Building, housing one of the nation’s oldest membership libraries. Here, Bell first presented his telephone research to the world before a gathering of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Built in 1847, the year Bell was born, the granite building at 10½ Beacon Street still exudes the charm of his era, outside and in.

I talked my way past the guard at the entrance to catch a glimpse of the main hall on the first floor, a grand room ringed by a small balcony and large, paned windows along the back wall. There, inside the hushed, historic library, I found the tangible connection to Bell I had set out in search of: the Athenaeum, with its unmistakable Boston Brahmin pedigree, remains all but unchanged from Bell’s day.

As I headed back through the front lobby to the spare, historic front entrance, it was easy to conjure the scene of Bell’s 1876 presentation. I imagined horse-drawn carriages clattering down the cobblestone-lined street outside and pulling up in front of the building. I imagined formally attired gentlemen in top hats earnestly popping out onto the curb and streaming in to the Academy’s meeting, curious to hear from a young scientist presenting what he called his “researches in telephony.” But once back outside, the press of the city’s bustling traffic quickly intruded on my reverie.

PERHAPS THE MOST
compelling portrait of young Aleck Bell’s life in Boston comes from his assistant, Thomas A. Watson. In 1874, when Watson first met him, Bell was twenty-seven years old and thriving. Since arriving in Boston several years earlier, Bell had served as a most successful ambassador for his father’s system of Visible Speech. With Bell’s own natural empathy for his students and his gifts as an instructor, he had also distinguished himself by teaching a number of deaf children to talk. By using pictures based upon his father’s system, Bell found he could illustrate for the children exactly how to position their mouths and tongues in order to speak correctly. The results were dramatic. Before long, dozens of leading educators from throughout the region sought to learn more about Bell’s techniques, and newspapers chronicled the success of his School of Vocal Physiology. As a result, Bell soon built upon his core of a dozen private pupils—many of whom were from wealthy families—to take on additional duties as a professor of “vocal physiology and elocution” at Boston University, which had just opened in 1869. As he had in Scotland, Bell did his inventing in his spare time.

At the time, after having lived in the city for several years, Bell had accepted an offer from the wealthy family of one of his students—young George Sanders—for free room and board at their stately home in Salem, Massachusetts, in exchange for his tutoring services.

Bell commuted into Boston by train, and initially set up a room for his acoustic experiments at the Sanderses’ home. Thomas Sanders soon agreed to help underwrite Bell’s experiments in exchange for a share of the profits should the work prove commercially viable. Before long, Bell would make an additional, similar arrangement with another parent of a deaf student, the wealthy and worldly Gardiner Greene Hubbard.

Before meeting Bell, Watson had been an enterprising, earnest teenager with little formal education, who had worked for a living since he was thirteen years old. In July 1872, at the age of eighteen, Watson landed a job at the Charles Williams machine shop on Court Street. As Watson recalls, it was a thrilling place for a young man like him—a hub for visionary inventors attempting to build all sorts of machines that tapped the potential of the exciting and little-understood “power of electricity.”

Among these young inventors was Thomas Edison, who, in the late 1860s, set up his office in the same building as the Williams shop to best avail himself of its services. It was here, in fact, that Edison won his first patent—for an electrical vote recorder—only to realize that no one would buy the machine. Perhaps, given today’s controversies over voting technology, Edison’s invention simply came a century and a half ahead of its time. Nonetheless, it was, Edison said later, the last time he would invent anything without first making sure there was a market for it.

As a machinist, Watson’s job was to make prototypes to the specifications of the shop’s patrons, including people like Edison and Moses Farmer, another respected electrical researcher of the day. As Watson memorably recalls in his autobiography,
Exploring Life
(1926), no one in the Williams shop ever knew what to expect. Watson certainly did not expect the dramatic arrival of a man who would change his life:

Bell stormed into the shop holding two small instruments Watson had crafted for him. Breaking with normal procedure, he headed straight onto the shop floor to complain directly to Watson that the machines had not been built according to his instructions. Bell’s demeanor was exceedingly formal; but he was also frequently hot-tempered, and in this case, he got right to the point, demanding that Watson correct his mistakes. Watson was happy to comply. He listened with interest to Bell’s explanations about the strange contraptions he had constructed with no idea what they were intended for.

The pair of instruments Watson pledged to rebuild descended directly from Bell’s tuning fork experiments in Scotland. Since moving to Boston, Bell believed he had found a practical application for his ideas about sympathetic vibration. He knew the telegraph industry was having difficulty keeping pace with the voluminous number of telegrams being sent. More and more unsightly wires were rapidly being strung on telegraph poles that, at considerable expense to the industry, were proliferating across the continent. In parts of some cities like Boston, the tangle of overhead telegraph wires was becoming oppressive, all but blocking out the sky. As a result, Western Union had announced that it was willing to pay up to $1 million to the inventor who could ease the congestion by allowing telegraph wires to carry multiple messages simultaneously.