The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) (10 page)

A. Edward Evenson, an engineer in Illinois who has made a close study of this controversy, contends that, in fact, the evidence suggests Gray’s caveat did arrive at the Patent Office first. Drawing upon the results of an investigation by the Department of the Interior in 1886, Evenson explains that, at the time, the procedure in the Patent Office was unvarying: all hand-delivered filings were placed in a large basket in the clerk’s office over the course of the day. Each morning and afternoon, patent examiners would receive batches of patent applications in the mail. They would log them in a so-called cash blotter that served as the office’s official log book, along with a record that the filing fee had been paid. After examiners had dispatched the applications that had arrived in the batches of mail, they would reach into the basket of hand-delivered applications and log these too, one by one, into the cash blotter. The fact that Gray’s caveat is listed toward the end of that day’s entries (the thirty-ninth entry) in the log book, while Bell’s is listed as the fifth entry, means that Gray’s filing was drawn from the bottom of the basket,
thereby likely having arrived early in the day.

Piecing together the story from internal memos and the facts that surfaced in the ensuing legal case between Bell and Gray, Evenson presents his information in a fascinating book,
The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876.
Evenson infers that the confusion over this issue stems from the fact that whoever delivered Bell’s patent apparently insisted that it be immediately logged into the cash blotter and hand-delivered directly to the patent examiner in his office. We know this from correspondence between Bell’s lawyers and Ellis Spear, who was the acting commissioner of the Patent Office at the time. The unusual hand delivery within the office accounts for the fact that, even though the documents were technically filed on the same day, the patent examiner in the case—a man named Zenas Wilber—received Bell’s patent personally in his office on February 14 but did not receive Gray’s caveat until the following day. But the available facts indicate strongly that Gray’s claim arrived at the Patent Office several hours
before
Bell’s, despite the oft-repeated story to the contrary.

The most important thing to note about the entire issue is this:
normally, it would make no difference whose claim was filed first.
At the time, the U.S. patent system was legally bound to issue patents to those who were the first to
invent,
not the first to
file.
Accordingly, after reading Bell’s and Gray’s filings, patent examiner Wilber properly ruled that, because of the overlapping claims of the two filings, Bell’s application would be suspended for three months, allowing Gray time to formally file a full patent application, as the rules of the day stipulated. The Patent Office would wait until it had Gray’s patent in hand before formally deciding whether to declare interference between the claims. Following this standard procedure, Wilber mailed notice of the temporary suspension (and likely interference) to Bell, Gray, and each of their attorneys on February 19, 1876.

This is the point in the story, however, where the contention over the time of day became vital to the telephone’s future. Bell’s attorneys, Anthony Pollok and Marcellus Bailey, immediately responded to Wilber’s letter by arguing that if Bell’s
patent
had been filed before Gray’s
caveat
(which was not, after all, a full patent application), then no such suspension or declaration of interference should be allowed. It was a brash and highly questionable argument. As Pollok and Bailey no doubt knew, the Patent Office kept no official track of the time when applications arrived. In fact, just three weeks earlier, on February 3, in an almost identical case, Acting Patent Commissioner Ellis Spear had ruled against such an interpretation of U.S. patent law.

In that prior incident, known as the
Essex
case, Spear upheld the suspension of a patent application when an overlapping caveat was filed for a similar invention the same day. Like Wilber, the patent examiner in the
Essex
case—which dealt with an improved spinning machine invented by Jeremiah Essex—had made the standard office decision to call for a suspension in anticipation of formal interference hearings. As Spear wrote in that case:

Therefore, Spear ruled that

Despite this clear and recent precedent, Pollok and Bailey made precisely the same plea in their own
ex parte,
or one-sided, case. In a letter to Spear received at the Patent Office on February 24, 1876, Pollok and Bailey wrote:

Setting aside all other circumstances, the letter from Bell’s attorneys seems suspicious to begin with. Pollok and Bailey would have been unlikely to go to the trouble of making this plea to Spear unless they felt confident that Bell’s patent had, in fact, arrived first. Technically speaking, they should have had no way of knowing such a thing. And yet, as we know from the proceedings that followed, whoever delivered Bell’s patent application had specifically bypassed normal procedure, insisting that it be hand-delivered to Zenas Wilber immediately. Could this have been part of a hastily made plan that could explain Hubbard’s rush to file that day? It certainly seemed plausible.

In response to the letter from Pollok and Bailey, Acting Patent Commissioner Spear contacted Wilber about the matter. Wilber responded with the following memo:

Somehow, despite Wilber’s explanation, and despite Spear’s recent ruling in the virtually identical
Essex
case, Pollok and Bailey managed to prevail. They argued that Spear should disallow Gray’s claim because Bell’s patent application was logged into the cash blotter before Gray’s caveat and because Wilber admitted receiving Bell’s filing before Gray’s.

In virtually all patent matters before and since, when two or more competing claims have arrived on the same day, the U.S. Patent Office has undertaken steps toward interference proceedings to determine which inventor conceived of the idea first. But on February 25, 1876, Acting Commissioner of Patents Ellis Spear made U.S. Patent Office history. At the written urging of Bell’s lawyers, Spear overturned the initial judgment of the assigned patent examiner, ordering that only Bell’s claim be considered because it had allegedly reached the Patent Office earlier in the day than Gray’s caveat had.

Pollok and Bailey were clearly prominent and powerful players on the patent scene in this period, but it remains a mystery why Spear was swayed by their highly questionable argument. Even Spear’s rationale is obscure. He specifically notes in his ruling that

In Gray’s case, however, Spear says it is within his right to consider “the exact time of day when an act was done,” and, accordingly, he ruled that Gray’s caveat “should be disregarded.” Spear’s reasoning may remain a mystery. But there is nothing unclear about its consequences for Elisha Gray: Spear’s ruling drastically undermined his chances for legal recourse in the case.

The entire episode seemed extraordinary, even brazen in its irregularity, dovetailing with much else I had learned about the opening moves of the Bell team to assert their patent rights. I was relieved to find the work of Evenson and several others who shared my view that something was highly suspect in the patenting of the telephone. But I marveled that the controversy surrounding the telephone’s origins was not more widely remembered today.

Along these lines, perhaps the best source of both information and outrage over the case occurred ten years after the fact, in an unusual governmental report. Dated December 22, 1885, the report was part of the congressional investigation into the anomalies in the case. At the time, enough controversy surrounded Bell’s patent rights to the telephone that the government was considering annulling them. Because the U.S. Patent Office was then under the purview of the Department of the Interior, Assistant Secretary of the Interior George A. Jenks conducted an investigation of the matter for Congress. As it turned out, the investigation was politically tainted by the fact that some of the congressmembers who called for it stood to gain financially if the Bell telephone monopoly were dismantled. Nevertheless, the investigation makes for fascinating reading: it brings to light many of the particulars that the courts had previously ignored and stands as a thorough look at the entire patenting process in the case.

Jenks’s report singles out Spear’s decision in the Bell-Gray matter for particular attack, calling Spear’s ruling “exceptional” and “contrary to the former practice of the office.” Jenks notes too that Spear contradicted his own ruling on the same subject made on February 3, 1876, in the
Essex
case. Citing these and other disturbing irregularities, Jenks ends with this unequivocal assessment:

A
SIDE FROM THE
wrangling at the Patent Office, I was curious about how Bell’s work fit into the broader intellectual history of the telephone. For instance, even if he figured out how to make a working transmitter only after seeing Gray’s caveat, I thought Bell might perhaps deserve credit as the first to have actively pursued the idea of a telephone.

I quickly realized, however, that such a notion was badly mistaken.

Efforts to trace the intellectual history of an idea or artifact almost always result in a complex tale with many disparate players. Surprisingly, though, unlike the patent question, most of those who have looked closely at the origins of the telephone agree about the key milestones that paved the way for its development. And almost all of them occurred well before Gray or Bell’s time.

Over the course of more than a century, a number of people have carefully traced the telephone’s conceptual development. George Prescott, a leading electrical researcher and contemporary of Bell’s, did so in his 1878 book,
The Speaking Telegraph, Talking Phonograph and Other Novelties.
The British electrical engineer William Aitken reexamined the history in 1939 in a detailed work entitled
Who Invented the Telephone?
And more recently, in 1995, Lewis Coe revisited the topic in
The Telephone and Its Several Inventors.

Many of these experts contend, for instance, that much credit is due to Charles Grafton Page, an accomplished physicist and physician in Salem (the Massachusetts town where, coincidentally, Bell later lived with the Sanders family). In 1837, ten years before Bell was born, Page made a seminal breakthrough when he observed that an electromagnet emits a sound when the current flowing to it is interrupted rapidly. He called the effect “galvanic music” and found he could vary the sound by changing how fast the interruptions in current flow occurred. Most historians agree that Page was the first to use electricity to directly produce musical tones. His discovery opened the door to the prospect that electrical current could create sounds—and that the current could carry those sounds along a telegraph wire. This line of thinking would lead a diverse assortment of researchers on a direct path toward the telephone.

On numerous occasions, Bell referenced Page’s discovery as a key influence on his work. He also frequently cited the importance of the electrical devices Helmholtz built to test his acoustical theories, especially the tuning fork sounder. In fact, in Bell’s first public talk about the telephone at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he cites more than a dozen researchers who influenced his work in addition to Page and Helmholtz. As Bell himself notes, by the time he began his research, the acoustic effects related to Page’s mysterious galvanic music had been

The list may sound like an imposing historical tangle, but it offers some noteworthy context. Quite simply, by Bell’s day many people, in many countries, were actively researching the intriguing, emerging nexus of acoustics and electricity.

Years later, in response to questioning in the lawsuits over patent rights to the telephone, Bell disavowed much knowledge of the work of any of the researchers listed above, at least so far as it might have helped him to invent a telephone; he claimed disingenuously that he didn’t follow the literature in the field very closely. But Bell’s later comments can to some extent be understood in the context of the adversarial tug and pull in the courtroom. The list Bell offered when he first publicly spoke about the telephone, on May 22, 1876, speaks for itself: Bell was at least to some degree familiar with the early telephonic research that preceded him.

With Bell’s understandable focus on academic experimenters in his speech at the American Academy, though, he neglects to mention a particularly important conceptual breakthrough: an 1854 article by the Belgian-born engineer Charles Bourseul. Bourseul’s article, “Transmission électrique de la parole” (“The Electric Transmission of Speech”), appeared in a French magazine called
L’Illustration,
offering what most historians believe to be the world’s first published description of the telephone. “I have,” Bourseul writes,

Bourseul didn’t merely propose the notion of long-distance communication. He outlined the rudiments of how the system might actually work, describing an adaptation of the telegraph that he believed would allow it to transmit the human voice. As he explains:

Aside from the faulty, telegraph-influenced notion that vocal sounds could be transmitted by “making and breaking” an electrical circuit, Bourseul presents a remarkably accurate description of the telephone’s underlying principle: that sound waves on one end of a wire could be carried via an electric current and replicated on the other. He never attempted to build the system he described, but his article was widely read in scientific and engineering circles, and it inspired a number of researchers to pursue the idea. At the time of its publication, Alexander Graham Bell was seven years old.

“
WELL, THERE’S SOMEONE
up to no good.”

I was crouched over my laptop computer at a Cambridge café when my colleague Dave Pantalony came by my table with a characteristic greeting. Pleased for the company, I asked him to join me.

Pantalony, an energetic and jocular postdoctoral fellow, was spending the year at the Dibner Institute after receiving his Ph.D. in history from the University of Toronto. Passionate about historic machines, he had already done a stint as a curator of a major U.S. collection of scientific instruments at Dartmouth College and he hoped for more such opportunities in the future. He asked what I was working on. I told him about my efforts to tease apart the intellectual history of the telephone.

“We’ve got to go together to inspect some of these early telephone devices,” he said eagerly. Enthusiasm was a Pantalony hallmark.

“I’d love that.”

I had spent enough time with folks at the Dibner to know that the field had long since fractured into two distinct camps: devotees of the history of science versus those who studied the history of technology. Although the distinction was hard for me to fathom, each group had its own associations, conventions, and journals. For his part, Pantalony was a strong proponent of the study of tools, instruments, and techniques. In a field dominated by philosophers tracing the development of theoretical knowledge, Pantalony took an almost archaeological approach. He believed that his colleagues would do well to pay more attention to scientific instruments and devices, rather than focus exclusively on documents.

In the course of his doctoral research, Pantalony had found an interesting way to further this view by focusing on Rudolph Koenig, one of the most skilled and meticulous instrument makers of the nineteenth century. Pantalony documented how Koenig, with a high-profile shop in Paris, made a discernible mark on numerous scientific fields by building instruments for scientific giants throughout Europe and North America, from Hermann von Helmholtz in Germany to Joseph Henry in the United States.

“The intellectual history of ideas can be like quicksand,” Pantalony said. “But the machines—the instruments themselves—they tell their stories in such a concrete way. It’s amazing how much you want to know is wrapped up in their design, materials, and construction.”

We talked about a lot of things that afternoon, certainly more than we had in our many brief exchanges at the copy machine or office coffeemaker. And while we never did organize a joint visit to look at early telephone prototypes, I sought out Pantalony’s expertise on several occasions as my research progressed. More important, though, I tried to take to heart his straightforward approach of emphasizing the tangible.

As a result of our chance encounter that day, I decided to take a trip to the Science Museum in London, which houses an unparalleled telecommunications collection that includes some of the world’s earliest telephone prototypes. The pilgrimage seemed a far cry from my initial stroll around Boston in pursuit of physical traces of Bell’s past. There was no escaping the fact that I had become deeply immersed into trying to unravel what I could about the telephone’s inception.

When I arrived at the museum, John Liffen, curator of the communications collection, was my spry and knowledgeable guide. After meeting at his office in South Kensington, he whisked me away on an unforgettable journey to a vast warehouse on the outskirts of London. It was hard to keep up with both his whirlwind pace and his rapid-fire references to disparate topics in the history of technology. Liffen was encyclopedic, especially on details of the history of the telephone and telegraph.

When we reached the vast, unmarked brick building, once a postal facility, Liffen flashed his badge and chatted with the guard at the entrance. Then, as I scrambled along behind him, he swiftly climbed two flights of stairs to the rooms containing early telecommunications equipment. Through thick fire doors, we entered a vast warehouse filled with tall rows of heavy-duty metal shelves. They held the largest and most astonishing array of items I have ever seen.

We wove our way past many aisles. Some held aging architectural models of early factories and scientific instruments that looked like early vacuum chambers and static electricity generators. One aisle even featured a gangly and eerie assortment of historic prosthetic limbs made from wood, metal, and plastic. All told, it was a phenomenal graveyard of inventions, each a touchstone for little-known stories of human initiative and ingenuity. As a longtime casual collector of old tools and scientific instruments, I was enthralled by the surroundings. Despite regular visits, Liffen clearly sustained a similar passion.

“I never want to leave once I get here,” he said.

We finally arrived at a cavernous wing of the warehouse devoted to communications devices. Our pace slowed a bit and I noticed that Liffen began to gaze at the collection as we walked past, as though fighting the temptation to explore and digress from our intended focus on the telephone. He was a specialist on the early telegraph, particularly the rare, very early “needle telegraphs” designed by the British team of William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone. The Science Museum has an unmatched collection of these remarkable devices, and, as we walked by, Liffen couldn’t resist stopping briefly.

Sitting side by side on a waist-high shelf were a half dozen beautiful and intriguing needle telegraph machines. Encased in polished wood, with hand-carved detail, they looked like strange, Victorian-era clocks that might have once adorned somebody’s mantelpiece. It was hard to imagine that, in their day, in the late 1830s, these radically new and avant-garde machines were the world’s very first commercial electric telecommunication devices. Predating the simplicity of Morse code, the needle telegraphs made use of a fabulously idiosyncratic scheme in which telegraphic signals moved compass needles to spell out words by pointing to letters on a dial. Each machine had five compass needles with twenty letters arrayed around them in a diamond-shaped grid. The positions of the needles indicated a particular letter on the grid. As for the six letters of the alphabet missing from the grid, Liffen explained with a chuckle, the sender was out of luck; those letters simply had to be omitted from messages.

The needle telegraph machines were first employed for communication by trained technicians working at Britain’s newly developing railways. By 1838 they were used to send telegrams between London and outlying towns. “On the one hand, given the advent of Morse code, these machines were obviously a dead end,” Liffen mused. “And yet, on the other hand, what an extraordinary accomplishment they represent. They really can be seen to have paved the way for every telecommunications device that came after them.”

Around the corner, Liffen paused briefly to pull down a length of now-fraying cable. It was a piece cut from the first transatlantic telegraph cable, laid in 1858, opening up the prospect of telegraphic communication between Europe and North America. The humble-looking cable, a little over an inch in diameter, was the physical representation of a truly enormous development in the history of human communication, shrinking the time it took to send a message from America to Europe from some two weeks by ship to a matter of mere minutes. We were working our way chronologically through the history of telecommunications, and the next aisle was devoted exclusively to the telephone.

I scanned the contents of the aisle as we approached, thinking immediately of Dave Pantalony’s energetic passion for the artifact and the almost overpowering assemblage of clues contained here about the telephone’s history. Floor to ceiling on either side of us were telephones and telephone-related paraphernalia. Some large pieces of switchboards caught my eye, as did a bright pink princess telephone from the 1950s. The museum’s collection even included the “Osborne telephone” that Bell used in 1878 to demonstrate his invention to Queen Victoria (who was then staying at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight).

“I believe this is what you will be most interested in,” Liffen said finally, pulling a compact wooden box off a shoulder-high shelf. He handed me a device designed by a German schoolteacher called Philipp Reis in 1863, when Bell was sixteen years old. “This,” Liffen said, “is surely one of the very oldest telephones ever built.”