The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) (14 page)

W
ILBER’S AFFIDAVIT, PUBLISHED
in
The Washington Post
on May 22, 1886, prompted a swift and adamant public denial. Three days later, on May 25, the newspaper printed Bell’s sworn retort:

Bell categorically denied most of Wilber’s specific allegations. He said he had never given Wilber a hundred-dollar bill or any payment. And he added flatly:

Wilber’s affidavits, coming nearly a decade after the fact, never played a role in any of the legal challenges to Bell’s claim to the telephone. But Wilber’s final affidavit, in particular, bears a close reading alongside those numerous other occasions when Bell spoke specifically about the matter.

On several occasions, Bell simply denied having had any knowledge whatsoever of Gray’s caveat. One such comment, for instance, came late in Bell’s life, when his son-in-law Gilbert Grosvenor sought to write his authorized biography. Grosvenor embarked on the project in 1905 and pursued it for over a decade. During that time, he also served as the editor of
National Geographic
magazine and, given this and many other duties, he never managed to complete the book. Nevertheless, the Library of Congress contains one fascinating document, dating most likely from around 1910, in which Bell and his wife Mabel each offer extensive typed comments in response to an early, fragmentary draft from their son-in-law. Referring to Grosvenor’s handling of the controversy surrounding Gray’s caveat, Bell writes:

Of course, having previously reviewed the 1877 correspondence between Bell and Gray, I knew that Bell must have had some knowledge of Gray’s caveat because he wrote that he believed Gray’s claim had something to do with the “vibration of a wire in water.” Furthermore, as always, the picture of Gray’s device in Bell’s notebook nagged at me. After all, it had been drawn almost immediately upon Bell’s arrival home in Boston after having met with Wilber, Pollok, and Bailey in Washington. For me, Bell’s sketch hung like a cloud over all the various iterations of his story, casting many of his claims into deep shadow.

Continuing to look closely into the matter, I found ever more inconsistencies. Perhaps the most troubling occurs in one of the first telephone patent cases, the
Dowd
case of 1879, which ultimately led to a historic settlement between the fledgling Bell Telephone Company and the established telegraph giant Western Union. In response to questions, Bell’s testimony offers a strikingly different version of events—one significantly closer to the story Wilber recounts in his final affidavit. Speaking under oath, Bell admits that he
did
discuss Gray’s caveat with Wilber. By way of explanation, Bell contends that, during his visit to the patent office in February 1876, Wilber had pointed to a particular paragraph
in Bell’s own patent application
to explain the overlap between his and Gray’s claims. According to Bell,

In particular, Bell says,

The paragraph Bell mentions in his testimony—the one he says Wilber pointed to—does seem to anticipate the principle, now known as variable resistance, that makes Gray’s transmitter work. With its reference to a wire immersed in a liquid, it also appears to anticipate the very method used in Gray’s liquid transmitter. Like so many other aspects of the telephone patent saga, it seems suspiciously coincidental that Bell would have independently invented the very mechanism that made Gray’s telephone work, especially because virtually nothing in Bell’s laboratory notebook suggests that he had experimented with the notion prior to filing his patent application.

Nevertheless, taking Bell at his word that Wilber had only pointed out a paragraph in Bell’s own patent, the passage above still stands as a most remarkable admission. In it, Bell acknowledges under oath that he received specific, confidential information about Gray’s work before he had ever successfully transmitted intelligible speech via the telephone.

Given the benefit of hindsight, Bell’s account of the hint Wilber gave him appears even more questionable in light of information that emerged in the
Dowd
case: in Bell’s original file copy of his patent application, the particular paragraph in question regarding the concept of so-called variable resistance—the one Bell claims Wilber pointed to—
is written into the margin of the document,
presumably added sometime after the rest of the application had already been written.

Once again, because truth
is
, as they say, stranger than fiction, I offer below a picture to persuade the skeptical. Again, this version of the patent application, from the Library of Congress, is Bell’s original file copy. The version of Bell’s patent that went to the U.S. Patent Office was copied over by a professional copyist in Pollok & Bailey’s office before being formally submitted. In this original version, however, a paragraph is written into the left-hand margin seemingly in Bell’s handwriting. The passage contains Bell’s reference to variable resistance—the seminal claim that made the telephone possible and that ultimately swayed the courts to uphold Bell’s patent against the many legal challenges it faced in its first decade. This is also the paragraph Bell claims Wilber pointed out to explain where his application had conflicted with Gray’s caveat.

Call it historical intuition, or just a journalist’s horse sense, but, to me, Bell’s testimony simply contains too many overlapping coincidences to be convincing. Given the central importance of variable resistance, is it plausible to believe that Bell left such a crucial passage out and then independently added it into the margin as an afterthought? As the British engineer John Kingsbury put it as early as 1915:

Two decades later, William Aitken echoed the sentiment, likening Bell’s omission of the variable resistance clause to writing a play “without the leading character.”

So, when did Bell pen the crucial addition into his patent application? The question goes to the heart of the central mystery: namely, how much did Bell independently know about variable resistance and how much did he actually learn from Gray’s caveat?

The question leads into one of the deepest thickets yet.

BELL SPENT THE
evening of January 12, 1876, at the Hubbard’s house in Cambridge. That evening, Mabel, now Bell’s fiancée, was feeling ill. Her mother and sister were away for a social engagement and her father was attending business in Washington. As a result, Bell stayed at the house that night to make sure, as he put it in a letter to Gardiner Hubbard, “that burglars did not enter.” While Mabel rested upstairs, Bell worked late into the night in Hubbard’s mahogany-paneled library, finalizing his patent application. Bell had been toiling to complete the patent material since October, and had labored especially hard at the job over the past several weeks. He mentioned it frequently in his correspondence during the period.

January 12 was, according to Bell, a crucial night in the telephone’s development because it represented his last chance to finalize his latest patent application—the one that would come to be known as the telephone patent. He had agreed to send it to Hubbard and Pollok in Washington the following day.

Because of the many irregularities surrounding Bell’s patent, and the many lawsuits he would face, Bell had numerous opportunities to recount under oath his actions of that night. It was then, he says, on the eve of sending his application to Pollok & Bailey in Washington, that he realized he had inadvertently left out a crucial element—his conception of variable resistance. That is why, Bell claims, the concept is added in a lengthy note in the margin of the application and in an additional patent claim appended to the original text. As Bell explained in an 1879 deposition:

The following day, Bell sent the patent application to Gardiner Hubbard to give to the attorneys in Washington. A copyist in Pollok & Bailey’s office reportedly drew up a “fair copy” for Bell to sign and notarize on January 20. Then, as the plan went, the application would sit, ready to be formally filed at the Patent Office as soon as Bell received word from George Brown, who was carrying it to England to file there first.

In a letter to Mabel on January 19, Bell noted that Hubbard, Pollok, and Bailey had favorably received his application and that he still needed to finalize the papers for Brown to take to England. Bell wrote:

The four specifications Bell refers to were all to be included in the package of patent applications he was readying for Brown, including: his first two U.S. patent filings on multiple telegraphy; his new patent application on “undulating currents” (the telephone patent); and a fourth application (never formally filed) for a device Bell called a “spark arrester,” designed to suppress sparks in telegraphic and other electrical devices.

What is especially noteworthy in this passage, though, is Bell’s explanation that he is, at this date, in the process of making three identical copies of each of the documents.

Five days later, on January 25, 1876, Bell, Hubbard, and Pollok met with Brown in New York City. Brown was to depart by ship to England the following day, carrying with him the package containing Bell’s original, handwritten patent applications. At the meeting, Bell and Brown formalized their agreement with one another, including the provision that Bell would not file his new patent application in the United States until he had heard from Brown.

Here the mystery—already murky—deepens considerably. George Brown’s copy, presumably one of the original three Bell was copying on January 19, ultimately resurfaced in 1885, when the U.S. government was preparing a case to consider annulling Bell’s telephone patent on charges that it had been fraudulently won. As it turned out, Brown’s copy had been retrieved by Bell’s legal team years earlier, in 1878, for the
Dowd
patent case, but it had never been officially logged among that case’s documents, let alone presented as evidence. The disquieting fact is this: Brown’s copy of Bell’s patent application contains no marginalia about variable resistance, no additional patent claim about variable resistance, and no mention of a wire immersed in liquid. All these items, so essential to Bell’s ultimate success in court, are simply left out of the Brown version entirely. As a result, the version reads much like a straightforward patent application for a multiple telegraph with only the vaguest references to the possibility of transmitting vocal sounds.

When eventually confronted with this discrepancy, Bell and his legal team argued that the Brown copy that surfaced must have been an earlier draft that Bell had given to Brown months before in Canada. But the note accompanying Brown’s copy when he sent it to Bell’s legal team in 1878 in preparation for the
Dowd
case leaves little question about the matter. Brown states: