The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) (17 page)

Were all historical accounts riddled with such problems, I mused. If historians and writers of every stripe could not agree on the place, date, or circumstances of a well-known and well-documented incident like the telephone’s invention, how much credence should we give to the standard renditions of any historical tale?

I was so busy puzzling over the odd inconsistencies in this story that I nearly overlooked something far more consequential: Casson’s bungled 1910 account was the earliest version of the famous scene that showed up in my search.

Looking further, I realized that, however unlikely it seemed, there were no contemporaneous versions of this story, no speeches about it, no newspaper accounts from the 1870s. Scouring all my sources, I discovered that Bell himself never publicly told this now-famous story. The discovery seemed hard to believe until I realized that dreaded Whiggism had crept into my analysis. Just as David Cahan had warned, I was reading history backwards. The scene is so closely associated with the telephone today, I found it hard to accept that it was virtually unknown at the time. After all, it does purport to recount the world’s first conversation over the telephone.

By all accounts, Bell loved nothing more than holding forth about his scientific research, and this was certainly his greatest breakthrough. It was hard to imagine that Bell would never have regaled people with the story of his first telephone call. Yet, as I concluded after a careful review, the story we now quote would probably be all but unknown today if it hadn’t been authoritatively and winningly recounted by Watson in his autobiography,
Exploring Life,
published in 1926—four years after Bell’s death.

The more I thought about it, the more consequential Bell’s silence seemed to be. In the story as Watson eventually recounts it, Bell calls out urgently after
spilling acid on his pants.
Even the basic storyline evokes Bell’s work with a liquid transmitter. Did Bell withhold any public mention of his success with a liquid transmitter to keep Elisha Gray in the dark about his foul play? Was that why he never told the story of his first success in transmitting intelligible speech? I wasn’t sure yet, but it certainly seemed like a plausible explanation.

The explanation gained further credence when I learned, to my amazement, that in the 1879
Dowd
case—the only occasion when the claims of Bell and Gray came directly into conflict in court—Bell made no mention of his first transmission of speech with the liquid transmitter
during his entire nine days
on the witness stand.

The following year, in 1880, Bell does touch upon the story under questioning in the courtroom. And Watson gives a somewhat more detailed account during his testimony in August 1882. But aside from Casson’s flawed telling, the story does not come to widespread public attention until some
four decades
after the fact, when Watson recounts it in his autobiography. Only then does it begin to make its way into the history books, starting with Catherine MacKenzie’s
Alexander Graham Bell: The Man Who Contracted Space,
the first biography of Bell, published in 1928. MacKenzie’s book drew upon her close association with Bell as his assistant during the last eight years of his life. Despite Watson’s prior published account, one wonders about the extent to which MacKenzie’s rendition posthumously derives from Bell himself. As she tells it:

ON A PARTICULARLY
cold and wintry afternoon, I was heading out to have lunch in Cambridge with a colleague who taught in MIT’s graduate writing program. As I often did, I walked through the main reception area of the Dibner Institute to check my mailbox. My thoughts were occupied with the events of 1876 and Bell’s strange silence about his telephone breakthrough. On my way through the front office, I passed the handsome glass cases containing the assortment of familiar historical artifacts, when one of them suddenly grabbed my attention in a new way.

There, behind the glass, rested the handsomely marbled cover of a pamphlet from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dated May 22, 1876, it was a transcription of Alexander Graham Bell’s first public speech about the telephone. I had walked past it countless times without giving it much thought, but now it beckoned with a crucial clue. I realized that in a year of research I had been so focused on the details leading up to the invention of the telephone that I had overlooked Bell’s actions afterward. I had seen many references to Bell’s talk at the Academy and read excerpts of it, but I had never closely inspected the speech itself. Given Bell’s reticence about the “Watson come here” story, how exactly had he recounted the circumstances of his invention of the telephone when he first spoke of it in public?

Before heading off to lunch, I sped to my office to look online in the hope that I could locate a copy of Bell’s speech at one of MIT’s libraries. Sure enough, MIT’s Hayden Library in the heart of the campus contained a full set of the
Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
, dating back to the organization’s founding in 1780.

I made for the library directly after my lunch meeting.

The works I sought were stored in a section in the basement, where the floor-to-ceiling shelves roll on tracks to close up solidly against one another, packing the walls of books and journals together like proverbial sardines. To retrieve a book, the intrepid researcher has to turn a crank, roll apart the walls of bookshelves, and create a passable aisle, then brave this new crevice to find what you are looking for.

The musty old volume from 1876 looked as if it hadn’t been touched for many decades. Making my way straight to the nearest carrel, I sat in the fluorescent glare to examine it.

Scholars normally describe Bell’s Academy speech as the first time he publicly disclosed his work on the telephone. And yet, looking back over the bound volume of the Academy’s
Proceedings,
I realized it was doubtful that Bell had actually demonstrated the transmission of speech at this oft-cited event. Without offering many specifics, Bell did mention that he had transmitted some intelligible speech with his invention. But he did not reveal the circumstances of his initial success, and he made only a passing conceptual reference to the liquid transmitter. Instead, Bell focused on, and presumably demonstrated for his colleagues, a far more primitive apparatus he had built that could transmit only musical tones.

Once again, I marveled that the truth seemed so at odds with the received history. Hot on this new trail, sitting in my office that evening, I looked further into the matter using the online collection of the Library of Congress. I quickly found a letter Bell had written to his parents immediately after giving his presentation at the Academy. It corroborated my suspicion:

Bell wrote that he telegraphed Willie to play some music, “and in response came some rich chords.” But he made no mention of having tried to speak through his device. Sometime later I found that, as was so often the case, Bell’s legal testimony offered the most precise and revealing account. The following passage from Bell’s deposition in the 1879
Dowd
case would seem to leave little doubt about the matter. The opposing counsel specifically asks Bell what electrical devices, if any, Bell exhibited during his speech at the American Academy. Bell responds:

Despite his marked and uncharacteristic vagueness in this answer, Bell seems notably certain about that last point. It is truly a remarkable admission. Consider the fact that Bell had made his breakthrough speaking to Watson with the liquid transmitter some two months earlier. It is possible to imagine that Bell might have perhaps been concerned that the liquid transmitter might not perform reliably and thus refrained from demonstrating it. But such a hypothesis seems unlikely. Bell had built a device capable of transmitting speech. And he had a U.S. patent giving him broad rights to it. His speech to his prestigious colleagues at the American Academy marked his moment to bask in their acclaim. Why, then, would he refrain from displaying his most successful and important breakthrough?

Reviewing Bell’s laboratory notebook once again, I realized that, during this period in the early spring of 1876, after Bell’s phenomenal success with the liquid transmitter, he quickly abandoned any effort to improve his liquid transmitter design. Instead, he switched his focus to developing
an alternative method
to transmit speech that evolved directly from his accident almost a year earlier in which Bell had heard Watson pluck the steel reed of his finicky multiple telegraph receiver.

In so doing, Bell switched to trying to develop a “magneto-electric” transmitter design. He had guessed from his earlier work that such a design would be possible. But, at the time he filed his patent, he provided no specific guidelines for how to build such a transmitter and, of course, he himself had never yet done so to successfully transmit articulate speech.

Like the liquid transmitter, Bell’s magneto transmitter design used a vibrating diaphragm, but it operated on a different principle. Rather than using the vibrating diaphragm to vary the electrical resistance in the circuit, the diaphragm vibrated in front of a magnet to cause tiny fluctuations of the current in the magnetic field. It was, in essence, a telephone receiver in reverse: rather than using fluctuations in electric current to trigger vibrations of sound waves in the air, Bell realized he could make the sound waves induce tiny changes in a magnet’s residual electric current.

The method yielded a terribly weak signal, but Bell nonetheless had adopted the method wholeheartedly by late April 1876. By May, all mention of the liquid transmitter in Bell’s laboratory notebook had ended. Only then, with this alternative transmission method in hand, did Bell finally make a public announcement of his invention of the telephone.

In 1966, Bernard Finn, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution, tested some of the museum’s collection of Bell’s transmitters and surmised that Bell might have switched away from the liquid variable resistance transmitter because the magneto design worked better. Finn’s hypothesis is intriguing, but Bell’s notebooks offer no evidence that he was displeased with the performance of the liquid transmitter, or that his new method achieved any improvement. On the contrary, Bell notes that it is difficult to hear consonants with the early versions of his magneto transmitter.

Even if Finn’s conjecture is accurate, it still does not adequately explain Bell’s complete abandonment of the variable resistance transmitter. Bell surely recognized that the signal in his magneto transmitter was exceedingly weak, whereas the variable resistance transmitter’s signal could be easily amplified. This crucial advantage would make it possible to transmit speech over long distances. Electrical researchers, including most notably Thomas Edison, would soon make the need for liquid obsolete by using carbon in their variable resistance transmitter designs. But it was the liquid, variable resistance transmitter which first crossed the vital technological threshold, opening the door to virtually all modern telephone transmitter designs.

Viewed with hindsight, the irony is that Bell took a marked step backward in his transmitter design, moving from a primitive version of the variable resistance model that would become the industry standard to a magneto-electric design that would quickly become obsolete. As Bell’s biographer Bruce notes,

Nonetheless, having finally succeeded in transmitting speech—months after the fact—with a telephone design that comported more closely with the language in his patent, Bell went public. He announced his success in his lecture at the American Academy. And he actually demonstrated speech transmission several days later, on May 25, 1876, before a good-sized audience at MIT.