The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) (22 page)

for an improved telegraph relay:
Elisha Gray, U.S. Patent 76,748, “Improvement in Telegraph Apparatus,” issued April 14, 1868.

Barton & Gray:
See
American National Biography,
Vol. 9, p. 441.

a one-third interest:
See David A. Hounshell, “Elisha Gray and the Telephone: On the Disadvantages of Being an Expert,”
Technology and Culture
(April 1975), p. 138.

“Gray was electrician”:
Watson,
Exploring Life,
p. 60. “Electrician” was the contemporary term for what we would call an “electrical engineer” today.

called a “caveat”:
The U.S. Patent Office rules are laid out clearly in Webster Elmes,
The Executive Departments of the United States at Washington
(Washington, DC: W. H. & O. H. Morrison, 1879), chap. 28, “The Patent Office,” pp. 471–87.

by 1910:
See timeline in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office,
The Story of the United States Patent and Trademark Office
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1981), p. 21.

Gray filed his claim:
Elisha Gray, U.S. Patent Office Caveat, “Instruments for Transmitting and Receiving Vocal Sounds Telegraphically,” filed February 14, 1876.

one of the largest and most lucrative monopolies:
AT&T, the direct descendant of Bell’s original agreement with Hubbard and Sanders, was incorporated on March 3, 1885. A vertically integrated monopoly, AT&T would soon thereafter become the largest corporation in the world. See Irwin Lebow,
Information Highways and Byways: From the Telegraph to the 21st Century
(New York: IEEE Press, 1995), p. 41.

4
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H
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to have his pocketwatch cleaned:
Edwin S. Grosvenor and Morgan Wesson,
Alexander Graham Bell: The Life and Times of the Man Who Invented the Telephone
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), p. 16.

born in 1847 in Edinburgh:
Bruce,
Bell,
p. 16. Bell was born on March 3, 1847, at 16 South Charlotte Street, Edinburgh.

Alexander Bell, taught elocution:
MacKenzie,
Alexander Graham Bell
, p. 13.

David Bell:
Ibid., p. 32.

Alexander Melville Bell:
See AGB, “Notes of Early Life.” See also MacKenzie,
Alexander Graham Bell
, pp. 17–20.

“Visible Speech”:
See Alexander Melville Bell,
Visible Speech: The Science of Universal Alphabetics
(London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1867).

Shaw’s preface:
George Bernard Shaw,
Pygmalion
(1916; New York: Washington Square Press, 2001), preface, p. 19.

just minutes away:
Bruce,
Bell,
p. 30.

Bell invariably thereafter called the experience:
See, e.g., AGB, “Notes of Early Life.”

reading Shakespeare aloud:
Ibid.

don a suit jacket:
Ibid. As Bell recalls: “The moment my father left for Edinburgh my grandfather sent for a fashionable tailor, and I soon found myself converted into a regular dude, resembling a tailor’s picture plate of an Eton school-boy.”

“Sanskrit cerebral T”:
Grosvenor and Wesson,
Alexander Graham Bell
, p. 23.

“The best thing Bell did for me”:
Watson,
Exploring Life,
p. 58.

Shakespearean repertory theater troupe:
Ibid., pp. 250–96.

a gifted musician:
See MacKenzie,
Alexander Graham Bell
, p. 22. She says that Bell, as a boy “enjoyed music, and it was his solace all his life.”

following Signor Bertini’s model:
AGB, Address Before the Telephone Society of Washington, February 3, 1910.

Eliza Symonds Bell:
AGB to Mabel Hubbard, August 1, 1876. See also Bruce,
Bell,
p. 22.

a renaissance in the science of acoustics:
See, e.g., Stephan Vogel, “Sensation of Tone, Perception of Sound, and Empiricism: Helmholtz’s Physiological Acoustics,” in David Cahan, ed.,
Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 259–87.

Sir Charles Wheatstone:
See Daniel P. McVeigh, “An Early History of the Telephone 1664–1865,” a project of the New York–based Institute for Learning Technologies, available online at http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/projects/bluetelephone/html/.

most lucrative telegraph patents:
Ibid.

on a visit to Wheatstone’s laboratory:
AGB, “Notes of Early Life.”

Wolfgang von Kempelen:
See Bernd Pompino-Marschall, “Von Kempelen et al.: Remarks on the history of articulatory-acoustic modeling,”
ZAS Papers in Linguistics,
no. 40 (2005), pp. 145–59.

“I saw Sir Charles”:
Ibid. See also Grosvenor and Wesson,
Alexander Graham Bell
, p. 17.

their own “talking machine”:
As recounted in AGB, “Making a Talking-Machine,” unpublished article, undated, Miscellaneous Articles file, LOC.

“The making of this talking-machine”:
Ibid.

“made it yell”:
Ibid.

“We heard someone above say”:
Ibid.

Weston House Academy:
AGB, autobiographical article, February 6, 1879.

his first-ever professional experiment:
See AGB, “The Result of Some Experiments in Connection with ‘Visible Speech’ Made in Elgin in November 1865,” Alexander Graham Bell Family Collection, LOC (Subject File Folder: The Deaf, Visible Speech, Notebooks, 1865).

Alexander John Ellis:
Wesson and Grosvenor,
Alexander Graham Bell
, p. 30.

Hermann von Helmholtz:
See Hermann von Helmholtz,
On the Sensation of Tone
(1863), 2nd English ed., trans. Alexander J. Ellis (New York: Dover, 1954).

London Philological Society:
Wesson and Grosvenor,
Alexander Graham Bell
, p. 30.

a “tuning fork sounder”:
For a discussion of Helmholtz’s device, see Bruce,
Bell,
p. 50.

47
the completely erroneous conclusion:
See Bell’s explanation in
The Bell Telephone: The Deposition of Alexander Graham Bell in the Suit Brought by the United States to Annul the Bell Patents
(Boston: American Bell Telephone Co., 1908), Int. 19, p. 12.

“‘I thought that Helmholtz had done it’”:
Quoted in MacKenzie,
Alexander Graham Bell
, p. 41.

Grandfather Alexander had died:
Ibid., p. 37.

passed his entrance exams:
J. Symonds to AGB, July 26, 1868; see also Bruce,
Bell,
p. 57.

had suffered from chronic maladies:
See, e.g., Wesson and Grosvenor,
Alexander Graham Bell
, pp. 30–31.

Melville Bell’s reputation:
Ibid., p. 58.

On a visit to Boston:
See Bruce,
Bell,
p. 59.

Harvard University president Thomas Hill:
MacKenzie,
Alexander Graham Bell
, p. 44.

to Brantford, Ontario:
Bruce,
Bell,
p. 73.

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NSWER

“If Gray had prevailed in the end”:
Bruce,
Bell,
p. 168.

the liquid transmitter makes its first appearance:
AGB, Laboratory Notebook, 1875–1876, p. 39.

MIT professors:
In particular, Bell met with Professors Charles R. Cross, Lewis B. Monroe, and Edward Pickering—see Bruce,
Bell,
pp. 110 and 171.

world’s first public demonstration:
AGB, “Researches in Telephony,”
Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
, May 10, 1876.

Watson had sat in a warehouse:
Walworth Manufacturing Co., Cambridgeport, MA. See Watson,
Exploring Life,
pp. 91–95, and AGB, “The Pre-Commercial Period of the Telephone,” speech delivered November 2, 1911, p. 16.

A painting by W. A. Rogers:
The painting, depicting Bell’s workshop at 5 Exeter Place as it stood in March 1877, is available in a photographic reproduction in the Gilbert H. Grosvenor Collection of Alexander Bell Photographs, LOC, Bell Collection, neg. no. LC-G9-Z2-4429-B-3.

the Charles Williams machine shop:
For an evocative description of the shop, see Charlotte Gray,
Reluctant Genius: Alexander Graham Bell and the Passion for Invention
(New York: Arcade Publishing, 2006), p. 82.

Boston Athenaeum Building:
The building on Beacon Street in Boston was designed by Edward Clarke Cabot; construction began in 1847. See http://www.bostonathenaeum.org.

Perhaps the most compelling portrait:
See Watson,
Exploring Life
, passim.

By using pictures:
AGB to his parents, May 6, 1874. See also Grosvenor and Wesson,
Alexander Graham Bell
, pp. 41–43.

newspapers chronicled the success:
See “Report of a Committee on the New Method of Instruction for Deaf-Mutes,”
Boston Daily Advertiser,
December 1871; and AGB Papers, LOC (Subject File Folder: The Deaf, Visible Speech, Misc., 1868–1919). See also AGB to his parents, June 22, 1873. Bell writes eagerly, The lecture has at once placed me in a
new position
in Boston. It has brought me in contact with the
scientific minds
of the
city
” (emphasis in the original). See also Bruce,
Bell,
p. 76.

at Boston University:
AGB to his parents, November 1, 1873; see also AGB to his parents, April 1874.

Thomas Sanders soon agreed:
AGB to his parents, October 2, 1873. Bell writes his first letter after moving into the Sanders home. For more on Sanders, see also Bruce,
Bell,
pp. 127–31.

“power of electricity”:
Watson,
Exploring Life,
p. 52.

in the same building:
See Josephson,
Edison,
p. 62.

an electrical vote recorder:
Thomas A. Edison, U.S. Patent 90,646, “Improvement in Electrographic Vote-Recorder,” issued June 1, 1869.

“One day early in 1874”:
Watson,
Exploring Life,
p. 54.

he headed straight:
Ibid. See also Bruce,
Bell,
pp. 134–35.

More and more unsightly wires:
See Hounshell, “Elisha Gray and the Telephone,”
Technology and Culture,
p. 144.

Joseph Stearns:
Joseph Stearns, U.S. Patent 126,847, “Duplex Telegraph Apparatus,” issued May 14, 1872. See also Bruce,
Bell,
p. 93.

“harmonic multiple telegraph”:
The most complete explanation can be found in Bell’s
The Multiple Telegraph
(Boston: Franklin Press, 1876). This monograph was prepared by Bell as a detailed narrative account of his path to his invention in accordance with the U.S. Patent Office’s so-called Rule 53, which required a detailed statement in an interference proceeding. See also AGB to George Brown, October 4, 1874.