The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) (7 page)

At Sanders’s urging, he and Bell visited a Boston patent lawyer named Joseph Adams. Their plan was to file a caveat with the U.S. Patent Office on Bell’s idea for a multiple telegraph. As Bell tried to perfect a workable prototype, they hoped the caveat would protect his rights to the invention he envisioned. Sanders agreed to pay the legal expenses just as he had so far provided funds for Bell’s research.

Despite Sanders’s reservations and his push for legal protection, he also realized that Hubbard could be a great asset to the success of Bell’s endeavors. Hubbard quickly came in on the deal, and the three men formed a team. They decided to divide any profits from the invention three ways, with Sanders and Hubbard sharing the cost of Bell’s experiments and legal fees. In addition, the investors offered to pay for an assistant to help with the experiments, paving the way for Bell’s close association with Thomas Watson.

Hubbard’s connections, energy, and savvy were on display from the start. He convinced the team to switch to his powerful associates at the Washington, D.C.–based law firm of Pollok & Bailey for legal advice. Anthony Pollok, one of the most politically powerful attorneys of his day, had worked with Hubbard on many projects. Among these, he had been chosen by Hubbard as part of the consortium outlined in the Hubbard Bill to oversee the proposed United States Postal Telegraph Company.

With Pollok’s help, Hubbard also immediately convinced Sanders and Bell to withdraw their efforts to seek a caveat. The reason is telling. Even as early as the fall of 1874, Hubbard had learned that Elisha Gray, the well-known electrical researcher, had already filed a patent for a multiple-message telegraph system that overlapped with Bell’s idea. Rather than tip their hand and lose priority with a caveat, Hubbard urged Bell to work as fast as possible and file a patent directly. That way, he and Pollok reasoned, they could try to undermine Gray’s claim by arguing that Bell’s conception for the invention had come prior to the filing of Gray’s caveat.

By the fall of 1874, almost all the major players were in place and the stage set for the invention of the telephone. Bell quickly took Hubbard’s advice to heart. He clearly recognized that to succeed he must produce his multiple telegraph before Gray did. As he put it on November 23, 1874:

Of course, it is important to remember that the all-out race with Gray that Bell describes is
not
one for a telephone, but for the so-called multiple telegraph, capable of sending multiple messages simultaneously. Interestingly, though, it was around this time, in November of 1874, that the conception began taking shape in Bell’s mind for a device to actually transmit speech. At first, Bell envisioned a receiver that was much like a sophisticated version of the talking machine he had built as a teenager with his brother Melly. Watson remembers that when Bell first spoke to him about the idea for a telegraph that could transmit speech, he described it as a machine, perhaps as big as an upright piano, that would simulate the transmitted vocal sounds using a multitude of tuned strings, reeds, and other vibrating mechanisms.

Not surprisingly, however, Gardiner Hubbard kept his gaze focused intently on the multiple telegraph, insisting that Bell focus on it exclusively. According to Watson’s later account, no doubt colored to some extent by the benefit of hindsight, Hubbard told Bell to

WITH HUBBARD AND
Pollok directing the operation, Bell would file his first patent related to his research on the multiple telegraph on March 6, 1875. Hubbard’s strategic hand was everywhere to be seen in Bell’s dealings with the U.S. Patent Office. But, as I researched Hubbard’s role in Bell’s patents, I learned that Hubbard’s handling of Bell’s later patent, for “Improvements in Telegraphy”—the one that would come to be known as the telephone patent—stood out in particular.

Some of the most detailed information about Bell’s path to the telephone actually comes from legal testimony in patent lawsuits over the telephone’s first decade. Bell, Hubbard, and others, fighting off legal challenges to Bell’s patent, gave detailed testimony to substantiate their right to an exclusive claim over the telephone. Often their comments came in response to pointed questions about what had transpired. Bell’s book-length deposition in one such case—now an exceedingly rare volume—was even published in 1908 by the Bell Telephone Company in an edition the firm described as the most complete account ever given of the telephone’s development.

Unfortunately, historians have too often failed to mine these rich legal documents adequately. Bell’s biographer Robert Bruce is something of an exception, but even he dismissively explains in the note accompanying his bibliography that

There is little question that these volumes of testimony make for often slow and painstaking reading, and I certainly cannot claim to have looked at most of their pages. But, based on the resources at my fingertips at the Dibner Institute’s library, I soon found that the testimony of Bell, Hubbard, and others often had momentous bearing on the story of the telephone. In one lawsuit challenging the invention, for instance, Bell made a most extraordinary admission under oath about the timing of his patent: he testified that on February 14, 1876, Hubbard had filed the telephone patent himself,
against Bell’s specific wishes and directions.

Bell explains that he had explicitly directed Hubbard and his lawyers to wait while Bell sent an emissary and family friend—George Brown, an editor at the
Toronto Globe
—to file for a patent in Britain. At the time, the British Patent Office would issue a patent only if the specified technology had not already been patented in other countries.

The British patent was important to Bell: not only was he, at the time, a subject of the British crown, but such British rights were not covered by his agreement with Hubbard and Sanders. Thus, Bell worked out a separate agreement with the Brown brothers, George and Gordon, under which he stood to control a full half of the profit his technology might bring if it could be successfully commercialized in Great Britain.

George Brown had left by ship for Britain on January 25, 1876. On February 14, he had yet to cable about the matter. In Hubbard’s testimony in one case, he claims that Bell:

In the voluminous archives of telephone arcana, no record survives of such a communication from Bell to Hubbard. More important, though, Bell’s own testimony on the matter tells a notably different story. As Bell explains in his deposition:

Hubbard’s involvement had intrigued me from the first. But this discovery, perhaps more than any other, confirmed my commitment—no matter what the effort—to unravel the true story of the telephone’s development. Hubbard knew Bell had a formal, written agreement concerning his patent strategy in England. In fact, Hubbard was present at a meeting with Bell and George Brown during which they drew up a note to reflect their agreement. It read, in part:

As a lawyer, Hubbard would surely have been unlikely to take it upon himself to break Bell’s agreement lightly or frivolously. And yet, if Bell’s testimony is to be believed, Hubbard never consulted Bell about the matter. Nor, if he was merely impatient, is there any evidence to indicate that Hubbard tried to take the simple step of sending a cable to Brown to inquire about the delay.

What prompted Hubbard to summarily negate Bell’s prior agreement without his consent? The most likely explanation is that Hubbard felt it was urgent to file when he did. Especially given the Bell team’s long-standing “neck and neck” competition with Gray, it strains credulity to imagine that Hubbard’s hurried, unilateral action came only coincidentally on the exact day that Gray’s caveat was filed.

As I pondered the information, it seemed far more likely that Hubbard was somehow tipped off about Gray’s intention to file a caveat. The vague outlines of Hubbard and Pollok’s clever telephone gambit were just starting to emerge, but many unanswered questions remained. If Hubbard was tipped off, how did he get the information? And why wouldn’t Gray have objected once the Bell team’s actions came to light? I lacked answers, but I knew one thing for sure: the timing of Bell’s and Gray’s telephone claims is normally portrayed as mere coincidence, but Hubbard’s apparent rush to file—behind Bell’s back, no less—strongly suggests otherwise.

B
Y LATE FALL OF
2004, I had amassed a growing number of questions about the invention of the telephone. I had listed them in my handwritten notebook, typed them into my laptop computer, and written them on notecards. My office came with a white board—the kind with erasable Magic Markers—and one day, on a whim, I used it to jot down some of my questions in the hope that, by looking at them together in one place, I could develop a more coherent research strategy:

Why didn’t the U.S. Patent Office require Bell to submit a working model of his invention?

Why didn’t the truth about Bell’s apparent plagiarism come out in years of bitter court battles?

Why didn’t Elisha Gray pursue his claim?

Before I knew it, I had nearly filled the entire board with questions like these when David Cahan, my colleague from the next office, knocked on my door.

“You busy?” he asked, glancing quizzically at the scribbling on my white board.

“No, no. Come in.”

Cahan had come bearing a gift. He handed me a sheet of paper.

“I have no idea whether this is of interest,” he began, “but I came across evidence that Bell and Helmholtz actually did meet face to face when Helmholtz visited the U.S. late in his life. I thought you might want to see it.”

It was a photocopy of a newspaper article he had unearthed from the
New York Daily Tribune
dated October 4, 1893. According to the report, Bell had come immediately from Nova Scotia upon receiving word that Helmholtz, who had so inspired his work on the telephone, was in America. Ironically enough, the aged Helmholtz had decided to make the trip primarily to attend an International Electrical Congress organized and led by Elisha Gray. But, as the article reported, Bell did manage to meet his mentor in New York. The two men had lunch, after which Bell attended a lecture by Helmholtz and a reception held in his honor.

I was touched by Cahan’s gesture of finding a link between his research and mine. I thanked him for thinking of me and he took a seat in the overstuffed chair across from my desk. He told me he was almost done writing a journal article about the impact of Helmholtz’s visit to the United States. I told him I would be interested to read it.

“Listen,” I said, in an impulsive overture that was doubtless long overdue. “I’m not ready to share this widely yet, but if you have a minute, there is something I’d love to get your advice about.” Shuffling through the papers on my desk, I placed the photocopies of Gray’s caveat and Bell’s version of the liquid transmitter side by side on the corner of my desk and explained how I had happened upon them.

Cahan listened attentively and scrutinized the copies closely. Then he was silent for a long time.

“These are very intriguing documents,” he said. “If the facts are just as you say, it would seem that you really could have something here.” He paused again. “Of course, there is more I would want to know. The key thing that comes to my mind is the danger of Whiggism. Do you know about Whiggism?”

Seeing the blank look on my face as I struggled to imagine what Tories and Whigs had to do with the invention of the telephone, Cahan proceeded in his soft-spoken and collegial way to offer me a learned thumbnail on historiography—the study of
the study of
history. “Whiggism,” Cahan said, was the historical pitfall of not seeing things in their own context but rather judging the past by the norms or standards of the present. The term likely derived from the penchant of certain politically allegiant historians in Britain to write history in terms that favored their own party. In the history of science and technology, Cahan explained, “Whiggism” meant assuming knowledge that one’s historical subjects would have lacked: giving undue credence to a theory, for instance, because you know it was ultimately proven true, or otherwise casting historical subjects as having acted for anachronistic reasons. As another colleague would later put it, “It’s hard to avoid, but whenever possible you need to guard against reading history backwards.”

As Cahan continued: “What could be going on here—I’m not saying it is likely but it is possible—is that Bell and Gray both depicted their inventions this way because at the time it was a standard way of doing so.”

Unlikely or not, the thought had not crossed my mind.

“To avoid any threat of Whiggism creeping into your analysis, I’d recommend scouring through the textbooks of the day to make sure that a picture of a man’s head leaning over like that wasn’t some kind of a standard way of depicting any number of new inventions. At any rate, it’s a base that I would want to cover on something like this.”

Cahan, a specialist in this particular period, didn’t hesitate before offering some highly specific recommendations.

“I’m pretty certain that Helmholtz’s works never included diagrams like this,” he said. “But I’d look particularly at the work of Lord Rayleigh, who was widely read in America. Also any primers on electricity and magnetism from the period.

“I’ll certainly keep this to myself,” he added, going to the door, “but please do keep me posted on what you come up with. You’ll want to try to rule out any alternative explanation you can think of. But there’s no question this is a very interesting find. Thanks for sharing it.”

And with that, he returned to his office.

Before the week was out, I followed Cahan’s suggestion. I flipped through Lord Rayleigh’s classic
Theory of Sound
and many other period texts. There were no similar diagrams. I paged particularly carefully through Daniel Davis’s
Manual of Magnetism
(1842) and J. Baile’s
Wonders of Electricity
(1872). Bell and Watson mention both books as sources of inspiration and, delving into their texts, I could easily see why. Among other fascinating things, Baile’s work actually predicts the invention of what it called an “acoustic telegraph,” noting:

Still, for all the illustrations I found of electrical contraptions, people were hardly, if ever, depicted. Several of Davis’s detailed illustrations include a disembodied hand resting upon a device, but none depict a person’s head as Bell and Gray had done in their drawings.

I gradually became more confident that Bell and Gray had not appropriated some common form of diagram from the period. The more I scrutinized the two drawings, the more certain I became that they were primary documents that represented that rarity: a “smoking gun” that forces us to reevaluate our received understanding of a historical event. In this case, the drawings, now more than a century old, revealed a clear and discernible act of plagiarism—committed by Bell in his private laboratory notebook on the crucial eve of his success with the telephone.

MORE THAN THE
fear of Whiggism, what continued to nag at me was the widespread evidence of Bell’s upstanding reputation. Those who knew Bell generally portray him as a gentleman of integrity with a keen sense of justice. In the preface to her biography, for instance, Bell’s longtime assistant Catherine MacKenzie describes Bell as “honest, courageous” and “scornful of double-dealing.” As MacKenzie writes,

MacKenzie, a close friend, assistant, and confidante of Bell’s, could never be considered an unbiased source. Yet, while the passage made me all the more curious that charges of fraud against Bell were “widespread” in his day, my reading of Bell’s notebooks and correspondence gave me no reason to doubt MacKenzie’s fundamental assessment of his character.

I considered the possibility that Bell might have been unwittingly manipulated by Hubbard or his other advisers. But such a theory couldn’t explain away the fact that the picture of Gray’s transmitter had been drawn in Bell’s own hand. At the very least, I reasoned, Bell must have cooperated with a plan to steal Gray’s design even if he didn’t instigate it. Given Bell’s reputation for honesty, I couldn’t help but wonder why.

Watson’s autobiography offers a few potential clues. As with MacKenzie, there is no mistaking Watson’s admiration for Bell. As he puts it:

In their several years of close collaboration, the teacher opened up many horizons for his assistant. From the first, Bell encouraged Watson to learn algebra and introduced him to works by many of the leading scientists of the day, including Helmholtz. But, as Watson recalls, Bell’s mentoring went far beyond the professional sphere. From Bell, Watson also learned how to comport himself like a gentleman, including everything from elocution to table manners.

Watson’s abundant affection for Bell, like MacKenzie’s, makes his autobiography rightly suspect in the eyes of most historians. So does the fact that it was written in 1926, toward the end of Watson’s life, decades after the key facts it relates about the invention of the telephone. Despite these significant shortcomings, though, Watson’s account is revealing for the detail he offers about Bell’s unremitting frustration in his quest to build a multiple, or “harmonic” telegraph in 1874 and 1875. Try as they might, Watson and Bell could not make the device work. In Watson’s words:

As Watson recalls, when the two rigged up the system in Bell’s workshop in the attic above the Williams shop, the receiver would not respond to the signal reliably. Or it would respond when it wasn’t supposed to. At best, the instruments were exceedingly difficult to tune to one another. According to Watson, things eventually got so bad that

Watson, in his account, emphasizes the strain on Bell from the arrangements he had made with his financial backers and the pressure Bell felt to succeed on their behalf. Sometime later, Bell himself wrote in one letter that he “never would have continued” in his research if not for his wish that Sanders and Hubbard “be repaid for the money they expended upon patents and upon my experiments.”

In Watson’s account, Bell’s frustration and disappointment are palpable. But still I wondered: could the pressure have been great enough to lead Bell to steal a competitor’s work? It certainly seemed at odds with Watson’s glowing assessment of Bell’s character and with most else I’d learned about him. As I soon came to appreciate, though, there was another aspect of the story to consider.