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

“How often does a detective story upend history?…A page turner…read[s] more like the stuff of thrillers than of the history of science.”

—Marjorie Kehe,
Christian Science Monitor

“It’ll be stacked in the science shelves, but
The Telephone Gambit
might be an early contender for best thriller of the year.”

—Barbara Spindel,
Barnes & Noble Review

“Fraught with controversy, conspiracy, and possible chicanery, Shulman spins real-life
Da Vinci Code
drama around one of the most influential inventions of the modern era.”

—Amazon.com (Editor’s Pick of the Month)

“A dramatic probe into a shocking intellectual theft…the skillful, polished writing makes century-old events spring to life.”

—
Publishers Weekly
, starred review

“Shulman’s book rewards us with a fresh take on old lore, and spurs us to consider what history’s losers might add to the story—such as how they got to be losers in the first place.”

—Jane H. Furse,
New York Daily News

“Shulman deftly explains the intricacies of electrical currents in user-friendly prose…. [He] proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Bell’s employment of a liquid transmitter had to be both a blatant appropriation of Gray’s idea and an 11th-hour addition to Bell’s own patent application.”

—Mark Coleman,
Los Angeles Times

“History is often a collection of agreed-upon myths. The historian’s role is to ask tough questions and doggedly follow the evidence. Seth Shulman provides a stellar example of historical investigation at its probing best…challeng[ing] one of the greatest ‘eureka moments’ of scientific history.”

—Chuck Leddy,
Boston Globe

“An impressive aspect of Shulman’s sleuthing is his measured assessment of facts…. [
The Telephone Gambit
] rewrites history even as it immediately lures readers with scandal and iconoclasm.”

—Gilbert Taylor,
Booklist
, starred review

“Following a trail of clues discovered in Alexander Graham Bell’s journals, Seth Shulman’s
The Telephone Gambit
masterfully breathes life into a long-forgotten controversy.”

—Jeff Lebrecque,
Entertainment Weekly
(Rated “A”)

“Part muckraking journalism, part detective story, and part science lesson,
The Telephone Gambit
is an engaging romp through the scientific world of the late 19th century with a cast of characters worthy of Dickens…. Shulman does his fascinating best to right a very old wrong.”

—VeryShortList.com

“A powerful and personal story of historical sleuthing and discovery that you won’t be able to put down. Seth Shulman has single-handedly rewritten the history of the telephone, one of the most important inventions of modern times.”

—Robert Buderi, author of
The Invention That Changed the World
and founder of Xconomy.com

“Shulman…brings [to the book] some tantalizing bits of fresh evidence and his considerable talent for writing engaging prose.”

—David L. Morton, Jr.,
Science

“[A] great tale of historic detection.”

—Jeff Hecht,
NewScientist

“[This] smoothly written, impeccably researched book…traces a tangled tale of theft and fraud as Bell and his well-connected lawyers obtain and defend the most lucrative patent ever issued.”

—Phillip Manning,
Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Shulman combines deft sleuthing and a nose for a good story with lively, compact prose.
The Telephone Gambit
is a necessary addendum to textbook history.”

—
Bookmarks Magazine

“Shulman brings a journalist’s storytelling skills and a historian’s persistence to this account…. With humor and intelligence, [he] helps us understand how myth overtakes historical events. This title is ideal for history undergraduates learning scholarly methods; general readers will enjoy it for its engrossing descriptions of historical detective work.”

—Michael Dashkin,
Library Journal

“In Seth Shulman’s
The Telephone Gambit,
readers will find a story of intrigue worthy of James Patterson…. Shulman crosses the globe teasing apart layers of assumptions and history—including possible coercion, lies, deceit and long court battles—to find out exactly what happened with what has been called the most lucrative patent in history.”

—Cindy Kibbe,
New Hampshire Business Review

“[A] tale of intrigue and deception…Balzac said that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Whether this is the case with the telephone, as Shulman’s detective work seems to suggest, the reader can judge.”

—Saswato R. Das,
Times Literary Supplement

“Examines a historical event with the suspenseful gush of a detective novel and the intellectual clarity of academic scholarship.”

—Chelsea Bauch, Boldtype.com

“[A] fascinating tale of what could be the greatest intellectual property theft in history.”

—Mark Roth,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Undermining Science

Unlocking the Sky

Owning the Future

The Threat at Home

Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret

To my father,

with love and gratitude

Copyright © 2008 by Seth Shulman

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shulman, Seth.

The telephone gambit : chasing Alexander Graham Bell's secret / Seth Shulman.—1st ed.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.
1. Bell, Alexander Graham, 1847–1922. 2. Gray, Elisha, 1835–1901.
3. Telephone—History. 4. Telephone—Patents. 5. Inventors—United States—Biography.
I. Title. II. Title: Alexander Graham Bell's secret.

TK6018.B4S58 2008
621.38509—dc22

2007030904

ISBN: 978-0-393-33368-8

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

M
R
. W
ATSON
—Come here—

Thomas Watson hunched over the bureau in Alexander Graham Bell’s attic bedroom at the modest boardinghouse at 5 Exeter Place in Boston. Watson’s ear pressed tightly against the metal frame of the small “speaking telegraph” receiver. His head faced the window. Outside, the city had grown dark and a full moon rose in the chill evening air.

The booming voice was unmistakable, even in a tinny, ghostlike facsimile. Watson reeled in amazement when he heard it. Jumping back, he swung open the bedroom door and ran into the hallway.

In the adjacent room, Bell was leaning over his workbench and shouting into the mouth of a metal cone clamped onto a block of wood. At the bottom of the cone, a piece of parchment was stretched tightly, like an upside-down drum. A platinum needle, stuck into a cork, was glued to the far side of the parchment from Bell’s mouth. Its point dipped down into a small cup below that held a dilute solution of sulfuric acid.

When Bell yelled into the device, his bellowing voice vibrated the parchment diaphragm, slightly raising and lowering the needle into the solution and moving its tip alternately closer and further from a separate metal contact immersed in the cup. By attaching the top of the needle to a battery, Bell had created an electrical circuit that was completed only through the acidic water. The acid conducted electricity, but imperfectly. As a result, the vibration of the needle caused by the sound waves from Bell’s voice correspondingly varied the resistance—or strength of the current—in the circuit. The machine looked something like this:

With this pathbreaking liquid transmitter Bell had finally found a way to convert the sound waves of his voice into a signal that could be carried by electric current on a wire. It was a brilliant and elegant invention—and a radical departure from his previous research.

Wires from this novel, battery-driven liquid transmitter snaked their way down the hall to the bedroom next door, where a telegraph-like receiver was fitted with a small, vibrating strip of metal. Bell had used the receiver part of the apparatus many times before in a series of experiments over the past year and a half. In his terminology, the sensitive metal “reed” was intended to vibrate in concert with the “undulations” created in the electrical current.

Bell was undoubtedly still shouting into the contraption when Watson burst into the room to report what he had heard. Only then did Bell realize that he had placed the world’s first telephone call.

The feat was hard for either man to believe. They had labored toward the goal for so long—and with such paltry success—prior to that moment on March 10, 1876.

THE BELL AND WATSON
“eureka moment” is one of the best-known stories in the history of invention, and among the most romantic, with its two earnest and visionary young inventors profoundly changing the world from their humble quarters. I first heard the tale as a child and have read enough versions now for its familiarity to give it a luster, the way polished old wood develops a patina.

Bell’s voice traveled just ten yards along a bare wire from one room to another. It was a modest transmission of sound waves to have unleashed such an enormous change in human interaction. Yet even today, after untold billions of long-distance conversations spanning more than a century, Bell’s oddly emphatic words are still probably the most famous ever uttered into a telephone.

The story of the telephone’s invention is not just well known, it is impeccably documented, beginning that very evening, when both men wrote about it in their notebooks. With contemporaneous eyewitness accounts from each of the episode’s principals, the story is the historian’s equivalent of a slam dunk.

Bell’s formal account is written in neat script in the pages of his leatherbound laboratory notebook, beneath his detailed diagram of the liquid transmitter:

Watson’s notes are more cryptic and hastily penned, in now-faded grayish ink toward the beginning of a tall, slim notebook of which only the first twenty pages are filled. Noting the date, Watson jotted down some of the phrases he and Bell tried to pass along the wire to one another.
Mr. Watson come here I want you,
he wrote on one line. Below it:

The next line reads:

Unlike some other inventors at their moment of discovery, Bell and Watson recognized at once the implications of the momentous threshold they had crossed. Bell was elated. In a letter to his father that same night, he waxed prophetic, writing:

Much later, Watson even quietly pocketed the wires that had carried the pioneering conversation. He reverently coiled them up almost as though they were a religious relic. Watson placed the wires in an envelope and brought them to a safe-deposit box at the bank. He attached a note to the coiled wires that read:

Bell’s and Watson’s notebooks and even the wires they used have survived to this day. But history, I have come to learn, is an odd business. We can know a tremendous amount about what happened in the past and yet still understand very little.

SEVERAL YEARS AGO
, in 2004, I accidentally stumbled upon a trail of information that casts a shadow over the now-famous and familiar story of Bell and Watson. It started as a nagging question that occurred to me when I read Bell’s laboratory notebook. But it built into something stranger. Over the course of my research, Bell and Watson’s tale, told for generations and written into textbooks, transformed from a beloved and earnest “eureka moment” to something more complex and disturbing.

There is little doubt that Bell’s call to Watson is now the best-known story about him. I would become convinced—much to my own amazement—that the simple tale also immortalizes what was likely the most ignominious act of Bell’s life. In some sort of cosmic historical irony, the well-known tale that makes Bell’s name also freezes him for all time in the midst of one of the most consequential thefts in history.

As I investigated the roots of Bell’s story of invention, much of what I thought I knew about him came into question. I would ponder, at some length, how so many historians could have gotten the facts of Bell’s story so wrong. And I would wonder, especially at times of frustration, whether history isn’t a bit like the children’s parlor game of “telephone” where one person whispers into the next person’s ear until the starting phrase becomes twisted beyond recognition.

But I am getting ahead of my story. Let me just say this: stranger things have happened—but not to me. Absolutely by accident I fell through a kind of historical trapdoor into a vexing intrigue at the heart of one of the world’s most important inventions.