The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) (20 page)

Bell is often fondly cited as saying that he would rather be remembered as a teacher of the deaf than as the inventor of the telephone. A good example can be seen in a booklet, published by AT&T in 1947 to mark the centennial of Bell’s birth, which notes that,

Bell no doubt felt deservedly proud of his accomplishments as a teacher of the deaf. But even this sentiment, diminishing as it does his role in the birth of the telephone, can be seen in different light.

Ultimately, in considering Bell’s testimony over the years, I imagine that he came to believe the versions of the story he told under oath which claimed, in essence, that he had never behaved improperly. There is no question that Bell
had
been on the right track in his telephone research; that he had made an important contribution with his theoretical understanding of the way “undulatory currents” could carry acoustic signals electrically; and that he believed in the telephone’s viability when few shared his vision. Surely, those facts must have helped to assuage whatever guilt he might have felt over the purloined liquid transmitter.

Plus, Bell must certainly have taken comfort in his lifelong happiness with Mabel. The key episodes in the telephone’s invention had occurred when Bell was still in his twenties. Whatever ethical compromises he may have made in his dealings with Hubbard, Wilber, Pollok, and Bailey, Bell had mostly likely made them for love. As he wrote Mabel in 1878, on the cusp of the
Dowd
case,

If the secret in Bell’s notebook changes our estimation of him, it also highlights the brilliant technological innovations of his competitor, Elisha Gray. Gray’s work is now largely forgotten. But his contributions to the telephone stand up under close scrutiny as seminal and creative advances that made the invention possible.

In his day, Gray was esteemed as an inventor by his peers and financially well rewarded. He was also always a proper gentleman. But he became increasingly outspoken about the telephone affair toward the end of his life as more of the details of Bell’s actions came to his attention.

Even without the benefit of the smoking-gun evidence that lay hidden in Bell’s notebook, Gray pieced together much of the story from Bell’s own statements and from patent examiner Zenas Wilber’s remarkable confession. As Gray wrote in a letter to the journal
Electrical World and Engineer
that was published a week after his death in 1901:

Gray wrote that he had chanced to meet Wilber on the street in New York, years before the former patent examiner’s final affidavit. As Gray recalled, Wilber told him:

Sadly, as the evidence accumulated, Gray died embittered over the way he had been wronged. A handwritten note found among his belongings after his death poignantly summed up his resentment. Gray may well have been right when he lamented:

There was still a bit of unfinished business about Bell’s role in the telephone gambit. George Smith, who has experience serving as an expert witness in court, brought one vitally important practical matter to my attention on the day after my Dibner seminar. As Smith excitedly and rightly noted, the verdict in the
Dowd
case and subsequent lawsuits might well have gone against Bell had his laboratory notebook ever been subpoenaed. In Bell’s day, however, as evidenced in Bell’s foot-dragging in the
Dowd
case preliminaries, courts relied exclusively on pretrial statements and depositions to establish the facts of a case. The so-called rules of discovery we now take for granted as part of our legal system would have required Bell to hand over his notebooks—including the incriminating evidence they contained. But these rules were not uniformly adopted until 1938.

Changes in the legal rules of discovery could explain why the secret in Bell’s notebook never factored in any of the court cases over the telephone. But what about since then? How could the incriminating sketch in Bell’s notebook have been overlooked by so many of the historians who must surely have pored over his work? As it turned out, the answer to this question was simpler than it seemed, but I would not find it until my year at the Dibner Institute was coming to an end.

Spring had arrived, and the pace and excitement of the academic year seemed to quicken as the end of the semester drew near. I had been offered a chance to do some contemporary investigative work and, at least from the perspective of 1876, I welcomed the opportunity to get back to the future. The Dibner Institute kindly allowed me to continue to use the office through the summer; but with the term ending in May, my many dozens of books were due back to the library after the luxury of having them all within easy reach on my office shelves over the course of the entire academic year. I had tried to take notes and photocopy key passages but now faced the prospect of their disappearance with a sense of closure mixed with mild panic. After all, I hoped to write about Bell’s story, and some of these books were exceedingly rare old works that would not be easy for me to obtain again.

One morning, as I was trying to systematically collect my research files, I came across a lingering list of questions I had made about the Bell case, one of many over the course of the year. It contained a question I still hadn’t answered about the provenance of Bell’s notebook itself. When, I had asked, had anyone besides Bell gotten a chance to look at it? My plan had been to search through the references of many of the books I had collected to find the earliest citations I could that mentioned it as a source. Now, with the books due, there wasn’t nearly enough time to complete such a task. Exasperated with myself, I did something we all routinely take for granted every day: I used the telephone.

Thinking more like a journalist now, I called the switchboard at the Library of Congress and asked to speak with whomever was in charge of the Alexander Graham Bell Collection. I only hoped that the archivist I spoke with would be as concerned about issues of provenance as Roland Baumann at the Oberlin Archives had been.

I was in luck. Leonard Bruno, a curator in the Library of Congress’s manuscript division, answered the phone. I began by thanking him and his library for having made the Bell Collection available online. I told him how helpful the documents had been in my work. Then I asked him what I might find about exactly when Bell’s laboratory notebooks had become publicly available. Bruno told me he would look into the matter.

Within the hour, Bruno called me back. According to the accession data, he said, the Bell family papers were not made available on an unrestricted basis until the family donated them to the Library of Congress in 1976. Prior to that, they had remained in the family’s possession in a special room at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. Even more impressively, Bruno had been able to locate a brief 1974 memo that went to the heart of my question. Written by Bruno’s predecessor as the accession was being negotiated, the note read:

Hard as it was for me to believe, Bruno’s records indicated that Bell’s notebooks had been kept almost entirely hidden from public scrutiny for a full century; and after that, they really only became widely accessible in 1999, when they were finally posted online in digital form. Even today, Bell’s key laboratory notebook remains, at least to some extent, buried in plain sight as part of a vast collection of some 147,000 documents. The information Bruno gave me went far toward explaining why Bell’s incriminating sketch might never yet have received wider attention: only a relatively small number of people had ever read Bell’s notebooks closely before I happened to do so. Upon reflection, it seemed clear that the lone historian mentioned in the memo was Robert Bruce, who negotiated access to the collection with the Bell family and spent a decade on the research for his 1973 biography of Bell before the collection was donated to the Library of Congress. Bruce’s work offers a masterful handling of the kaleidoscopic details of Bell’s long and fruitful life. But Bruce became so partisan about the issue of Bell’s priority in inventing the telephone that it seems to have blinded him to the evidence before him. Convinced by scant data that Bell deserved sole credit, Bruce wrote in 1997, for instance,

Bruce was the first historian with access to Bell’s notebooks. But he missed one of the most fascinating pieces of Bell’s story.

In the end, perhaps the most important failing is not Bell’s or Bruce’s, but our own. Bell’s notebook aside, the most striking thing about the whole case is how much was uncovered about it even in Bell’s day. Gray knew many of the details himself, and he concluded that Bell had stolen his design. And, in the intervening years, various capable people have reviewed the evidence and reached a similar conclusion. I have tried to credit the work of many of them in these pages.

None of these efforts, though, has ever managed to do much to pierce the seemingly invincible myth that Bell single-handedly invented the telephone. For many years, even after Bell’s death in 1922, this myth was skillfully nurtured and promoted by a monopoly whose interests it served.

I have no doubt that Elisha Gray’s contribution to the invention of the telephone is important and unduly neglected. But, in my obsession to get to the bottom of the story, my aim is not to supplant one myth with another. Bell may well have stolen Gray’s design for the breakthrough variable resistance liquid transmitter, yet there is little doubt that Gray, locked as he was into his shorter-term interest in the telegraph industry’s sought-after multiple telegraph, would probably have been slow to commercialize the telephone even if he did pioneer it. As I had learned from my research, both Bell and Gray owed a considerable debt to the pathbreaking work of Philipp Reis in Germany. And, to name just one of many other vital contributions, without the ensuing transmitter improvements made by Emile Berliner and Thomas Edison, the commercial, long-distance telephone industry could never possibly have gotten off the ground.

Despite the unscrupulous dealings on Bell’s behalf—at least some of which were almost certainly undertaken with his collusion and consent—Bell’s vision and his energy still stand out as a remarkable model. The telephone brought him world renown when he was still a young man. But in all the decades that followed, Bell never rested. He built flying machines, bred sheep to study heredity, and tried to learn what he could about the language of the Mohawk tribe who lived in Canada not far from his parents’ home in Brantford, Ontario. In just one of myriad examples of his foresight, Bell even fretted about the air pollution of his day in a manner that seems particularly prescient. The soot in the air would block some of the sun’s heat, Bell figured in 1917. But he reasoned that the earth, on balance, would gain some of the heat normally radiated into space, calling it “a sort of greenhouse effect.”

History is messy, and delving deeper doesn’t necessarily make it come much clearer. We can pin down many of the details of what happened in the past. But it is up to us what lessons we take away. Still, if I learned anything from my research into the invention of the telephone, it is that history needs to be constantly challenged and interrogated. To do anything less is to play a game of “telephone,” tacitly accepting the garbled story that is whispered from one generation to the next.