The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) (25 page)

a firsthand demonstration:
Deposition of Alexander Graham Bell,
Int. 54, p. 50. See also AGB to his parents, March 18, 1875.

“Before March 7, 1876”:
Deposition of Alexander Graham Bell,
Cross-Int. 843, p. 428.

“Any sound will be reproduced”:
Letter from Philipp Reis to William Ladd, July 13, 1863, courtesy of the Science Museum, London, inv. 1953–118.

“I take the ground that”:
Deposition of Alexander Graham Bell,
Cross-Int. 854, p. 432.

a demonstration in a U.S. courtroom:
See Baker,
The Gray Matter
, pp. 42–43. The issue of Reis came up in many courtrooms; but a key failure of the demonstration took place in the so-called second
Dolbear
case—Dolbear II, 17 Fed. Rep. 604, U.S. Circuit Court, District of Massachusetts, filed October 10, 1881.

Silvanus Thompson argues:
See Thompson,
Philipp Reis,
pp. 165–79.

British Post Office:
As detailed in Aitken,
Who Invented the Telephone?
, citing “The First Telephone,”
Post Office Electrical Engineers’ Journal,
vol. 25 (July 1932), pp. 116–17.

a detailed series of experiments:
Letter from L. C. Pocock, Standard Telephones & Cables, Ltd., to W. T. O’Dea, assistant curator, Science Museum, October 4, 1946, copy courtesy of the Science Museum, London.

STC was negotiating:
For a full review of the incident, see Liffen, “Precursors of the Telephone,” unpublished talk. See also Liam McDougall, “Official: Bell didn’t invent the telephone; ‘top secret’ file reveals that businessmen suppressed the identity of the telephone’s real inventor,”
Sunday Herald
(Glasgow), November 23, 2003.

11
: T
APPING THE
P
HONE

Furthermore, by 1874:
Hounshell, “Bell and Gray,”
Proceedings of the IEEE,
p. 1308.

a forty-three-page booklet:
Transcript of “Complimentary Reception and Banquet to Elisha Gray, Ph.D., Inventor of the Telephone,” at Highland Park (Chicago: McRoy Clay Works, 1904), November 15, 1878.

“The citizens of Highland Park”:
Quoted in ibid., citing
The Interior,
a weekly Presbyterian newspaper in Chicago, p. 7.

“If the press and the public”:
Gray reception booklet, p. 10. Bingham’s remarks were part of the second toast, entitled “The Telephone in Its Origin.”

astonished parishioners became:
Ibid.

George Prescott:
Ibid., p. 38.

“in coming up with”:
Bruce,
Bell,
p. 170.

plenty of evidence:
David A. Hounshell, “Two Paths to the Telephone,”
Scientific American,
vol. 17, no. 3 (January 1981), p. 161. As Hounshell puts it, “By this time [1875] Gray and Bell were playing cat and mouse with each other. Each suspected that the other was spying on him….”

According to Gray’s own account:
See “Deposition of Elisha Gray,” in
Speaking Telephone Interferences, The Case for E. Gray
(Washington, DC, 1880), pp. 41–42.

“electrotherapy” machines:
For a wealth of documents and photographs of electrotherapy machines, see the online electrotherapy museum at http://www.electrotherapymuseum.com.

Gray showed the device:
Bruce,
Bell,
p. 116.

widely reported in newspapers:
Ibid., p. 118.

Gray patented his version:
See Elisha Gray, U.S. Patent 165,728, “Improvement in Transmitters for Electro-Harmonic Telegraphs,” July 20, 1875.

two boys in Milwaukee:
For the most detailed account given by Gray, see Elisha Gray,
Nature’s Miracles,
vol. 1 (New York: Eaton & Mains, 1900), p. 141: “I noticed two boys with fruit-cans in their hands having a thread attached to the center of the bottom of each can and stretched across the street…my interest was immediately aroused. I took the can out of one of the boy’s hands…putting my ear to the mouth of it I could hear the voice of the boy across the street. I conversed with him a moment, then noticed how the cord was connected at the bottom of the two cans, when, suddenly, the problem of electrical speech-transmission was solved in my mind.”

“water rheostat”:
“Deposition of Elisha Gray,” pp. 48–49. See also Hounshell, “Elisha Gray and the Telephone,”
Technology and Culture,
p. 153.

“One of Gray’s staunchest supporters”:
Coe,
The Telephone and Its Several Inventors
, p. 71.

Taylor’s one published article:
Lloyd W. Taylor, “The Untold Story of the Telephone,”
American Physics Teacher
(December 1937), pp. 243–51, reprinted in Coe,
The Telephone and Its Several Inventors
, Appendix 9, p. 206.

“was the first embodiment”:
Lloyd W. Taylor, “The Untold Story of the Telephone,” unpublished MS, Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin, OH, chap. 2.

“in a confidential document”:
Taylor, “The Untold Story of the Telephone,”
American Physics Teacher,
p. 246.

a book-length manuscript:
Coe,
The Telephone and Its Several Inventors,
p. 73.

fortresslike library:
The archives are on the top floor of the Seeley G. Mudd Center, the central library facility for Oberlin College.

Oberlin’s extraordinary history:
See Marlene D. Merril, “Daughters of America Rejoice: The Oberlin Experiment,”
Timeline: A Publication of the Ohio Historical Society
(October–November 1987), pp. 13–21.

“There is no suggestion”:
Taylor, “The Untold Story of the Telephone,”
American Physics Teacher,
p. 247.

“made and publicly used”:
Ibid., p. 245.

Bell had priority:
See, e.g., Bruce, Foreword, in Wesson and Grosvenor,
Alexander Graham Bell
, p. 6.

“Gray had made and exhibited”:
Taylor, “The Untold Story of the Telephone,”
American Physics Teacher,
p. 251.

“Gray’s loss of credit”:
Ibid.

12
: B
AD
C
ONNECTION

Taylor contacted Gray’s descendants:
See Lloyd W. Taylor, correspondence, 1921–1948, Untold Story of the Telephone, Folders 1–4, Lloyd W. and Esther B. Taylor Papers, courtesy of the Oberlin College Archives.

the editor of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
:
See correspondence between Lloyd W. Taylor and Walter Tust, editor of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
August–October 1945, Lloyd W. and Esther B. Taylor Papers, courtesy of the Oberlin College Archives.

a long-forgotten trove:
See Lloyd W. Taylor, correspondence, 1921–1948, Oberlin College Archives.

a revealing letter:
Elisha Gray to AGB, March 2, 1877.

the
Chicago Tribune
:
“Personal column,”
Chicago Tribune,
February 16, 1877. The article stated, in part, “The real inventor of the telephone—Mr. Elisha Gray, of Chicago…concerns himself not at all about the spurious claims of Professor Bell….”

“I do not know the nature”:
AGB to Elisha Gray, March 2, 1877.

“Zenas Fisk Wilber”:
Zenas Fisk Wilber affidavit, October 21, 1885; Zenas Fisk Wilber affidavit, April 8, 1886, Thomas W. Soran, Notary Public, in Lloyd W. and Esther B. Taylor Papers, courtesy of the Oberlin College Archives.

“I am convinced”:
Wilber affidavit, October 21, 1885.

in the same regiment:
Ibid.

Columbian College Law Department:
George Washington University Law School, “Marcellus Bailey and the Telephone,” available online at http://www.law.gwu.edu.

“Professor Bell called upon me”:
Wilber affidavit, October 21, 1885.

Wilber’s affidavit is extremely problematic:
See, e.g., Affidavit of John F. Guy, September 18, 1885, Elisha Gray Collection, National Museum of American History, reprinted in Evenson,
The Telephone Patent Conspiracy
, p. 175. See also Bruce,
Bell,
p. 278. Without citing any particular evidence, Bruce dismisses Wilber’s October affidavit this way: “…Zenas Wilber (probably liquored up or bribed, or both, by agents of the Globe Telephone Company) made affidavits that he had allowed Bell to examine Gray’s caveat in full.”

five separate affidavits:
As reviewed in Taylor, unpublished manuscript, chap. 11.

Lloyd Taylor analyzed:
For transcriptions of Zenas F. Wilber’s affidavits, October 21, 1885, and April 8, 1886, see Taylor’s unpublished manuscript, Appendix III.

One statement by Wilber:
Wilber affidavit, October 21, 1885.

“my faculties were not”:
Wilber affidavit, April 8, 1886.

“Extract from a letter”:
As recounted in Taylor, unpublished manuscript, Appendix III, p. 2.

“I have thus concluded”:
Wilber affidavit, April 8, 1886.

“In conclusion”:
Ibid.

13
: O
N THE
L
INE

published in
The Washington Post
:
“Affidavit of Alexander Graham Bell in reply to that of Zenas Fisk Wilber,”
Washington Post,
May 25, 1886.

Bell’s sworn retort:
Ibid.

“I knew that some interference”:
Report from AGB and Mabel Hubbard Bell to Gilbert Grosvenor, undated, available in the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers, LOC.

the
Dowd
case:
Bell Telephone Co. et al. v. Peter A. Dowd
, Circuit Court of the U.S., District of Massachusetts, filed September 12, 1878.

“As I knew nothing”:
Deposition of Alexander Graham Bell,
Int. 266, pp. 194–95.

is written into the margin
: See file copy of AGB Patent Application filed February 14, 1876, LOC, reprinted in Coe,
The Telephone and Its Several Inventors
, p. 6, and Baker,
The Gray Matter
, p. A76.

“Strange, isn’t it”:
John E. Kingsbury,
The Telephone and Telephone Exchanges: Their Invention and Development
(London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1915), p. 213.

“without the leading character”:
Aitken,
Who Invented the Telephone?
, p. 100.

Bell spent the evening of January 12, 1876:
AGB to Gardiner Hubbard, January 13, 1876.

“that burglars did not enter”:
Ibid.

“Almost at the last moment”:
Deposition of Alexander Graham Bell,
Int. 103, p. 86.

The following day:
Bruce,
Bell,
p. 165.

“I have so much copy work”:
AGB to Mabel Hubbard, January 19, 1876.

Bell, Hubbard, and Pollok met with Brown:
Bruce,
Bell,
p. 165.