The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) (4 page)

The implication was instantly clear. Unless I was somehow mistaken, Bell must have returned to his lab in Boston from his trip to Washington, dropped his prior line of inquiry, and drawn an almost perfect replica of his competitor’s invention in his own notebook.

As I stared incredulously at the drawing in Gray’s caveat, I tried to make sense of the chain of events. Gray had filed a confidential caveat at the U.S. Patent Office, clearly outlining his prescient idea for a machine to transmit speech, an invention he had envisioned fully but had yet to build. Bell, on the other hand, returned from a visit to the nation’s capital in possession of a U.S. patent on an invention that had never yet transmitted speech. Upon his return to Boston, Bell scrapped his former efforts and sketched an unmistakable picture of his competitor’s idea for a liquid transmitter in his own laboratory notebook, passing it off as his own discovery. Next, in his laboratory in a boardinghouse on Exeter Street, Bell built and used this machine—Gray’s machine—to carry on what would forever be immortalized as the world’s first telephone conversation.

I was dumbfounded. Could Bell have committed such a blatant, wholesale act of plagiarism? If he did, I wondered, how could no one have noticed it before? After all, however long ago it may have occurred, this was an act of tremendous historical consequence. The telephone sits high atop any list of the most important modern inventions, and Alexander Graham Bell is surely one of the best-known inventors of all time. Even beyond issues of fame and historical accuracy, Bell’s seemingly iron-clad patent claim to the telephone led directly to a company, American Telephone & Telegraph, that would become one of the largest and most lucrative monopolies the world has ever known.

I know it sounds improbable that Alexander Graham Bell, almost universally canonized as the inventor of the telephone, might be undeserving of the title. Or that I, in a relatively casual reading of Bell’s notebook, might have discovered something that had eluded generations of historians. So, before going on with my tale, let me pause a moment for those who, reasonably enough, suspect that my account is fictionalized or embroidered. Here, for your own inspection, are the documents that first set me upon the strange quest to track down the true story about Alexander Graham Bell:

The drawings left me little room for doubt about where Bell’s idea for a liquid transmitter had come from. But, in so doing, they suggested a historical intrigue so at odds with the conventional story of the telephone’s invention that I could hardly think where to begin to try to unravel it. I had come to MIT to explore the rivalry between Bell and Edison. But now Thomas Alva would have to wait. I had happened upon a stunning fissure in the polished facade of Bell’s legacy; I couldn’t help but try to pry the history open from the beginning.

A
LEXANDER
G
RAHAM
B
ELL
was never one of those mechanically inclined children who excel at taking apart and fixing things. In his later years he told a story, apocryphal or not, that when his father had asked to have his pocketwatch cleaned, young Bell took it apart and washed the pieces with soap and water. As Bell put it, his father was “not enthusiastic over the result.”

Bell remained famously clumsy with mechanical devices throughout his life. But he was always exceptionally proficient in the conceptual realm. A bright and dutiful child, he inherited his fascination with speech, sound, and the emerging field of acoustics much as one would inherit a trade. Bell was born in 1847 in Edinburgh, at the beginning of the second decade of the rule of Queen Victoria. Britain was entering an age of industrial expansion. Science and rationality were ascendant. And Bell’s family had built the scientific study of speech into a kind of Victorian-era cottage industry.

Bell’s paternal grandfather and namesake, Alexander Bell, taught elocution. So did Bell’s uncle David Bell, and his father, Alexander Melville Bell, who published enormously popular texts on the subject and even developed a system called “Visible Speech” that became world-renowned in its day. Visible Speech, in wonderfully grand, Victorian style, attempted to systematically catalog all possible human vocal sounds by assigning each a written symbol that represented the placement of the tongue and lips as the particular sound was uttered.

If the idea sounds vaguely familiar, perhaps it is because George Bernard Shaw, a family acquaintance, immortalized Melville Bell’s system in his play
Pygmalion
(the basis of the subsequent musical
My Fair Lady).
Shaw’s preface to the play even mentions “the illustrious Alexander Melville Bell, the inventor of Visible Speech.” And, coincidentally or not, Shaw gives his memorable character Professor Henry Higgins an address just minutes away from the actual spot on Harrington Square in London where Grandfather Alexander Bell tutored students.

Shaw’s Professor Higgins—as erudite as he is overbearing—surely draws upon the tendency toward grandiosity and stern reverence for science displayed by the real-life patriarchs of the Bell family. Grandfather Bell taught an eclectic assortment of adults with stammers and other speech impediments as well as children whose upwardly mobile families wanted them to improve their elocution. Young Aleck Bell himself was carefully schooled in elocution and high-society etiquette at the hands of both his father and grandfather—not entirely unlike Higgins’s pupil Liza Doolittle, Shaw’s protagonist in
Pygmalion
.

At the age of fifteen, for instance, the family sent Aleck from their home in Edinburgh to live for a year with his grandfather in London. Bell invariably thereafter called the experience a turning point in his life. During his stay, Aleck worked intensively under his grandfather’s tutelage to polish his diction and accent by reading Shakespeare aloud. And elocution lessons were just part of his training. Grandfather Alexander also required him to don a suit jacket and top hat, and even to carry a cane—a teenaged caricature of a dapper Englishman, much like one Shaw himself might have conjured.

Around this time, Melville Bell’s system of Visible Speech was attracting interest throughout Britain. It fit the times perfectly, melding a grandiose scientific approach with the appealing, egalitarian prospect of self-betterment. Aleck, as a teenager, became one of its most well-versed practitioners and even took part in his father’s frequent lectures. Like a showman’s sidekick, Aleck would wait offstage and out of ear-shot while his father asked members of the audience to suggest difficult or unusual sounds—including words in any language—writing on a chalkboard the distinctive phonetic symbols he had invented for the sounds. Aleck would then return and pronounce sounds he had never heard to illustrate the viability of his father’s linguistic scheme.

As Bell later recalled, the symbols at one such lecture called for him to blow a puff of air while the tip of his tongue touched the roof of his mouth. Following his father’s written instruction, Aleck made the odd sound and drew a great round of applause in response. A linguist in the audience, Bell later wrote, had suggested to the assembled crowd that the sound—which he called the “Sanskrit cerebral T”—was one of the hardest for an English speaker to utter. Needless to say, the linguist was deeply impressed when Aleck, working only from his father’s notations, pronounced it correctly on the first try.

The training in etiquette, elocution, and public speaking that Bell received from his father and grandfather would serve him exceedingly well throughout his life. Much later, for instance, Thomas Watson put Bell’s vocal abilities first among the many rewards of having been his assistant, noting:

Watson, introverted and tongue-tied prior to his association with Bell, was immensely taken by his colleague’s vocal command and flair for public speaking. Long after the telephone brought fame and fortune to both of them, Watson even joined a Shakespearean repertory theater troupe.

Rivaling Bell’s vocal gifts was his natural ear for music. One of three brothers, Bell was a sensitive middle child and a gifted musician, studying piano first with his mother and then with a well-known concert pianist, August Benoit Bertini. From the youngest age, Bell could both improvise and play difficult pieces by ear, and he would be captivated by music throughout his life. In his early teens, Bell recalled later, he even dreamt of following Signor Bertini’s model and becoming a glamorous, performing musician.

Bell shared his love of music in his close relationship with his mother, Eliza Symonds Bell, a bright and cheerful woman who could hear only with the aid of a Victorian-era speaking horn held up to her ear. Aleck would often play music for his mother as she pressed the horn against the piano’s sounding board. The experience was no doubt formative for Bell. Not only would he continue to play the piano for the decades to follow, his concern for the deaf would become a defining and lifelong passion.

ALECK BELL AND
his two brothers, Melville (Melly) and Edward, all planned to follow the career path laid out by their father and grandfather. But this latest generation of Bells entered a markedly different field: a renaissance in the science of acoustics was yielding dramatically new ways to study and explore the production, transmission, and perception of sounds. The telegraph had opened up not only a new world of instantaneous telecommunication but also vast new areas of research. Among the major practitioners in this emerging field was Sir Charles Wheatstone, a largely self-taught British scientist whose early work included experiments on the transmission of sound, and who by the mid-1800s held some of England’s most lucrative telegraph patents.

When Bell was sixteen years old, his father took him along on a visit to Wheatstone’s laboratory in London. Sir Charles had, some years earlier, constructed an artificial speaking machine, a feat of considerable interest to Melville Bell given his work in elocution. In fact, Wheatstone had rebuilt his own version of a contraption invented decades earlier by an eccentric researcher named Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen from Hungary, who set out to create the machine based upon his pioneering insight that the sound of human speech must consist of nothing more than vibrating air.

Wheatstone’s tabletop device had a bellows that blew air into a box filled with an assortment of pipes with holes, valves, and levers that could be adjusted by hand. With practice, Wheatstone explained, a user could manipulate the resonating cavity to simulate the sounds of different vowels and consonants. Aleck was fascinated. As he later wrote:

Back in Edinburgh, Melville capitalized on Aleck’s enthusiasm by challenging him and his older brother Melly to construct their own “talking machine.” The boys had great enthusiasm, but the task was not easy. After an arduous effort and much experimentation, the brothers came up with a workable prototype of rubber, wood, and wire, replete with a bellows from a parlor organ to drive air into the machine and a small keyboard to control its parts.

Bell recalled that, while he and Melly were repeatedly discouraged in their quest to make the machine speak, the project taught him the value of persistence. As he wrote over four decades later, in 1909:

Bell acknowledged, though, that the two teenagers had more on their minds than the advancement of scientific knowledge. After assembling the prototype, the boys snuck the machine out to the common stairwell of their town house in Edinburgh and “made it yell.” As Bell later recalled, the noise that issued from the contraption sounded remarkably like the plaintive wail of an infant:

From Bell’s rich childhood emerged a young man whose talents and interests matched the tide of technological change around him remarkably well. He just didn’t know it yet.

IN THE FALL
of 1863, Bell—a sixteen-year-old riding high on his family’s reputation and fresh from his grandfather’s intensive tutoring—took his first full-time job, teaching music and elocution at Weston House Academy, a boarding school for boys in the town of Elgin on Scotland’s northeastern coast. The job gave him an opportunity to draw upon many of the powerful influences on his life: his training in elocution, his love of music, and his exposure to the science of acoustics. Bell thrived in the position. After two years at the job, the young man used his spare time to try to make his own mark on the young science of acoustics. At the age of eighteen, in his first-ever professional experiment, Bell focused on a topic that would hold tremendous import for him in the years to come: the idea that sound waves could induce sympathetic vibrations.

In his experiment, Bell placed a tuning fork in front of his open mouth. He made vowel sounds and noted that the tuning fork would resonate more loudly when he held his tongue in some positions than it would in others. Bell experimented further with what we now call overtones, trying to measure the precise pitches of varying vowel sounds and, in so doing, seeking systematically to understand the effects he observed.

With his father’s encouragement, Bell sent a report of his experiments to Alexander John Ellis, one of Britain’s leading authorities on phonetics. Ellis replied that Bell’s research repeated the work of the German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, who had similarly sought to detect the musical tones of vowel sounds with tuning forks. Helmholtz, a physicist and medical doctor, was a preeminent figure in the field of acoustics who would, from a top position at the University of Berlin, become well known throughout Europe.

It was, of course, an impressive feat for an eighteen-year-old to unknowingly repeat Helmholtz’s research. Ellis headed the London Philological Society, a scholarly group concerned with the study of speech and language, precursor to the modern-day field of linguistics. Based on what he had seen of young Bell’s achievements, he nominated Bell for membership. Even more important, Ellis encouraged Aleck to continue his research and lent him Helmholtz’s pathbreaking work,
On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music.
In the book, Helmholtz describes his invention of a machine called a “tuning fork sounder,” a device built upon much the same line of thinking as Bell’s tuning fork experiment and, in essence, a far more sophisticated version of Baron von Kempelen’s speaking machine. Helmholtz’s device used an intermittent electric current to keep a tuning fork in constant vibration. The tuning fork stood before a resonator cavity made of a cardboard tube fitted with a movable cover. By opening and closing the opening to the tube, the device could create remarkably human vowel sounds.

At the time, Helmholtz’s work had yet to be translated into English (Ellis himself would eventually do the job) and Aleck couldn’t read German. Somehow, though, either from Helmholtz’s diagrams or Ellis’s explanations, Bell arrived at the completely erroneous conclusion that Helmholtz had not only managed to modulate vowel sounds but
to transmit them along telegraph wires
. The mistaken notion thoroughly fascinated Bell and spurred him to experiment with electricity. Soon after hearing of Helmholtz’s work, Bell read up on the subject of batteries and built a small telegraph of his own.

Perhaps the best account of this confusion over Helmholtz’s work is relayed, much after the fact, by Bell himself via his longtime assistant Catherine MacKenzie. As MacKenzie recounts in the first biography of Bell,
Alexander Graham Bell: The Man Who Contracted Space
(1928):