The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) (6 page)

One researcher and patron of the Williams shop named Joseph Stearns had recently invented a “duplex telegraph” that allowed a single telegraph wire to carry both an outgoing and an incoming message simultaneously. Stearn’s scheme used a parallel circuit at each end of the main telegraph line that would blot out only the outgoing messages from that end of the line, leaving the telegraph device free to accurately receive incoming messages at the same time. It was an important advance. But Bell thought he had an even better solution with what he called his “harmonic, multiple telegraph.”

Bell’s concept was simple. Using the principle of sympathetic vibration, he hoped to develop a paired transmitter and receiver that could be tuned to a particular pitch. That way, it might be possible to send multiple messages—at different pitches—over a wire simultaneously. In Bell’s conception, the telegraph receivers would only vibrate in concert with the messages sent by the transmitters they were tuned to.

Bell had asked Watson to build an early prototype of the multiple telegraph design. The transmitter used a “reed” made out of a small, thin strip of steel that was mounted above an electromagnet with an adjustable contact screw like that found on an electric buzzer. When Bell attached the transmitter to a battery, the steel reed would vibrate and emit a sound; by moving the reed in and out of contact with the electromagnet, he could create an intermittent current that corresponded to the pitch of the reed. According to Bell’s plan, this vibrating, intermittent current would pass through the telegraph wire and set a reed in a distant receiver into sympathetic vibration—just as the sound waves from Bell’s voice had vibrated a tuning fork held in front of his mouth. It was a line of thinking that would, before long, lead Bell directly to what we now know as the telephone.

AFTER WANDERING ALL
afternoon in search of Bell’s history in Boston, I was exhausted when I made my way back to MIT. With little tangible evidence to hang on to, I wondered gloomily whether historical questions like mine could ever be answered definitively. It was already evening by the time I reached the long, carpeted corridor to my office.

The building was quiet, but the door to the office next to mine was open and the light was on. Inside, David Cahan sat engrossed before his computer. Cahan, a friendly man with a big midwestern smile and slightly stooped shoulders that made him seem at once warm and professorial, taught the history of science at the University of Nebraska. He was also, as fate would have it, one of the world’s leading scholars on the life and work of Hermann von Helmholtz. For nearly fifteen years, Cahan had been working on a definitive biography of Helmholtz, and his office shelves, piled with stacks of notes and manuscript pages, reflected his long labors. He glanced up and greeted me warmly, presumably happy not to be the only one still toiling.

Once in my office, I sunk into my desk chair and pulled out my notebook. I couldn’t help but think of my neighbor next door. I thought of all the historical mysteries that must surely have flummoxed Cahan in his career. And yet there he sat, undaunted even after long years of doggedly sifting fact from fiction about Helmholtz’s life. I wasn’t confident that I could uncover enough detail about what had transpired at the birth of the telephone to explain how Gray’s secret design seemed to have wound up in Bell’s notebook. But, for the year at least, I realized I was literally surrounded by historians brimming with expertise, people like Cahan who were devoting their lives to studying and understanding the history of science and technology. There was no question about it: I would just have to enlist their help to unearth what I could about the real story behind the telephone’s invention.

O
N A LATE OCTOBER
afternoon in 1874, Alexander Graham Bell paid a fateful visit to the Hubbard residence in Cambridge’s wealthiest neighborhood. For the past year, Bell had been tutoring Mabel, the Hubbards’ sweet and vivacious sixteen-year-old daughter, who had been deaf since a bout of scarlet fever when she was five years old. Now Bell had been invited to join the family for tea. As he approached the house at 146 Brattle Street, Bell paused to admire its grandeur. The impressive Italianate mansion overlooked the Charles River. Surrounded by formal gardens, a stable, and a greenhouse, it stood just down the road from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s equally luxurious Colonial-style estate.

Since arriving in Boston, Bell had traveled in some fancy circles. The well-heeled Sanders family, for instance, had included him in many social gatherings. They lived in a large house dating from the Colonial period topped with a Captain’s Walk that overlooked the Atlantic. But the tasteful grandeur of the Hubbard residence was striking by almost any comparison. Bell had already noticed how beautifully dressed, supremely well mannered, and bright Mabel was. She was easily the most winning student he had ever tutored. Mabel’s home even more clearly reflected her family’s wealth and upper-class pedigree.

Mabel’s father, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, an attorney and entrepreneur, had offices in both Boston and Washington. His father, Samuel Hubbard, had sat on the Massachusetts Supreme Court. His maternal grandfather and namesake, Gardiner Greene, was reputed in his day to be the wealthiest man in Boston. And the Hubbards’ Boston roots went deep. For example, Hubbard attended Harvard Law School in the early 1840s; his first American ancestor, William Hubbard, a notable Massachusetts pastor, had graduated from Harvard College some two hundred years earlier, in 1642.

Bell had already met Gardiner Hubbard professionally in conjunction with Hubbard’s impressive work on behalf of the deaf. After Mabel lost her hearing, Hubbard refused to relegate one of his four charming daughters to an asylum, as was the custom of the day. Instead, he devoted himself to creating opportunities not only for Mabel but for other deaf children as well. Among his accomplishments in this regard, Hubbard was a founder and first president of the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts—an institution that would gain world renown for its innovative methods of teaching the deaf to speak and helping them integrate into the hearing world.

Thanks to Hubbard’s efforts and his daughter’s natural talent, Mabel became an accomplished lip reader, and her comprehension was impeccable. By the age of twelve, she was attending classes in a regular school with hearing children two and three years her senior. Nonetheless, Hubbard felt her speech could be improved. In August 1873, he sought out Bell’s services shortly after his daughter’s return from an extended sojourn in Europe with her mother and sisters.

Now, some fourteen months later, Bell drank up the hospitality and attention of the Hubbard family. Mabel’s mother, who fully rivaled her husband in her energetic nature and rarefied background, charmed him from the start. Gertrude McCurdy Hubbard was the daughter of an established and well-to-do New York family. Her father, Robert Henry McCurdy, was a trustee and founder of the vast Mutual Life Insurance Company.

Not only did Gertrude Hubbard oversee a busy residence and social schedule in Cambridge, New York, and Washington; she was also highly educated and self-directed. When Mabel was small, for instance, she took it upon herself to learn Hebrew so she could read the Old Testament in its original language. More recently, when Gertrude Hubbard traveled with her family to Europe, her husband returned home after several months to tend to business. Mrs. Hubbard, however, remained abroad for two more years to single-handedly tour her four daughters through Geneva, Vienna, Rome, Florence, Paris, and London.

In the Hubbards’ formal drawing room, which was decorated in High Victorian style, with red velvet wallpaper, gilded drapes, and gaslights with crystal fixtures, Bell entertained his hosts on the family’s grand piano.

After playing a favorite sonata, Bell seized the opportunity to tell Gardiner Hubbard about his telegraphic research. As the two men stood together by the piano, Bell gave Hubbard a demonstration that stemmed directly from his original experiments with tuning forks in Scotland: he showed how, by stepping on the sustain pedal and bending over its open top, he could make the instrument’s undamped strings vibrate sympathetically with whatever note he sang. Sure enough, Hubbard saw, the piano strings echoed the precise pitch of Bell’s singing.

Bell explained that the effect was part of his research. Instead of using air, he could get the same effect by carrying the vibrations over a wire. That way, he should be able to make a string or reed sound from hundreds of miles away. Using the technique, Bell said, he believed he could build a multiple telegraph capable of sending six, eight, or even more messages over a single telegraph wire simultaneously.

Bell’s report visibly and uncharacteristically excited his host. Hubbard was a serious, formal patrician, who invariably wore his dark suit buttoned and his graying beard long and untrimmed. “I brought the subject before the Hon. Gardiner G. Hubbard,” Bell wrote home to his family soon after his visit.

From earlier letters home, it is clear that Bell knew of Gardiner Hubbard’s interest in the telegraph long before visiting the Hubbard household. A letter in March 1874, for instance—months before Bell’s visit—mentions the so-called Hubbard Bill introduced in the U.S. Congress to dismantle the Western Union monopoly and nationalize the telegraph industry. Bell tells his parents about tutoring Mabel and muses on the possibility of writing to her father about his telegraphic research given Hubbard’s high-profile position in the telegraph business.

Despite whatever plans Bell may have laid in advance, though, he could not have expected the swiftness with which his work would capture Hubbard’s entrepreneurial imagination. Hubbard instantly recognized the potential of the invention Bell outlined. That October day in Hubbard’s elegant parlor, Bell’s demonstration set in motion an extraordinary chain of events. Almost immediately Hubbard began to use his own wealth, connections, legal expertise, and political savvy to shape Bell’s fledgling telegraphic research.

Bell wrote home on October 20, 1874, after his visit to the Hubbards:

AS A LAWYER
specializing in patents, Gardiner Hubbard was naturally interested in inventions. In his legal practice he had helped to secure patent protection for everything from new machines used in the manufacture of shoes to specialized saws for milling lumber. But Hubbard had his own reasons for so quickly and enthusiastically backing Bell’s research: he had become intimately involved with the politics of the U.S. government’s efforts to regulate the lucrative and growing telegraph industry.

For at least six years before Bell’s visit, Hubbard had devoted much time and energy to a campaign calling for the government to assume control of the telegraph industry and bring it under the purview of the U.S. Post Office. In 1868, at the request of the Postmaster General, Hubbard had compiled a report on the postal-telegraph systems in other countries, most of which were under government control. In the countries Hubbard reviewed, the growth of the telegraph infrastructure and escalating telegram volume had led to reduced prices. But Hubbard’s analysis showed that in the United States, Western Union, with its near monopoly control of the telegraph lines, had frequently raised its rates despite the growth of its business.

In a widely read article in the
Atlantic Monthly
on the subject, Hubbard wrote that the population of Britain spent some $5 million to send roughly 18 million telegrams. In the United States, customers spent close to twice that much to send just 13 million telegrams. The size of the country, Hubbard believed, could not fully account for the difference. Rather, he contended, Western Union was overcharging its customers and thereby hurting the U.S. economy.

Congress debated the merits of the Hubbard Bill on several occasions. The plan was intriguing. Hubbard did not call for the U.S. Post Office to actually take over the telegraph industry. Instead, he proposed that Congress authorize the capital to create a private corporation—to be known as the United States Postal Telegraph Company—that would enter into a contract with the Post Office. This private corporation would build and oversee a new telegraph network in the service of the federal government. And perhaps most notable of all: it would be run by a consortium led by Hubbard and his business associates.

In Congress, Hubbard’s proposal caused controversy. Some representatives viewed the plan as the work of a public-spirited patriot; others saw it as the scheme of an overzealous entrepreneur. Either way, in his efforts to persuade Congress, Hubbard was repeatedly outmaneuvered by William Orton, the hard-driving and politically well connected head of Western Union. For instance, around the time of the debate over the Hubbard Bill, Orton offered all U.S. congressmembers the equivalent of the “franking” privileges offered by the Post Office, issuing them a card with which they could walk into any telegraph office and send an unlimited number of messages for free. In the face of such political tactics, the Hubbard Bill never gained nearly enough political traction to be enacted.

Of course, Orton’s tactics were relatively tame by the standards of the day. Political corruption would reach a kind of high-water mark in the coming 1876 presidential election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and his Democratic challenger Samuel Tilden, the governor of New York. In that remarkable contest, Tilden, running as a reformer who had broken up the corrupt, New York–based political machine of “Boss” Tweed, would win the popular vote by a considerable margin. But controversy over fraud and intimidation in Florida and several other southern states would push the nation to the brink of a constitutional crisis: a special electoral commission with a one-vote Republican majority would throw out enough contested Tilden ballots to hand Hayes a slim and highly questionable Electoral College victory.

Hubbard’s experience in the midst of a political climate pervaded by patronage and corruption had only deepened his antipathy toward Western Union. Little wonder, then, that when Bell unexpectedly outlined an invention with the promise of revolutionizing the telegraph industry, Hubbard immediately saw an opportunity. With Bell’s multiple telegraph, Hubbard reasoned, he could either return to Congress to champion a telegraph network built around Bell’s efficient new technology, or he could use patent protection to found a telegraph company himself. Bell’s kernel of an idea for a harmonic, multiple telegraph, Hubbard figured, might—just possibly—allow him to launch a new telecommunications network to rival Western Union after all.

THE MORE I
learned about Hubbard’s role in Bell’s early efforts to commercialize his telegraph research, the more intrigued I became. For one thing, I was struck by how successful Hubbard had been with several similar ventures closer to home.

Thanks largely to Hubbard’s energy and resources, for example, the city of Cambridge installed gas streetlights and a system to deliver clean water years before any other municipality in the Boston area. Hubbard helped to organize the Cambridge Gas company in 1853 and the Cambridge Waterworks two years later, serving as the latter’s first president. Even more remarkably, Hubbard helped create a horse-drawn trolley system between Cambridge and Boston. With Hubbard’s active backing, the so-called Cambridge Railroad Company was both operational and popular by 1856, disproving the many people who had argued that it would never attract enough passengers to be viable. It was the first municipal trolley of its kind constructed anywhere in the United States outside of New York City, an astonishing feat for a town with just 15,000 residents.

These successful ventures shared an important feature: each combined a heavy dose of public-spirited action with unvarnished self-interest. Although Hubbard had inherited a fortune, he had lost a good deal of it in the 1840s speculating on wheat. Nonetheless, he still had his legal practice, and, even more important, he owned a great deal of prime Cambridge real estate, much of which he would eventually develop into single-family homes. Providing municipal services that made Cambridge a more desirable place to live improved life for Hubbard and his neighbors—and bolstered the potential return from his real estate holdings.

In fact, Hubbard’s reputation as a “public man” in these kinds of endeavors was such that Thomas Sanders, Bell’s benefactor, landlord, and mentor, was concerned when he first learned that Bell had told Hubbard of his research. Sanders, of course, had already been offering a modest amount of financial support for Bell’s work and he wasn’t sure he trusted Hubbard. As Bell wrote to his family,