After the Fact

by Owen J. Hurd

  Morse brought some of these problems on himself. Because he loathed the business side of creating a large-scale, profitable telegraph system, Morse entered into one of the most disastrous partnerships of his life. He granted Francis O. J. Smith, a former U.S. congressman from Maine, rights to a portion of all future profits stemming from the telegraph. Morse believed that Smith’s government connections and experience would open all the right doors. To some extent he was right. Smith helped Morse get his first deal with Congress, a $30,000 appropriation to pay for the wires connecting Baltimore and Washington, DC. Unfortunately, Smith never passed up an opportunity to demand more than his fair share of, well, every aspect of the business.

  In charge of negotiating contracts for the construction of the Baltimore-Washington line, Smith insisted on hiring his brother-in-law to dig trenches for the underground wires. (This was before they decided it was more cost-efficient to string the wires high overhead on wooden poles.) Smith’s brother-in-law subcontracted the work to a man named Ezra Cornell, who had devised a machine that would dig the trench and lay and bury the pipes all at once. Delays and shortages of material led to still more delays. Even though the work was nowhere near complete, Smith and his brother-in-law demanded payment in full. When Morse refused, Smith publicly accused Morse of incompetence and malfeasance.

  These squabbles were over a fairly small amount of money, but the patterns established in this dispute were played out over and over again. Equipped with the moral code and fighting style of a hyena, Smith attacked his enemies at every angle. He never hesitated to make incendiary accusations, file lawsuits, enlist foes of his enemies—anything to win and profit.

  Smith even joined in lawsuits filed against Morse by rival telegraph companies. Morse had to defend himself against more than a dozen legal challenges to his patent on the telegraph. Finally, in 1854, the U.S. Supreme Court, with Justice Roger Taney presiding, ruled unanimously in Morse’s favor, putting all challenges to rest.

  The outbreak of the Civil War proved that the telegraph would not necessarily facilitate the preservation of world peace. Quite the opposite, it turned out, as both sides used the telegraph to advance their military objectives. The Confederates seized control of the telegraph network in its territory, depriving Morse of any associated rights or profits.

  The war also highlighted an extremely unsavory facet of Morse’s belief system. Despite being a Northerner—born no less in Charlestown, Massachusetts, the cradle of American liberty—Morse harbored acute proslavery sympathies. Astounding to modern sensibilities, Morse based his support of the peculiar institution on lessons he took from the Bible. Master decoder that he was, Morse gleaned from the Old Testament a hierarchy of obedience based on four pillars of authority: the government’s rule over its citizens, a husband’s dominion over his wife, a parent’s rule over its child, and finally, an owner’s authority over its slaves. Any violation of these essential foundations was an affront to God. Morse thus arrived at a philosophy that put serious limits on personal liberty.

  Like many antebellum supporters of slavery, Morse went so far as to argue that slavery was in the best interests of slaves, in that it provided them with “protection and judicious guidance” as well as the provision of food and shelter. Not to mention spiritual guidance. As a sign of slavery’s value to the enslaved, Morse pointed to higher Christianity conversion rates among slaves than among free blacks living in Africa.

  “Slavery to them,” he concluded, “has been Salvation, and Freedom, ruin.”

  When the war ended, Morse refused to celebrate the preservation of the Union, saying, “I should as soon think of applauding one of my children for his skillful shooting of his brothers in a family brawl.” Even if it had not turned out to his liking, the war had also precipitated an accelerated expansion of the telegraph system, connecting the nation from sea to sea, and making the septuagenarian Morse a vastly wealthy man. When he died in 1872 at the age of eighty, Morse was celebrated in obituaries as “the most illustrious American of his age.”

  LOOSE ENDS

  Before he became an inventor, Morse was a respected artist—a painter of portraits, landscapes, and historical scenes. When he decided to focus his efforts on telegraphy in the 1830s, Morse turned his back on a promising artistic career. In fact, he left behind a never-finished tableau, The Gem of the Republic, a representation of the signing of the Mayflower Compact. Previously, Morse was also commissioned to create portraits of important historical figures such as John Adams, the Marquis de Lafayette, and James Monroe. He even created some of the first portraits ever made using a new technology invented by Louis Daguerre. Morse operated his daguerreotype studio from 1839 to 1840, making portraits of wealthy customers and teaching pupils like Mathew Brady the new art form.

  Morse’s assistant, Alfred Vail, never earned the recognition or remuneration that he deserved, even though he helped develop the technology of telegraphy in profound ways. Trained as a machinist in the family-owned shop, Vail engineered major improvements to Morse’s hardware—the transmitter and receiver—as well as enhancements to the code that most famously bears Morse’s name. Feeling squeezed out, Vail quit the telegraph business in 1848, just as the industry was coming into its own. Morse minimized Vail’s contributions even after his loyal assistant’s death in 1859. At the unveiling of a monument to Morse in 1871, the inventor mentioned Vail’s name only in passing, a snub that infuriated Vail’s widow, who was in attendance.

  Morse fathered eight children with two wives. None of them really amounted to much. One was convicted of murdering an Indian, but was later exonerated and became a cowboy in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Two of Morse’s children appear to have committed suicide, though there was no definitive proof. His daughter Susan disappeared during a ferry ride, and his son Arthur “fell” onto railroad tracks moments before an approaching train crushed him to death. There’s no doubt about the suicides of two of his grandchildren—one a son of Susan’s, the other a son of Charles’s.

  Dr. Charles Jackson was one of the people who claimed that he and not Morse had come up with the idea for the telegraph. His credibility was later called into question when he made similar claims about several other discoveries, including the use of ether as an anesthetic and the digestive functions of the stomach. He also claimed to have made advances in ballistics technology.

  Bell Covers His Tracks

  The story of how Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone is a familiar one. On March 10, 1876, he and his assistant, Thomas Watson, were testing a new method for carrying vocal signals across a metal wire. Watson was in one room down the hall, setting up the receiver. Bell, positioned in an adjacent room housing the transmitter, inadvertently spilled some acid.

  “Watson!” he exclaimed, “come here—I want to see you!” To his everlasting shock, Watson heard his employer’s words emanating from the receiver. Over a century later this quaint story continues to define this milestone in technological history, but an examination of the events that unfolded in the coming months and years belies a far murkier, potentially nefarious truth. At least that’s the conclusion reached by several experts and journalists who have studied the details of the telephone’s invention, including a bewildering series of events at the U.S. Patent Office.

  From the time Bell made his discovery, he behaved strangely for a man who had just invented a revolutionary new technology potentially worth millions of dollars. Did he take the story directly to the press? As a matter of fact, Bell himself never publicly told the story of the first telephone conversation. The story was unknown to the world at large until related in a history of the telephone published in 1910. Did he rush to the patent office to stake his claim to this invention? It turns out he didn’t have to, because Bell had already been granted a patent three days earlier. This was highly unusual. To be granted patent applications typically required that an inventor submit a working model of the invention in question. To stake a claim to a technological advance sti
ll in the conceptual stage, Bell should have filed a document known as a caveat. A patent caveat, essentially, grants the inventor dibs on his intellectual property for a one-year period, ample time to build a working prototype. More about this later.

  Having made his revolutionary discovery, Bell seemed oddly reluctant to publicize it. He squirreled himself away in his laboratory, along with Watson, presumably in an effort to perfect his contraption before making public demonstrations. The upcoming International Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia would seem to be the ideal forum to unveil this new technology to the world, but Bell showed no interest in attending. His partner, Gardiner Hubbard, implored Bell to change his mind, but Bell was adamant, claiming that he needed to make additional refinements. Eventually, Hubbard played his trump card—his fetching daughter.

  A year earlier Bell had declared his intentions toward Mabel Hubbard, one of Bell’s deaf students and sixteen-year-old daughter of his employer and business partner. But her parents deemed the girl too young to get married to a young man of modest means and pedigree, however potentially brilliant he might be, especially since he was now proving inexplicably slow to capitalize on what seemed to be a potential gold mine. The Hubbards did not completely discourage Bell’s interest in Mabel but asked him to hold off on his advances for the time being.

  At first, Mabel had no more luck than her father in encouraging Bell to attend the Centennial Exposition, so she resorted to trickery. An innocuous carriage ride in the park ended up at the train station. Mabel shoved a packed suitcase into Bell’s hands and told him she wouldn’t marry him if he didn’t go. He did, complaining that he would “be glad when the whole thing is over.”

  So, what in the world was Bell so afraid of? An accomplished public speaker, it couldn’t have been stage fright. There was a deeper, more substantial source of anxiety, at least according to Seth Shulman, the author of The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret. Bell’s secret, Shulman says, was that Bell stole a key element of his invention from a rival scientist, Elisha Gray. Worse, Gray was expected to attend the Centennial Exposition, where he was scheduled to exhibit his own “musical telegraph” at the same forum. Surely Gray would presumably learn of the intellectual theft.

  Let’s back up a little bit. In 2004, Shulman was doing research on a related topic when he stumbled across an illustration from Bell’s lab notebook. The image, which featured a variable resistance transmitter—essentially a wire suspended in a vial of mercury—was uncannily similar to one Shulman had recently seen in Elisha Gray’s patent caveat filed on February 14, the same day Bell submitted his patent application. Two things struck Shulman as odd: Bell’s lab notebook schematic was dated March 9, just two weeks after his trip to Washington. Even more suspiciously, Bell’s notebooks contain no other indications of this idea’s evolution. Up until this point Bell had been experimenting with a metal reed transmitter, with which he was only able to produce muffled sounds but not clear speech.

  Could it be, Shulman wondered, that Bell somehow learned of Gray’s innovation and slipped it into his own design, essentially adding the final puzzle piece to an invention he was on the verge of making? Shulman sure seems to think so, making the stunning accusation that Alexander Graham Bell committed “a clear and discernible act of plagiarism…on the crucial eve of his success with the telephone.”

  On top of that, Shulman learned that Bell had met privately with an officer at the patent office, who later testified that he not only told Bell about Gray’s breakthrough but also permitted Bell to review Gray’s caveat, a serious breach of professional ethics. As if that were not enough, the officer, Zenas Wilber, said he even lied about which inventor had submitted his documentation first, placing Bell’s ahead of Gray’s. Considering that the patent Bell was granted has been called the most valuable patent in American history, this was larceny of the highest order.

  Bell denied the charges—especially that he had given Wilber a $100 bribe. However, documentary evidence suggests that some sort of irregularities may have occurred. Bell’s patent application contained a description of a liquid transmitter uncannily similar to Gray’s. However, that passage appears under an asterisk, suspiciously appended to the margin of Bell’s application. Under oath Bell later admitted that Wilber permitted him to amend his application after their secret meeting. It certainly seems plausible that Bell may have based his added footnote on intelligence gathered illegally from Gray’s caveat.

  Shulman’s iconoclastic accusations have induced an equal and opposite reaction among a cadre of Bell apologists, including Edwin S. Grosvenor, the editor in chief of American Heritage magazine and Bell’s great-great-grandson. They point out that Shulman is not the first to question Bell’s stature as the lone inventor of the telephone. Far from it. Over the years, Bell defended himself against hundreds of legal challenges to his telephone patent. Significantly, he never lost a single one of these court cases—though Bell Telephone did settle out of court with Gray’s company, Western Electric, in 1879. Bell loyalists also assail the testimony of patent office clerk Wilber, who they say was an aging, impoverished alcoholic at the time he filed his affidavit impugning Bell. Wilber was put up to it by the founders of a newly formed company, Pan-Electric, who also paid off the U.S. attorney and several U.S. senators involved in the investigations. For what it’s worth, in his affidavit Wilber claimed that poverty and alcoholism had induced him to accept Bell’s bribe back in 1876.

  It’s unlikely that anyone will ever know just what happened back in that patent office. Several things are clear: Bell and Gray were both brilliant scientists who were heading in the same direction at the same time. Whether through accident, good fortune, or chicanery, Bell beat Gray to the punch and enjoyed the spoils of victory. But Gray fared pretty well himself. As the president of Western Electric he continued to innovate, taking numerous patents under his own name and others for his company. In 1887 he invented the teleautograph, a precursor to the fax machine. Gray died in 1901 shortly after collaborating on a device for sending long-distance underwater signals.

  Bell, too, continued to invent, but thanks to his Bell Telephone stock he had the luxury to operate on the basis of a gentleman-scientist. When President James Garfield was shot by an assassin in 1881, Bell answered the challenge of devising a metal detector to locate the bullet lodged in Garfield’s body. Unfortunately the bullet was buried too deeply, and Garfield died several weeks later of infections introduced by his doctors’ probing—and unsterilized—fingers.

  Bell was also inspired by the prospect of human flight. One of his companions in this endeavor was his friend Samuel P. Langley, the director of the Smithsonian Institution. The two spent countless hours at Bell’s summer home, discussing and experimenting. Bell focused on a horizontal propeller system, a kind of predecessor to the helicopter, while Langley developed a biplane similar in design to the Wright brothers’ “aeroplane.” Bell later recruited Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge and Glenn Curtiss to his camp of aviation pioneers, two names that would figure in the history of human flight.

  LOOSE ENDS

  Gardiner Hubbard, Bell’s business partner and father-in-law, later established the National Geographic Society in 1888. The society sponsored meetings and published a magazine featuring technical articles targeted to experts. When Hubbard died in 1897, Bell took over as president. Two years later Bell hired his future son-in-law, Gilbert Grosvenor, to edit the magazine. Over the next fifty-five years, Grosvenor turned National Geographic into the internationally respected publication it is today. Bell helped shape the magazine’s photographic bent, prodding his new editor in one letter to “run more dynamical pictures—pictures of life and action—pictures that tell a story ‘to be continued in our text’!!”

  Thomas Watson, like Bell, made a fortune from Bell Telephone Company stock. After retiring from the Bell Company, Watson tried farming for a while but then turned to shipbuilding. His Fore River Ship & Engine Company built some of th
e U.S. Navy’s first battleships capable of shooting torpedoes. Watson and Bell were reunited by telephone in 1915, when they were invited to conduct the first transcontinental telephone conversation in the United States. Bell sat at a phone in New York and Watson was stationed in San Francisco. Bell repeated his famous phrase, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” This time, Watson replied that it would take him a week to get there.

  Hubbard’s granddaughter Grace Hubbard Fortescue, was convicted of manslaughter by a Hawaiian court in 1932. Her daughter, Thalia Massie, had accused several local Hawaiian men of rape. After a mistrial, Fortescue masterminded the abduction of one of the defendants, Joe Kahahawai, in the hopes of getting him to confess to the crime. She and several others were found later in the act of disposing of Kahahawai’s dead body. The killers were found guilty, but their sentences were reduced to one hour of jail time.

  Wright Brothers, Wronged

  As the sun set in Dayton, Ohio, on December 17, 1903, Bishop Milton Wright settled into his study, but his thoughts were in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where his two youngest sons were testing their first powered flyer. Just then the Wright family’s cook was at the front door signing for a telegram that would forever change the lives of the Wrights and the rest of the world as well. In telegram shorthand, the message read: