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

by Seth Shulman

  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:

  I saw Sir Charles manipulate the machine and heard it speak, and although the articulation was disappointingly crude, it made a great impression upon my mind.

  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:

  The making of this talking-machine certainly marked an important point in my career. It made me familiar with the functions of the vocal cords, and started me along the path that led to the telephone.

  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:

  We heard someone above say, “Good gracious, what can be the matter with that baby” and then footsteps were heard. This, of course, was just what we wanted. We quietly slipped into our house, and closed the door, leaving our neighbors to pursue their fruitless quest for the baby. Our triumph and happiness were complete.

  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):

  “I thought that Helmholtz had done it,” Bell used to say, “and that my failure was due only to my ignorance of electricity. It was a very valuable blunder. It gave me confidence. If I had been able to read German in those days, I might never have commenced my experiments!”

  In Bell’s estimation, then, his telephone research was spawned by a colossal misunderstanding. According to MacKenzie, Bell didn’t recognize his mistake until he was about to leave Great Britain in 1870 and finally read a copy of the French edition of Helmholtz’s work. Only then did Bell learn he had been trying to reproduce a feat Helmholtz himself had never actually accomplished.

  Mistaken or not, there is little doubt Bell’s notions about Helmholtz’s work were of signal importance to the development of his thinking. By the time Bell headed to America, as MacKenzie notes, the idea of sending sounds over the telegraph had “rooted itself firmly” in his imagination.

  THE BELL FAMILY’S precipitous departure from Great Britain in 1870 came as a result of tragedy. Grandfather Alexander had died in 1865, and in the several following years, both of Bell’s brothers died of tuberculosis. Bell’s younger brother Edward succumbed to the disease in 1867, when he was just nineteen years old. When Melly died in 1870, at age twenty-five, his heartbroken parents decided to emigrate to North America to make a fresh start.

  The move came at a difficult time for Aleck Graham Bell. He had begun to make a name for himself and hoped to complete his studies. In 1868, he had passed his entrance exams and matriculated as a student at the University of London. He had also begun to use his understanding of the mechanics of elocution to teach deaf children to speak, an effort that had met with remarkable success and won him growing recognition.

  But Bell’s parents were certainly justified in worrying about the health of t
heir surviving son. Throughout his early life, Aleck had suffered from chronic maladies and, as a young man, had repeatedly worked himself into a state of exhaustion. He would frequently complain of headaches severe enough to make reading impossible. Bell’s parents felt it imperative to find a healthier environment for him.

  They also knew that Melville Bell’s reputation, though flagging in England, was ascendant in North America after word of the Visible Speech system had crossed the ocean. On a visit to Boston in 1868, for instance, Melville had given the prestigious Lowell Lectures to widespread acclaim; according to Melville’s own proud reports home, Harvard University president Thomas Hill was among the enthusiastic fans who had personally taught himself Visible Speech from Bell’s book.

  Unmoored by the deaths in the family, and in the hopes of protecting their remaining son’s health, Bell’s parents chose to move to Brantford, Ontario, where family friends from Scotland had taken up residence. Aleck joined them, but as it turned out, in those years, at least, he would spend little time in Canada. Rather, trading once again on his father’s reputation, twenty-four-year-old Aleck Bell would find his fortune in Boston, teaching the deaf and lecturing at Boston University.

  5

  NO ANSWER

  I WISH I COULD say that I jumped on the telephone case with the zeal of Bell’s literary contemporary Sherlock Holmes. But I did not. After eagerly making a photocopy of Gray’s caveat, I returned to my office and—I remember this part quite clearly—placed the document underneath a pile of papers on my desk. It sat there for over a week, buried physically and figuratively as I weighed it against the information contained in the many historical texts and biographies I had begun to collect about Bell.

  At first, I think, I set the information aside because I didn’t want to learn something untoward about Bell. After all, I had been drawn to write about him because I admired him, not just as a creative inventor but as a humanitarian. The seemingly incriminating connection I had discovered was so at odds with the story I had planned to tell that I simply didn’t know what to make of it. To be sure, I had stumbled upon a tantalizing find. If it panned out, the accepted, almost ubiquitous historical tale of the telephone’s invention could be turned on its head. But, for better or worse, I wasn’t sure how to proceed. I didn’t know who would believe me or how I could prove it even if Bell had stolen the design for the telephone. How could a journalist hope to set straight such a high-profile historical record more than a century after the fact? Myths, erroneous or not, are powerful.

  I knew that accusing Alexander Graham Bell of malfeasance or worse would mean embarking on a long, probably frustrating venture. It would mean confronting the failings of the U.S. legal system, which had heard and rejected numerous challenges to Bell’s claim to the telephone. It would mean questioning the work of generations of trained and respected historians. It would mean defying stacks of texts and reference books that credit Bell with the telephone’s invention. The prospect seemed more than a little daunting.

  When I did start to grapple with the information I had found, the major secondary sources I consulted about Bell only made matters worse. Perhaps none of these was more confounding than Robert Bruce’s highly regarded 1973 biography, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude. Bruce, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, goes so far as to cast the aspersion that Elisha Gray stole Bell’s idea. “Was it entirely a coincidence” that Gray filed his claim at the same time as Bell did, Bruce asks. As he writes:

  If Gray had prevailed in the end, Bell and his partners, along with fanciers of the underdog, would have suspected chicanery. After all, Gray did not put his concept on paper nor even mention it to anyone until he had spent nearly a month in Washington making frequent visits to the Patent Office, and until Bell’s notarized specifications had for several days been the admiration of at least some of “the people in the Patent Office.”

  Bruce’s tone is so assured and seemingly authoritative on the subject of Bell’s claim that it shook my confidence deeply. I thought I must be mistaken. For some time as I puzzled over the case, I even overlooked the obvious point that Gray’s pathbreaking design for a liquid transmitter is nowhere depicted in Bell’s patent. Even stretching to give Bruce the benefit of the doubt, Bell’s “notarized specifications” make only the most oblique and passing mention of such a possibility. Meanwhile, the liquid transmitter makes its first appearance in Bell’s notes—in a form virtually identical to Gray’s design—some three weeks after Gray filed his caveat. And Bell’s notebook offers no indication that he had ever experimented with such a transmitter prior to that time, nor had he fully succeeded in transmitting intelligible speech with any other method. Authoritative-sounding or not, Bruce’s conjecture simply does not fit the facts. But what were the facts? Could I hope to discern them after so much time had passed?

  One aspect of the question tantalized me in particular. Alexander Graham Bell conducted his telephone research less than two miles from my office. He sought advice from MIT professors whose archival papers still resided nearby on campus. Bell made the world’s first public demonstration of the telephone in 1876 at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which was, at the time, located directly across the river in downtown Boston. And, in October 1876, when Bell and Watson first tested their machine “long distance” over a two-mile stretch of telegraph wire from Boston to Cambridgeport, Watson had sat in a warehouse that, as near as I could tell, once occupied the parking lot outside my building. The geographic proximity of the whole story made it seem maddeningly within reach, like a treasure buried somewhere beneath my feet.

  It was a beautiful autumn in Boston, with striking fall foliage in oranges and reds. One especially sunny afternoon, about a week after finding Gray’s caveat, I put aside the stacks of biographical material and set out on a long, quixotic walk to learn more about Bell by retracing his steps in Boston. What I learned instead is that history’s physical traces can be infuriatingly ephemeral. I walked for many hours to parts of Boston I had rarely if ever visited. But I found little remaining evidence of the major landmarks of Bell’s life.

  I headed first for Bell’s workshop at 5 Exeter Place, only to learn that it had long since fallen victim to urban renewal. A painting by W. A. Rogers, frequently reprinted in the secondary literature about Bell, depicts his workshop as it stood in March 1877. What comes across perhaps most notably is how dowdy, Victorian, and ordinary it was, with its coal stove, bare wood floor, and patterned wallpaper.

  Today, however, the boardinghouse where Bell worked is hard to even imagine amid the city’s towering office buildings and the ongoing construction of Boston’s “Big Dig.” The only remnant of its former existence is a forlorn bronze plaque placed by a local historical society to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the telephone’s invention. Standing largely unnoticed near a sea of traffic on Boston’s central artery, the quaint and formal plaque reads:

  Here Alexander Graham Bell transmitted to Thomas Augustus Watson the first complete and intelligible sentence by telephone, March 10, 1876.

  Making my way through narrow side streets to the heart of the city, I tried next to locate the Charles Williams machine shop where almost all of Bell’s earliest telephone devices were constructed. In Bell’s day, Williams’s shop—employing roughly two dozen machinists—had buzzed and clattered with the din of lathes and metalworking tools as workers turned out prototypes for an array of strange new electrical devices, from telegraph relays to galvanometers.

  As I soon learned, no trace of the shop remains today. Not only has the building been demolished, its address, 109 Court Street, no longer even exists. In the 1960s, the city shortened Court Street to make room for a new City Hall at Government Center. Today, not even a plaque marks the site of the Williams shop—once the world’s epicenter of telephone research and home for a time to Bell’s personal workshop. Instead, in one of history’s ironies, the spot, near as I could tell, is now occupied by an increasing
ly rare cluster of outdoor pay phones.

  Finally, on Beacon Hill, near Boston’s statehouse with its magnificent Bulfinch dome, I found one of the few important sites from Bell’s time that has survived: the historic Boston Athenaeum Building, housing one of the nation’s oldest membership libraries. Here, Bell first presented his telephone research to the world before a gathering of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Built in 1847, the year Bell was born, the granite building at 10½ Beacon Street still exudes the charm of his era, outside and in.

  I talked my way past the guard at the entrance to catch a glimpse of the main hall on the first floor, a grand room ringed by a small balcony and large, paned windows along the back wall. There, inside the hushed, historic library, I found the tangible connection to Bell I had set out in search of: the Athenaeum, with its unmistakable Boston Brahmin pedigree, remains all but unchanged from Bell’s day.

  As I headed back through the front lobby to the spare, historic front entrance, it was easy to conjure the scene of Bell’s 1876 presentation. I imagined horse-drawn carriages clattering down the cobblestone-lined street outside and pulling up in front of the building. I imagined formally attired gentlemen in top hats earnestly popping out onto the curb and streaming in to the Academy’s meeting, curious to hear from a young scientist presenting what he called his “researches in telephony.” But once back outside, the press of the city’s bustling traffic quickly intruded on my reverie.

  PERHAPS THE MOST compelling portrait of young Aleck Bell’s life in Boston comes from his assistant, Thomas A. Watson. In 1874, when Watson first met him, Bell was twenty-seven years old and thriving. Since arriving in Boston several years earlier, Bell had served as a most successful ambassador for his father’s system of Visible Speech. With Bell’s own natural empathy for his students and his gifts as an instructor, he had also distinguished himself by teaching a number of deaf children to talk. By using pictures based upon his father’s system, Bell found he could illustrate for the children exactly how to position their mouths and tongues in order to speak correctly. The results were dramatic. Before long, dozens of leading educators from throughout the region sought to learn more about Bell’s techniques, and newspapers chronicled the success of his School of Vocal Physiology. As a result, Bell soon built upon his core of a dozen private pupils—many of whom were from wealthy families—to take on additional duties as a professor of “vocal physiology and elocution” at Boston University, which had just opened in 1869. As he had in Scotland, Bell did his inventing in his spare time.