by Seth Shulman
Though independently attested records state [Bell’s] basic idea in October 1874 and its vital supplement of variable resistance in May 1875, he was bedeviled by a rival [Gray] who contested his priority by claiming to have conceived both ideas in November 1875. And there still remain some, apparently believing in time travel or the occult, who suggest that Bell stole one or both ideas.
Bruce was the first historian with access to Bell’s notebooks. But he missed one of the most fascinating pieces of Bell’s story.
In the end, perhaps the most important failing is not Bell’s or Bruce’s, but our own. Bell’s notebook aside, the most striking thing about the whole case is how much was uncovered about it even in Bell’s day. Gray knew many of the details himself, and he concluded that Bell had stolen his design. And, in the intervening years, various capable people have reviewed the evidence and reached a similar conclusion. I have tried to credit the work of many of them in these pages.
None of these efforts, though, has ever managed to do much to pierce the seemingly invincible myth that Bell single-handedly invented the telephone. For many years, even after Bell’s death in 1922, this myth was skillfully nurtured and promoted by a monopoly whose interests it served.
I have no doubt that Elisha Gray’s contribution to the invention of the telephone is important and unduly neglected. But, in my obsession to get to the bottom of the story, my aim is not to supplant one myth with another. Bell may well have stolen Gray’s design for the breakthrough variable resistance liquid transmitter, yet there is little doubt that Gray, locked as he was into his shorter-term interest in the telegraph industry’s sought-after multiple telegraph, would probably have been slow to commercialize the telephone even if he did pioneer it. As I had learned from my research, both Bell and Gray owed a considerable debt to the pathbreaking work of Philipp Reis in Germany. And, to name just one of many other vital contributions, without the ensuing transmitter improvements made by Emile Berliner and Thomas Edison, the commercial, long-distance telephone industry could never possibly have gotten off the ground.
Despite the unscrupulous dealings on Bell’s behalf—at least some of which were almost certainly undertaken with his collusion and consent—Bell’s vision and his energy still stand out as a remarkable model. The telephone brought him world renown when he was still a young man. But in all the decades that followed, Bell never rested. He built flying machines, bred sheep to study heredity, and tried to learn what he could about the language of the Mohawk tribe who lived in Canada not far from his parents’ home in Brantford, Ontario. In just one of myriad examples of his foresight, Bell even fretted about the air pollution of his day in a manner that seems particularly prescient. The soot in the air would block some of the sun’s heat, Bell figured in 1917. But he reasoned that the earth, on balance, would gain some of the heat normally radiated into space, calling it “a sort of greenhouse effect.”
History is messy, and delving deeper doesn’t necessarily make it come much clearer. We can pin down many of the details of what happened in the past. But it is up to us what lessons we take away. Still, if I learned anything from my research into the invention of the telephone, it is that history needs to be constantly challenged and interrogated. To do anything less is to play a game of “telephone,” tacitly accepting the garbled story that is whispered from one generation to the next.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
OUR CAPACITY TO unearth any truths about the past depends upon the extent to which we have access to the records in question. In this regard, I want to especially acknowledge and commend the remarkable, pathbreaking job the manuscript division of the U.S. Library of Congress has done by digitizing and making freely available the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers. It is especially fitting that this collection should so demonstrate the modern marvels of telecommunications. The originals of most of the key documents cited in this book can be found in this accessible online archive, as can thousands upon thousands more. The collection immeasurably facilitated my research and sets a wonderful example for other archives around the world to emulate.
Meanwhile, anyone who uses primary source documents or artifacts in his or her work most certainly owes a debt to the painstaking and often thankless labors of many archivists, curators, and librarians. I want particularly to acknowledge several who helped me, including: David McGee, Ben Weiss, Philip Cronenwett, Anne Battis, Howard Kennett, and the rest of the staff at the Dibner Institute’s Burndy Library; John Liffen, curator of communications at the Science Museum in London; Roland Baumann, Ken Grossi, and Tamara Martin at the Oberlin College Archive; Leonard Bruno, curator in the manuscript division of the Library of Congress; Jeffrey Mifflin at the MIT Archive; and Charles Sullivan and Susan Maycock at the Cambridge Historical Commission.
I am indebted to my many friends and colleagues at MIT’s Dibner Institute, which is now sadly defunct after a falling out with its host university. (The Burndy Library collection, and some continuation of the Dibner’s related fellowship program, now resides at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.) The Dibner Institute provided the crucial support and home for my initial research. I especially thank George Smith and Bonnie Edwards, respectively the acting director and executive director of the Dibner Institute while I was there, for the special haven they fostered for this kind of research and their willingness in 2004 to make room at their “historians’ table” for a science writer. During my year at the Dibner, I was also helped enormously by the rest of the institute staff, including Trudy Kontoff and Rita Dempsey, who smoothed many bureaucratic and logistical edges for me. I benefited from contacts, discussions, and seminars with many of the scholars who overlapped with me at the Dibner Institute during the 2004–05 academic year, including Tom Archibald, Peter Bokulich, Alexander Brown, Claire Calcagno, Dane Daniel, Ford Doolittle, Gerard Fitzgerald, Olival Freire, Kristine Harper, Arne Hessenbruch, Giora Hon, Cesare Maffioli, Takashi Nishiyama, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Sam Schweber, Peter Shulman (no relation), Jenny Leigh Smith, Katrien Vander Straeten, Jim Voelkel, Sara Wermiel, and Chen-Pang Yeang. For special technical and moral support, I offer particularly sincere thanks to David Cahan and Conevery Valencius, both of whom went far above and beyond the call of duty to make extensive and tremendously helpful suggestions to an early draft of this manuscript. I learned a great deal from the impressive scholarship undertaken by all of these dedicated historians; but, of course, my thanks to them in no way implies their endorsement of my work. Despite their help, the interpretations and mistakes in the text, for better or worse, are mine alone.
I am particularly grateful to a number of others who also read the book in draft form and helped me to improve it in many ways, including Christopher Clarke, John Liffen, Nancy Marshall, David McGee, Dave Pantalony, and Jill Shulman. Still other friends and colleagues gave encouragement at various points along the way. Among these, I thank Dan Charles and Lewis Cohen for conversations that sparked new avenues in my research; Sarah Shulman and Tom Garrett for all their support throughout; Doug Starr at Boston University’s Science Journalism Program; Marcia Bartusiak, Rob Kanigel, and Tom Levinson at MIT’s Graduate Writing Program; Victor McElheny, longtime mentor and former director of MIT’s Knight Science Writing Fellowship; David Talbot at MIT’s Technology Review magazine; and Deborah Cramer, who succeeded me as the Dibner Institute’s second (and, sadly, last) science writer fellow at MIT.
Marc Miller was one of my very first magazine editors and, luckily for me, he has never managed to get free from my prose since. A prizewinning historian himself, Marc has earned the dubious distinction of editing each of the five books I have written. I can’t offer enough thanks for his generous and immeasurably helpful labors on my behalf any more than by calling him a dear and special friend.
My agent, Katinka Matson at Brockman, Inc., believed in this project from the start and, as usual, found a wonderful home for it. I thank Angela von der Lippe for her wise insights and editorial comments, as she, Lydia Fitzpatrick,
and Sabine Eckle helped guide the book through production, and I am grateful for the sharp eye and keen judgment of Ann Adelman, who copy-edited the manuscript.
Words cannot express my gratitude to the members of my amazing family, who have once again so kindly cared for and put up with me as I wrestled a manuscript to the ground. I am a lucky father and I give my deepest thanks to Elise and Ben for everything, as well as to the rest of my extended family, especially my father, Roy Shulman, to whom this book is dedicated. As usual, I absolutely couldn’t have managed without the selfless support and love of my wife and soul mate Laura Reed. She gets extra special thanks for being such an insightful and active listener and muse on all those long car rides back and forth to Boston as I worked to envision the scope and shape of this project.
In keeping with the theme of this book, I want finally to acknowledge my debt to the many researchers over the years who, after combing through the archival material about the telephone’s origins, felt compelled, as I did, to try to revise the widely held misperception that Alexander Graham Bell was the telephone’s sole inventor. The list includes George B. Prescott in 1878; Silvanus Thompson in 1883; John Paul Bocock in 1900; William Aitken in 1923; Lloyd Taylor in 1937; Lewis Coe in 1995; Edward Evenson, and Burton Baker, both of whose works appeared in 2000. That some of these efforts date to the earliest days of the telephone points up the long-standing roots of the controversy over its invention and, of course, also underscores just how difficult it is to correct the record adequately in the face of persistent historical myths. Nonetheless, I have learned from and taken inspiration from these researchers’ efforts to ferret out the truth; each of them made contributions that have furthered the public understanding of a complex story. If, in my odyssey through this material, I have added to their labors, it is perhaps only by pointing out the significance of the information contained in Bell’s notebook itself, and by weaving and culling together disparate details, many of which one or more of these researchers had already sought to bring to light.
NOTES
1 : PLAYING TELEPHONE
5 Exeter Place: Bell moved to two rooms (Ns. 13 and 15) at this location in mid-January 1876. See Alexander Graham Bell (AGB) to Mabel Hubbard, January 17, 1876, his first letter from the new location. Unless otherwise noted, letters come from the vast digitized collection called the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers, Library of Congress (LOC), available online at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/bellhtml/bellhome.html.
a metal cone: Bell’s diagram and specifications are available in AGB, “Laboratory Notebook, 1875–1876” (cited hereafter as Laboratory Notebook, 1875–1876), LOC, pp. 40–41. Watson explains much later that the original liquid transmitter does not survive as it was used for parts in successive adaptations—See Thomas A. Watson, “The Birth and Babyhood of the Telephone: An Address Delivered Before the Third Annual Convention of the Telephone Pioneers of American at Chicago, October 17, 1913” (New York: American Telephone & Telegraph Co., 1936).
the “undulations” created: See, e.g., AGB, U.S. Patent 174,465, “Improvements in Telegraphy,” filed Feb. 14, 1876; issued March 7, 1876. Bell claimed, among other things, a “method of producing undulations in a continuous voltaic circuit by the vibration or motion of bodies capable of inductive action.”
“I then shouted”: AGB, Laboratory Notebook, 1875–1876, LOC, pp. 40–41.
Watson’s notes: Watson’s notebook is part of the AT&T Historical Collection, NY. The page in question is printed in a full-scale color reproduction in H. M. Boettinger, The Telephone Book: Bell, Watson, Vail and American Life 1876–1976 (Croton-on-Hudson, NY: Riverwood Publishers, 1977), p. 67.
“I feel that I have at last found”: AGB to Alexander Melville Bell, March 10, 1876.
“This wire”: Reprinted in Thomas A. Watson, Exploring Life (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1926), pp. 126–27.
2 : DISCONNECTED
“wizard of Menlo Park”: According to one of Edison’s biographers, Matthew Josephson, the appellation was first given in an article entitled “An Afternoon with Edison,” New York Daily Graphic, April 2, 1878. See Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1959), p. 170.
born just twenty days apart: Edison was born on February 11, 1847; Bell on March 3, 1847.
just three months of formal schooling: See Neil Baldwin, Edison: Inventing the Century (New York: Hyperion, 1995), p. 25.
slavishly long hours: Ibid., p. 323.
punch a time clock: See, e.g., Seth Shulman, “Unlocking the Legacies of the Edison Archives,” Technology Review (February–March 1997).
His 1,093 patents set a record: Between 1869 and 1933, the U.S. Patent Office issued 1,093 patents to Thomas Edison, and the number still stands as the record for patents issued to a single individual. A complete accounting of Edison’s patents is available online at http://edison.rutgers.edu/patents.htm.
introduced Helen Keller: See Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1905), pp. 18–19.
launch the journal Science: Bell’s early support of Science is detailed in Robert V. Bruce, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), pp. 376–78. In addition to his close personal involvement in the selection of editors, etc., Bruce estimates that Bell spent a total of some $60,000 to help keep the journal afloat in the 1880s and early 1890s.
president of the National Geographic Society: The always energetic Gardiner Hubbard played the lead in founding the National Geographic Society in 1888; in 1897, after Hubbard’s death, Bell became its president—See Bruce, Bell, pp. 422–23.
first successful airplanes: For more on Bell’s role, see Seth Shulman, Unlocking the Sky (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).
the eugenics movement: See, e.g., “Frontispiece: Alexander Graham Bell as Chairman of the Board of Scientific Directors of the Eugenics Record Office,” Eugenical News: Current Record of Race Hygiene, vol. 14, no. 8 (August 1929), describing Bell as a “pioneering eugenicist.” See also AGB to Charles Davenport, Eugenics Record Office, December 27, 1912. Both documents are available online at http://www.eugenicsarchive.org.
women’s rights: See, e.g., AGB to Mabel Hubbard, October 5, 1875. At the end of a long, tongue-in-cheek disquisition on the subject, Bell writes his fiancée: “I suppose it will not be long before we have a woman wanting to be President of the United States! Well it is not for me to say her ‘Nay’—seeing that I am a subject of Queen Victoria—a woman-sovereign—and one of the best the world has seen—so my best wishes go with her.”
“Mr. Bell was tall”: David Fairchild, The World Was My Garden: Travels of a Plant Explorer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), p. 290.
Bern Dibner: For an interesting biographical sketch, see I. Bernard Cohen, “Award of the 1976 Sarton Medal to Bern Dibner,” Isis, vol. 68, no. 244 (1977), pp. 610–15.
Bohr-Rosenfeld paper: N. Bohr and L. Rosenfeld, “Field and Charge Measurements in Quantum Electrodynamics,” Physical Review, vol. 78, no. 6 (1950), pp. 794–98.
Sir Isaac Newton: See, e.g., I. Bernard Cohen and George E. Smith, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Newton (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
its sensible progression: AGB, Laboratory Notebook, 1875–1876, pp. 1–33.
notes on March 8: Ibid., p. 35.
idly twisted a box: The story is related in many places, including by Orville Wright in Marvin McFarland, ed., The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953), p. 8.
Alexander Fleming: Fleming’s discovery was published in the seminal article: A. Fleming, British Journal of Experimental Pathology, vol. 10, no. 226 (1929). A concise, descriptive account is given in Rupert Lee, The Eureka Moment: 100 Key Scientific Discoveries of the 20th Century (London: British Library, 2002), p. 29.
“Returned from Washington”: AGB, Laboratory Notebook, 1875–1876, p. 34.
3 : ON THE HOOK
made him seem much older: See, e.
g., AGB, “Notes of Early Life,” from the
“Notebook of Alexander Graham Bell” Volta Review (1910), available online at LOC (Series: Article and Speech Files, Folder: “Autobiographical Writings,” 1904–1910, undated). As Bell recalls, ever since visiting his grandfather for a year at age fifteen, people invariably thought he was older than he actually was. Bell’s pupil Mabel Hubbard thought him at least ten years older than he really was—see Mabel Hubbard Diaries, January 1879, available online at LOC.
an astonishing 12,000 miles of track: Harper’s New Monthly (February 1876), p. 465, available online at http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/. Harper’s reports on the latest figures from Railroad Gazette, noting that the major railroad lines in the United States added 6,202 miles of track in 1872; 3,276 miles in 1873; 1,664 miles in 1874; and 1,150 miles in 1875.
William “Boss” Tweed: For a thumbnail summary, see “Tweed, William Marcy,” in Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress, available online at http://bioguide.congress.gov.