The Wall Street Journal-20080116-Business Bookshelf- False Claim- Future Fortune
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Business Bookshelf: False Claim, Future Fortune
The Telephone Gambit
By Seth Shulman
(Norton, 256 pages, $24.95)
In "Unlocking the Sky" (2003), Seth Shulman argued that a century ago aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss did not get enough credit for developing the airplane and turning it into a practical technology while the Wright Brothers got altogether too much. The book is an example of historiography, the study of the principles and techniques of history -- a discipline that is usually dryness itself, but when utilized by a skilled historian, and excellent writer, like Mr. Shulman, can make for a tale that is detective-story exciting.
In his latest evidence-sifting, "The Telephone Gambit," he argues that Alexander Graham Bell didn't invent the telephone at all -- instead he stole the crucial technological breakthrough from the now- forgotten Elisha Gray. Mr. Shulman makes a compelling case.
After Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell is probably the most famous inventor of the 19th century. He certainly died the richest. His father-in-law, Gardiner Hubbard, a Boston lawyer and businessman who was well connected in Washington, helped mightily to turn Bell's patent on the telephone, No. 174,465, into what became the "Bell System" and AT&T.
The traditional story is the stuff of legend. Bell, a speech therapist and teacher of the deaf, tinkers with a means for transmitting the human voice over long distances. Aware in 1876 that others are pursuing similar ideas, he rushes to patent his technology -- without knowing whether it will work -- supposedly filing his application at the Patent Office just 2 1/2 hours before Elisha Gray submits his own papers. Years of litigation over who had an authentic first claim will follow, but a few days after Bell is awarded his patent, a decisive event occurs. Working in his Boston laboratory, Bell spills battery acid on himself and yells for his assistant in the next room: "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you." An astonished Watson hears the shout transmitted by the apparatus that the two have been working on -- a "speaking telegraph." The rest, as they say, is history. Or is it? As Mr. Shulman shows in this page-turner of a book, what we think we know about the past is not always true.
In the 1840s, the telegraph had revolutionized communications. News that had taken days or even weeks to get from one place to another now took seconds. When Cyrus Field laid a telegraph cable across the Atlantic in 1866, it was in many ways the birth of the modern world.
But the telegraph had a problem. It required skilled operators at both ends who could transmit and interpret Morse Code. So it is not surprising that, in the second half of the 19th century, many people were working on ways to transmit the human voice electrically through a wire. The commercial potential was as enormous as it was obvious. The key would be converting the voice into an electrical current that constantly modulated, mimicking the variations of human speech. A telegraph's current, by contrast, was only on and off.
Mr. Shulman was trying to discover how Bell had arrived at his solution when he noticed a gap in the inventor's notebook. Bell had been methodically describing his experiments and the means he had been trying -- different current strengths, magnets, etc. But the notebook stopped on Feb. 24, 1876, and didn't resume until March 7, when Bell wrote that he had just returned from a trip to Washington, D.C. Suddenly, the slow, incremental experimentation stopped and a brand- new method was tried. A day and a half later, Bell's famous cry for help was transmitted.
The solution to modulating the current for the human voice was to attach a platinum needle to the bottom of a speaker cone and dip the needle, connected to a battery, into acidulated water. As the speaker's voice caused the cone to vibrate, the needle would dip into the water, completing a circuit. The deeper the needle was immersed, the more current was transmitted, allowing it to modulate.
It was a brilliant concept. But was it Bell's? What had happened during his trip to Washington that allowed Bell to abandon the blind alleys he had been exploring and to suddenly, not incrementally, find the technological solution?
The answer to that question is a tale involving high-powered Washington lawyers, political influence, a patent clerk with a booze problem, and improper access to Elisha Gray's patent filing, where Bell found the secret to making the telephone work. Mr. Shulman lays out the evidence -- documentary, scientific, chronological and psychological -- piece by damning piece. He shows most impressively how Bell's subsequent behavior and actions are entirely in keeping with those of a decent and honorable man having to live most of his long life (Bell died in 1924) with the knowledge that behind his fortune and his fame lay a single instance of brazen dishonesty, of intellectual theft.
"The Telephone Gambit" is solid history, and Seth Shulman makes it as much fun to read as an Agatha Christie whodunit by using the techniques of historiography the way Hercule Poirot used his "little gray cells." That's no small accomplishment.
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Mr. Gordon is the author of "An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power" (HarperCollins, 2004).
