The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret by Seth Shulman. W.W. Norton, $24.95, 256 pages.


The Cleveland Plain Dealer

January 13, 2008

Writer suspects Bell stole lucrative telephone patent

By PHILLIP MANNING

“Mr. Watson — Come here — I want to see you,” shouted Alexander Graham Bell into the transmitter of the first telephone. “To my delight,” Bell wrote in his notebook, “he came.” Tenacity, hard work, and keen scientific insights had led Bell to this eureka moment — the invention of the telephone. This story has been told so many times that it seems heretical to question it. But science journalist Seth Shulman does exactly that in his smoothly written, impeccably researched book “The Telephone Gambit.” The book traces a tangled tale of theft and fraud as Bell and his well-connected lawyers obtain and defend the most lucrative patent ever issued.
Bell’s competitor in the race to build a working telephone was Ohio inventor Elisha Gray. Unlike Bell, Gray came from modest means, but he was a superb innovator. Running neck and neck, the two men filed for patents on the same day in 1876. Shulman begins to question Bell’s integrity after examining Gray’s filing of a provisional patent for an “instrument for transmitting and receiving vocal sounds.” Gray’s application included an illustration of its crucial feature: a novel liquid transmitter whose output could be converted into sound. The problem was that Shulman had seen an almost identical drawing in Bell’s laboratory notebook.
Further examining Bell’s notebooks, Schulman finds no mention of a liquid transmitter until two days before the “Come here, Mr. Watson” transmission, which occurred about three weeks after the transmitter’s design was revealed in Gray’s provisional patent application. Shulman begins to suspect that Bell stole the key idea for the telephone from Gray. His suspicions grow when he finds the testimony of the patent examiner, Zenas Wilber, who processed the claims of both men.
Wilber confessed in a written deposition that he showed Bell the illustration in Gray’s patent application, the one that appeared later in Bell’s notebook. But Wilber was an easily impeached witness who had earlier made contradictory statements about the matter. Nevertheless, it is hard to discount Wilber’s last and seemingly heartfelt declaration: “I am convinced,” he wrote, “by my action while Examiner of Patents that Elisha Gray was deprived of proper opportunity to establish his right to the invention of the telephone.”
As Shulman digs deeper, he discovers other discrepancies in Bell’s patent case. He also finds that previous investigators suspected that Bell and his high-powered lawyers got away with thievery.
Elisha Gray hesitated to pursue his case against Bell. At the time, Gray was a successful, well-to-do teacher and independent inventor at Oberlin College. But he eventually became convinced that Bell had stolen his ideas. A handwritten note found after his death summed up his resentment. “The history of the telephone,” Gray wrote, “will never be fully written. It is partly hidden away in 20 or 30 thousand pages of testimony and partly lying on the hearts and consciences of a few whose lips are sealed — some in death and others by a golden clasp whose grip is even tighter.”
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