Myths of Telephone History

      While waiting for the train downtown Friday, I noticed this bulletin from the Highland Park Historical Society, which is holding a commemoration of Elisha Gray Sunday night. I hadn't thought about Gray in years, and would certainly be there to honor him, but a prior commitment takes me to the city. Still, I spent a long time studying the man for my "Complete & Utter Failure" book, where he appears in the chapter on bad timing, "Myths of Telephone History."

     History is much more complex than the pap they feed you in school. Think of it as an onion. The outer, tough brown surface is the outline narrative we are all familiar with — what Voltaire called "the lie agreed upon."
     To get to the inner, fragrantly-human layers of the onion, where missteps and bungling and treachery and bad timing lie you sometimes have to peel. It takes time and thought, and most people don't bother — they have a hard enough time keeping the famous figures and buzzwords straight — but it is an exercise that, nevertheless, should be tried at least once.
     Consider the telephone.
     Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. We learn this in grade school. He was a teacher of the deaf, with a big beard, and he invented the telephone. After he invented it, the first words spoken over the telephone were "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you." Everyone knows this.
     The date was March 10, 1876. The reason Bell needed Watson was because he had spilled sulfuric acid on his clothes. The acid was being used to alter an electric current in response to shifting sound waves, the central element in the telephone Bell was using, a telephone he did not invent, but which was described the month before in an application registered at the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C. by Chicago inventor Elisha Gray.
     And now we begin to peel.
     Gray, an electrician who founded the Western Electric Company, is one of those shadow figures of history, a person whose life comes into focus only when the light of failure is shone on the pages of the past. his telephone invention could have — perhaps should have — placed him among the pantheon of immortal American inventors: Fulton, Morse, Edison, Gray.
     Certainly Gray appeared to be the right man to invent the telephone. He had eleven patents to his name, all for improvements in the telegraph, and his Western Electric Company had the backing of the powerful Western Union, the biggest company in America. His people saw the telephone coming. In a New York Times article of July 10, 1874, detailing Gray's "musical telegraph," a device conveying tones over wires in the fashion of an electric organ, a Western Union official predicted that "in time the operators will transmit the sound of their own voice over the wires."
     They did, and quickly too. Within five years people would be paying to talk over a phone Gray had designed, but not over a phone that hadGray's name on it or put cash into Gray's pocket. Gray suffered a single slip, a stroke of bad timing on his march to glory, and it was enough to sidetrack hm into oblivion and ridicule. He is remembered today chiefly for his moment of lateness, a cameo appearance in what is, at first glance, one of the more astounding coincidences of history.
     On February 14, 1876, Gardiner Hubbard, Alexander Graham Bell's silent business partner, visited the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., and filed a patent application for "Improvements in Telegraphy," Bell's modest term for a transmitter/receiver that could send a voice over electrical wires — a telephone.
     Approximately two hours later, an attorney named William D. Baldwin visited the same office and filed a caveat for Gray, describing a device for "transmitting vocal sounds or conversations telegraphically" (a caveat was an announcement of a pending patent application). The filing fee was $10.
     The Patent Office had a policy for handling two conflicting claims. On February 19, it issued what was called an interference, meaning that both applications were frozen for ninety days to give the examiners time to weigh the merits of the variou claims.
     The two devices were quite similar. Bell's used a membrane that when vibrated by sound waves, moved a strip of iron through the field of an electromagnet, converting the sounds into an undulating electric current. Gray's was a little more elegant. Vibration of the membrane changed the depth of immersion of rod in acidified water, varying the current (most people don't realize that it was not the element receiving or broadcasting the voice which was the radically new part of the telephone, but the smoothly varying electrical current, as opposed to the simple on/off of the telegraph circuit).

     Neither man had actually conveyed speech through his device. Gray hadn't built his. Bell had, but his assistant Thomas Watson had only been able to make out "tones" from it. But in keeping with the standard procedure of their time — and ours — each had bolted off to the Patent Office to try to secure the right to make great gobs of money off his invention a soon as the idea had been conceived.
     How did these two men — one in Boston, one in Chicago — end up inventing similar devices with identical purposes and presenting them to be patented on the same day?
     Remember, neither Gray nor Bel was a solitary genius wrenching his brilliant creation from his unique intellect. It didn't work like that. The telephone was a by-product, gradually extracted from the telegraph. Neither Bell nor Gray had set out to bring the art of disembodied conversation to an eagerly waiting world. Party lines, call-forwarding, telemarketing and Rock Hudson/Doris Day moves were well beyond imagining. In fact, there was no perceivable public desire to speak to people who were far away. The public was still pinching itself in wonder over the miracle of the telegraph, invented just thirty-two years earlier.
     That was the problem with the telegraph — it was too popular. people wanted to send too many messages over the fragile web of wires crisscrossing the country, since a line could handle only one message at a time. Message requests were routinely backing up. There were delays....
     When more information is considered, the coincidence of Bell's and Gray's devices colliding at the U.S. Patent Office seems less and less startling, more like two runners crossing the finish line at the same time than a bizarre twist of fate.
     As soon as the interference was announced by the Patent Office, Bell hotfooted it to Washington to try to smooth things over in person. Gray stayed in Chicago — perhaps a fatal error.
     Bell found himself in a conference with Zenas F. Wilber, the patent examiner. And this is the core of the onion — what passed between Bell and Wilber has been the subject of great speculation and debate. Bell later admitted that he asked Wilber about the nature of the conflict, and Wilber pointed to a line in Bell's patent application suggesting the possible use of liquid to vary the current. Even this is suspect, as the line is handwritten in the margin of the original application. Bell claims that he forgot to include it in the text. But suspicion lingers — perhaps unjustly — since Wilber was a deaf-mute,well acquainted with Bell and, just maybe sympathetic to his cause. They could have added the line on the spot, conjuring up the truism "Behind every great fortune is a great crime." Wilber later admitted that he also mistakenly showed Gray's application to Bell, which, if not a great crime, was certainly a breach of ethics.
     By the time patent No. 174465 was granted to Bell, on March 7, he had constructed a working phone — based not on the iron-bar model described and pictured in his newly issued patent, but on Gray's liquid model, at best only alluded to in Bell's application in the handwritten addendum. This was the telephone Bell used in calling Watson, the telephone he displayed at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia that summer to an awestruck audience, including Elisha Gray, who, not realizing that Bell was using his device, slunk off in defeat.