Like the phonograph, which Thomas Edison envisioned as an office dictation machine, the telephone was conceived for a different purpose than that of transmitting human voices. Alexander Graham Bell was attempting to build a telegraph that could send multiple messages simultaneously.
During the course of this work, he realized that the sound of the human voice could be transmitted across electrical wires too. In this discovery, he wasn't alone. A well-known electrical researcher named Elisha Gray signaled his intent to apply for the first telephone patent on Feb. 14, 1876 -- the same day that Bell applied for his. The ensuing competition and controversy is the subject of Seth Shulman's "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Bell's Secret."
Working as a resident scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Dibner Institute, Shulman set out to explore the relationship between Bell and Edison. Almost immediately, he got sidetracked. "I had happened upon a stunning fissure in the polished facade of Bell's legacy," he writes. "I couldn't help but try to pry the history open from the beginning."
The crack in the marble was Gray's competing telephone design; Gray made use of a process called liquid transmission, something he'd been tinkering with for years. In Shulman's close reading of Bell's voluminous lab notes leading up to his patent application, there was no mention of liquid transmission. "But Gray's sketch for his invention, on page 3 of his patent claim, hit me almost like a shock from the electric current it described," writes Shulman. The illustration was virtually identical to a drawing in Bell's patent application, made later.
"What I know is this: the transmitter design in Bell's drawings led him straight to a working telephone," Shulman declares. His prosecutor's surety only grows the deeper he digs. "I was increasingly convinced that a crime had taken place -- a blatant and immensely consequential one. And the actions of the victim -- Elisha Gray -- were particularly hard to understand." And so are the actions of the alleged villain.
Born in 1847 to a Scottish family, Bell followed in the formidable footsteps of his father. Alexander Melville Bell was a renowned teacher of speech and elocution, possibly the model for Professor Henry Higgins in "Pygmalion." Young Aleck established himself as a teacher for the deaf and became a professor at Boston University while pursuing his scientific muse on the side. Bell embraced the emergent information technology of his day -- the telegraph. In current terminology, he extended the family brand in the field of human acoustics, moving from software into hardware.
