Did Bell steal phone idea?
By Brian BergsteinBOSTON: A new book claims to have definitive evidence
of a long-suspected technological crime ó that Alexander Graham Bell
stole ideas for the telephone from a rival, Elisha Gray.
In "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham
Bell's Secret," journalist Seth
Shulman argues that Bell ó aided by aggressive lawyers and a corrupt
patent examiner ó got an improper peek at patent documents Gray had
filed, and that Bell was erroneously credited with filing first. Shulman
believes the smoking gun is Bell's lab notebook, which was restricted by
Bell's family until 1976, then digitized and made widely available in
1999.
The notebook details the false starts Bell encountered
as he and assistant Thomas Watson tried transmitting sound
electromagnetically over a wire. Then after a 12-day gap in 1876, Bell
went to Washington to sort out patent questions about his work ó he
suddenly began trying another kind of voice transmitter. That method was
the one that proved successful. As Bell described that new approach, he
sketched a diagram of a person speaking into a device. Gray's patent
documents, which describe a similar technique, also feature a very similar
diagram.
Shulman's book, due out Jan. 7, recounts other elements
that have piqued researchers' suspicions. For instance, Bell's transmitter
design appears hastily written in the margin of his patent; Bell was
nervous about demonstrating his device with Gray present; Bell resisted
testifying in an 1878 lawsuit probing this question; and Bell, as if
ashamed, quickly distanced himself from the telephone-monopoly bearing his
name.
Perhaps the most instructive lesson comes when Shulman
explores why historical memory has favored Bell not Gray, nor German
inventor Philipp Reis, who beat them both with 1860s telephones that
employed a different principle.
One reason is simply that Bell, not Gray, actually
demonstrated a phone that transmitted speech. Gray was focused instead on
his era's pressing communications challenge: how to send multiple messages
simultaneously over the same telegraph wire. As Gray huffed to his
attorney, "I should like to see Bell do that with his
apparatus."