The Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell controversy concerns the question of whether Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone independently. This issue is narrower than the question of who deserves credit for inventing the telephone, for which there are several claimants.
At issue are roles of each inventor's lawyers, the filing of patent documents, and allegations of theft.
Background
Alexander Graham Bell was a professor of elocution at Boston University and tutor of deaf children. He had begun electrical experiments in Scotland in 1867 and, after emigrating to Boston from Canada, pursued research into a method of telegraphy that could transmit multiple messages over a single wire simultaneously, a so-called "harmonic telegraph". Bell formed a partnership with two of his students' parents, including prominent Boston lawyer Gardiner Hubbard, to help fund his research in exchange for shares of any future profits.Bruce, page 129 He experimented with many different possible transmitters and receivers from 1872 to 1876, created numerous drawings of liquid transmitters, and obtained a patent in 1875 for a primitive fax machine using liquid transmitters, which appear in the published drawings in the U.S. Patent Office.
Elisha Gray was a prominent inventor in Highland Park, Illinois. His Western Electric company was a major supplier to the telegraph company Western Union. In 1874, Bell was in competition with Elisha Gray to be the first to invent the practical harmonic telegraph.Bruce, page 131
In the summer of 1874, Gray developed a harmonic telegraph device using vibrating reeds that could transmit musical tones, but not intelligible speech. In December 1874, he demonstrated it to the public at Highland Park First Presbyterian Church.
After largely abandoning these early experiments, fourteen months later on February 11, 1876, Gray included a diagram for a telephone in his notebook. On February 14, Gray's lawyer filed a patent caveat with a similar diagram. The same day, Bell's lawyer filed (hand-delivered to the U.S. Patent Office) a patent application on the harmonic telegraph, including its use for transmitting vocal sounds. On February 19, the patent office suspended Bell's application for three months to give Gray time to submit a full patent application with claims, after which the patent office would begin interference proceedings to determine whether Bell or Gray were first to invent the telephone.Bruce, page 172
At that time, the USPTO did not require a submission of a working patent model for the patent application to be accepted, but the acceptance process often took years, and with interference proceedings that often involved public hearings. The U.S. Congress had abolished the requirement for patent models in 1870.A Simple Fix for the US Patent System: The Legal Requirement For Working Models , KeelyNet website. Retrieved September 12, 2010.
On February 24, 1876, Bell traveled to Washington D.C. Nothing was entered in his lab notebook until his return to Boston on March 7. Bell's patent was issued on March 7. On March 8, Bell recorded an experiment in his lab notebook, with a diagram similar to that of Gray's patent caveat (see right). Bell finally got his telephone model to work on March 10, when Bell and his assistant Thomas A. Watson both recorded the famous "Watson — come here — I want to see you" story in their notebooks.
If there appears to be a similarity between the Gray and Bell drawings, there is also the possibility that Gray may have had knowledge of Bell's experiments. The community of electrical inventors was small at the time, and gossip spread quickly. In a letter written to Gardiner Greene Hubbard on August 14, 1875, Bell urged Hubbard to patent the telephone concept and added "it might be unwise to let Gray know anything about it." In 1928, Bell's secretary, Catherine MacKenzie, recalled Bell telling her that "I had always entertained ungenerous thoughts of Mr. Gray and believed him capable of spying upon me. Indeed, this idea subsequently led me to remove my apparatus entirely from Mr. Williams' shop to private rooms at Exeter Place."
In a letter of March 2, 1877, Bell admitted to Gray that he was aware Gray's caveat "had something to do with the vibration of a wire in water [the variable resistance breakthrough that made the telephone practical] — and therefore conflicted with my patent."Bruce, page 221 At this time, Gray's caveat was still confidential, although Gray had previously told Bell of the details of his liquid telephone design in late June 1876, while attending the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. In 1879, Bell testified under oath that he discussed "in a general way" Gray's caveat with patent examiner Zenas Fisk Wilber.Bruce, page 173 However, when patent examiners investigated possible interferences between applications, it was not uncommon for them to ask questions of the inventors directed at the places of possible interference, which is what Bell claimed happened.
In an affidavit from April 8, 1886, Wilber admitted that he was an alcoholic who owed money to his longtime friend and Civil War Army companion Marcellus Bailey, Bell's lawyer. Wilber says that after he issued the suspension on Bell's patent application, Bailey came to visit. In violation of Patent Office rules, he told Bailey about Gray's caveat and told his superiors that Bell's patent application had arrived first. During Bell's visit to Washington, "Prof. Bell was with me an hour when I showed him the drawing [of Gray's caveat] and explained Gray's methods to him." He says Bell returned at 2pm to give him a hundred-dollar bill.Zenas Fisk Wilber, Mr. Wilber "Confesses", Washington Post, May 22, 1886, pg. 1
Wilber's other affidavits leave out these details. Only his October 21, 1885 affidavit directly contradicts this story, and Wilber claims it was "given at the request of the Bell company by Mr. Swan, of its counsel" and he was "duped to sign it" while drunk and depressed.Evenson, page 168 However, Wilber's April 8, 1886, affidavit was also sworn to and signed before Thomas W. Swan.Evenson, page 171 These conflicting affidavits discredited Wilber.
Furthermore, the April 8 affidavit signed by Wilbur had been drawn up for him by lawyers for the Pan-Electric Telephone Company which at the time was being sued by Bell Telephone for patent infringement. In addition, the Pan-Electric Company was being investigated by the U.S. Congress for having given the U.S. Attorney General Augustus Garland 500,000 shares of Pan-Electric Telephone. Subsequently, Garland brought suit against Bell to annul the Bell patents. The Speaker of the House of Representatives appointed a special committee to investigate the Pan-Electric matter and Garland's actions.
The April 8 affidavit was published in the Washington Post on May 22, 1886. Three days later, the Post published a sworn denial from Bell, which was also reprinted in The Electrical World. Bell swore that he never gave any money to Wilbur, and that "Mr. Wilbur did not show me Gray's caveat of the drawing of it or any portion of either."
Bell's background and use of liquid transmitters The theory that Alexander Graham Bell stole the idea of the telephone rests on the similarity between drawings of liquid transmitters in his lab notebook of March 1876 to those of Gray's patent caveat of the previous month. However, there is extensive evidence that Bell had been using liquid transmitters in various experiments for over three years before that time. In 1875, Bell filed a patent application for a primitive fax machine which included drawings of multiple liquid transmitters and the Patent Office granted his application as Patent No. 161739 in April, 1875—ten months before Gray filed his telephone caveat. Experiments by Bell going back to his youth in Scotland show a steady, logical progression towards development of the telephone. Much of the documentation detailing these experiments includes drawings of liquid transmitters remarkably similar to the design which Bell is alleged to have stolen from Gray in 1876.
Early experiments and use of liquid transmitters, 1867–1873
Bell had an important advantage over other inventors trying to develop a talking machine: he had been trained in phonetics and had a deep understanding of how human speech is produced by the mouth and how the ear processes sound. While electricians such as Reis, Gray and Edison used make-or-break currents (like a buzzer) in their attempts, Bell understood acoustics and wave theory and applied this knowledge to analogous work in his electrical experiments.
Bell's father, Alexander Melville Bell, had studied the production of speech and developed a way to transcribe all elements of human speech in a system called Visible Speech. (See example in Fig. 1.). Melville (who was a friend of George Bernard Shaw and a model for Prof. Henry Higgins in Pygmalion) frequently involved his son Aleck in his work and public demonstrations. The historian Edwin S. Grosvenor, while researching his biography of Bell, discovered lost drawings that the inventor had done as a young man to illustrate his own research into how the mouth formed components of vowel sounds (Fig. 2). Bell detected the pitches of vowels by placing tuning forks in his mouth and speaking. His research into sound production was considered significant enough that Bell was elected into membership in the prestigious London Philological Society at age 19.
Bell later recalled that "I commenced the study of Telegraphy with a friend in the city of Bath" in 1867. He began sending electric currents through tuning forks to transmit sounds through by wire, which he later learned had been anticipated by Helmholtz. "I came to believe firmly in the feasibility of the telegraphic transmission of speech," Bell wrote later, "and I used to tell my friends, that some day or other we should talk by telegraph."
In the winter of 1872–73, after emigrating to Boston, Bell became a professor of elocution at Boston University. He continued research into phonetics and resumed the electrical experiments he had begun in Bath and London towards improving the telegraph. Bell replicated and enlarged upon Helmholtz's tuning fork sounder experiments (see Fig. 3). These experiments involved running an electric current through a tuning fork attached to a wire that dipped in liquid as the fork vibrated. The tone of the fork was then replicated in another fork hooked up into the circuit. These experiments, with a vibrating wire touching a liquid, anticipated the liquid transmitter of Bell's telephone in March, 1876 three years later. (Compare Fig. 3 and Fig. 7, for example.)
Initially, Bell was trying to develop a telegraph capable of sending multiple messages simultaneously over the same wire. Most of these early experiments involved "liquid transmitters" based on the Helmholtz model. On November 9, 1874, Bell's friend and neighbor, P.D. Richards, wrote the inventor a letter at Bell's request describing the experiments and transmission of telegraphic messages over wires using a liquid transmitter filled with mercury. "You used tuning-forks; and a connection or circuit was made and broken by means of the vibrations of the form (according to its pitch) in a cup containing quicksilver," he recalled. Richards' letter including a drawing of the experiments (Fig. 4a).
A detail of this drawing (Fig. 4b) the experiments of early 1873 shows a liquid transmitter filled with mercury on the table.
Use of liquid transmitters for telephone experiments, 1873–1876