The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) Read Online Free
Author: Seth Shulman
Tags: science, History, Biography & Autobiography, Law, Technology & Engineering, Science & Technology, Experiments & Projects, Applied Sciences, Intellectual Property, Inventors, inventions, Telecommunications, Telephone, Patent
reach, becomes forever clear. The element that makes such a shift possible—the fleeting insight or fortuitous accident—is often hard, if not impossible, to explain or capture. I’m as excited by such moments as a prospector might be to unearth a rich vein, or a book collector to stumble upon a vanishingly rare first edition.
Wilbur Wright’s pathbreaking idea for bending the wings of an airplane to give it control in the air purportedly came to him in his bicycle shop while he idly twisted a box that had held an inner tube. Alexander Fleming, excellent scientist that he was, became fascinated by the mold that had crept in from the damp London air to ruin his experiment growing colonies of Staphylococcus bacteria in culture. Thankfully, Fleming studied the mold instead of tossing the tainted samples, and penicillin was the world-changing result.
Musing on the account in Bell’s notebook of his experience at the threshold of his discovery, I had a little “eureka moment” of my own. I noticed that there was a twelve-day gap between Bell’s entries at the end of February and those beginning in March. With consecutive entries on every page, notebooks often make work appear relatively seamless; but in this case, Bell left his experiments on February 24 and didn’t resume them for nearly two weeks. He mentions the fact clearly himself on chapter 3, the day before he introduces his new transmitter idea, with this succinct notation:
Returned from Washington March 7th, 1876.
It seemed immediately clear that Bell’s absence from his lab spurred him in a new direction. I wanted to find out more about the trip to Washington and what might have led him to change his work so noticeably upon his return.
This, I imagined, was precisely the kind of challenge my historian colleagues engaged in routinely. For me, though, it was new. A primary source document had suggested a small, historical puzzle. And I was fortunate enough to have the time and resources available to explore such an open-ended lead. I doubted the question had much to do with Bell’s rivalry with Thomas Edison. But I was curious, nonetheless. I never for a moment suspected what would happen next.
ON THE HOOK
O N S ATURDAY MORNING , February 26, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell’s train pulled into the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad station in downtown Washington, D.C., with a loud hiss and metallic squeal. Bell was agitated as he hurriedly stepped down onto the station platform. He was keenly aware that his fortune hinged on the outcome of the events before him—almost all of which were beyond his control.
Aleck Bell, as he was then known, was days away from his twenty-ninth birthday, an intensely driven and serious young man with wavy black hair and a scruffy beard. A teacher of the deaf and an associate professor at fledgling Boston University, Bell was a man of meager means but grand ambitions. Acquaintances in this period remember Aleck Bell’s studied manners and speech. They recall, too, that his formal demeanor—from his straight-backed posture to his schooled diction—made him seem much older than he actually was.
Leather suitcase in hand, Bell made his way to the station entrance. It was a pivotal moment for Bell and an exciting time for a nation nearing its centennial year, with an unsettling, frontierlike quality to many of the changes under way. As Bell knew well, nothing illustrated the point better than the railroads themselves. In the past four years alone the United States had laid an astonishing 12,000 miles of track, speeding the nation headlong into a new era. And everyone, just like Bell himself, seemed to be disembarking into a bewildering and exciting new world of mechanical and electrical devices, from sewing machines to fire alarms; of grand new scientific ideas like Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory. A world beset by hucksters like P. T. Barnum with his “Greatest Show on Earth” by crooks like William “Boss”
Wilbur Wright’s pathbreaking idea for bending the wings of an airplane to give it control in the air purportedly came to him in his bicycle shop while he idly twisted a box that had held an inner tube. Alexander Fleming, excellent scientist that he was, became fascinated by the mold that had crept in from the damp London air to ruin his experiment growing colonies of Staphylococcus bacteria in culture. Thankfully, Fleming studied the mold instead of tossing the tainted samples, and penicillin was the world-changing result.
Musing on the account in Bell’s notebook of his experience at the threshold of his discovery, I had a little “eureka moment” of my own. I noticed that there was a twelve-day gap between Bell’s entries at the end of February and those beginning in March. With consecutive entries on every page, notebooks often make work appear relatively seamless; but in this case, Bell left his experiments on February 24 and didn’t resume them for nearly two weeks. He mentions the fact clearly himself on chapter 3, the day before he introduces his new transmitter idea, with this succinct notation:
Returned from Washington March 7th, 1876.
It seemed immediately clear that Bell’s absence from his lab spurred him in a new direction. I wanted to find out more about the trip to Washington and what might have led him to change his work so noticeably upon his return.
This, I imagined, was precisely the kind of challenge my historian colleagues engaged in routinely. For me, though, it was new. A primary source document had suggested a small, historical puzzle. And I was fortunate enough to have the time and resources available to explore such an open-ended lead. I doubted the question had much to do with Bell’s rivalry with Thomas Edison. But I was curious, nonetheless. I never for a moment suspected what would happen next.
ON THE HOOK
O N S ATURDAY MORNING , February 26, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell’s train pulled into the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad station in downtown Washington, D.C., with a loud hiss and metallic squeal. Bell was agitated as he hurriedly stepped down onto the station platform. He was keenly aware that his fortune hinged on the outcome of the events before him—almost all of which were beyond his control.
Aleck Bell, as he was then known, was days away from his twenty-ninth birthday, an intensely driven and serious young man with wavy black hair and a scruffy beard. A teacher of the deaf and an associate professor at fledgling Boston University, Bell was a man of meager means but grand ambitions. Acquaintances in this period remember Aleck Bell’s studied manners and speech. They recall, too, that his formal demeanor—from his straight-backed posture to his schooled diction—made him seem much older than he actually was.
Leather suitcase in hand, Bell made his way to the station entrance. It was a pivotal moment for Bell and an exciting time for a nation nearing its centennial year, with an unsettling, frontierlike quality to many of the changes under way. As Bell knew well, nothing illustrated the point better than the railroads themselves. In the past four years alone the United States had laid an astonishing 12,000 miles of track, speeding the nation headlong into a new era. And everyone, just like Bell himself, seemed to be disembarking into a bewildering and exciting new world of mechanical and electrical devices, from sewing machines to fire alarms; of grand new scientific ideas like Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory. A world beset by hucksters like P. T. Barnum with his “Greatest Show on Earth” by crooks like William “Boss”
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