The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) Read Online Free Page A

Tweed, who had plundered New York City as its elected official and recently escaped jail to flee the country; and even outlaws like Jesse James and his gang, who had not long ago held up passengers in an audacious raid on the Rock Island Line.
    Outside the station, the weather was unseasonably warm. A fine carriage and driver met Bell to deliver him to the home of his wealthy and powerful patent attorney, Anthony Pollok. Bell would be Pollok’s guest during his visit.
    Out the window of Bell’s carriage, the nation’s capital had an unfinished and rough-edged air, especially compared with his adopted hometown of Boston. The broad avenues were sparsely settled; cheap and shabby hotels and shops stood near grand government buildings. Many roads had yet to be paved. When Charles Dickens had toured Washington a few decades earlier, he declared it little more than a pretentious village, calling it the “city of magnificent intentions.”
    The capital had doubled in population since then, but now, at the tail end of President Ulysses S. Grant’s second term, Dickens’s words still echoed. As if to reinforce the sentiment, the half-finished Washington Monument rose from the center of town like an unsightly exclamation point, its construction stalled for nearly three decades since before the Civil War. President James Polk had famously laid the cornerstone in 1848; but now, in 1876, the monument still stood like an oversized broken-off chimney, replete with a makeshift roof pitched over the top to keep the rain out.
    Unlike the provisional feel of many parts of the city, however, Bell found Pollok’s home to be opulent. As Bell wrote his father during his stay:
    Mr. Pollok has the most palatial residence of any that I have ever seen. It is certainly the finest and best appointed of any in Washington.
     
    Among its amenities, Pollok’s Gilded Age mansion boasted granite pillars, fifteen-foot-high ceilings, and, Bell noted, a large staff of “colored servants.” During Bell’s stay, Pollok would introduce him to many people in Washington’s high society and even host a party in his honor.
    Bell was too preoccupied with his own affairs, though, to dwell much upon any of this. As he confided to his father,
    You can hardly understand the state of uncertainty and suspense in which I am now.
     
    As Bell put it, his entire future rested on the outcome of the “patent muddle” he had come to Washington to sort out. The stakes were high. Bell’s telephone patent—a claim that would come to be known as the most lucrative patent in history—had been threatened with a formal declaration of “interference,” the term the U.S. Patent Office uses when two or more inventors apply for patents on overlapping inventions at the same time. Now, the patent examiner thought he might have found more overlap between Bell’s claims and those of others. The finding raised the prospect of potentially protracted and expensive interference proceedings.
    Bell knew that such a dispute was to be avoided at all cost. It could drag on for years, during which it would stall his ability to reap any financial reward from his work for himself and his financial backers. Only a clear and unfettered patent would allow Bell, a relatively unknown outsider to the telegraph industry, to successfully commercialize his research.
    Bell laid out the situation clearly in a letter to his father from Washington. He saw it as a key turning point in his life. Bell wrote that if he lost his patent bid, he would abandon his electrical research altogether and devote himself full time once again to teaching the deaf. But if he succeeded in winning his patent claim, he would feel confident enough to marry the wealthy young woman to whom he had recently become engaged. As he put it excitedly, with the emphasis as it appears in his letter:
    If I succeed in securing that patent without interference from the others, the whole thing is mine… and I am sure of fame, fortune,