Free The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) by Seth Shulman

priority with a caveat, Hubbard urged Bell to work as fast as possible and file a patent directly. That way, he and Pollok reasoned, they could try to undermine Gray’s claim by arguing that Bell’s conception for the invention had come prior to the filing of Gray’s caveat.
    By the fall of 1874, almost all the major players were in place and the stage set for the invention of the telephone. Bell quickly took Hubbard’s advice to heart. He clearly recognized that to succeed he must produce his multiple telegraph before Gray did. As he put it on November 23, 1874:
    It is a neck and neck race between Mr. Gray and myself who shall complete our apparatus first. He has the advantage over me in being a practical electrician—but I have reason to believe that I am better acquainted with the phenomena of sound than he is—so that I have an advantage there…. I feel I shall be seriously ill should I fail in this now I am so thoroughly wrought up.
     
    Of course, it is important to remember that the all-out race with Gray that Bell describes is not one for a telephone, but for the so-called multiple telegraph, capable of sending multiple messages simultaneously. Interestingly, though, it was around this time, in November of 1874, that the conception began taking shape in Bell’s mind for a device to actually transmit speech. At first, Bell envisioned a receiver that was much like a sophisticated version of the talking machine he had built as a teenager with his brother Melly. Watson remembers that when Bell first spoke to him about the idea for a telegraph that could transmit speech, he described it as a machine, perhaps as big as an upright piano, that would simulate the transmitted vocal sounds using a multitude of tuned strings, reeds, and other vibrating mechanisms.
    Not surprisingly, however, Gardiner Hubbard kept his gaze focused intently on the multiple telegraph, insisting that Bell focus on it exclusively. According to Watson’s later account, no doubt colored to some extent by the benefit of hindsight, Hubbard told Bell to
    perfect his telegraph, assuring him that then he would have money and time enough to play with his speech-by-telegraph vagary all he pleased. So we pegged away at the telegraph and dreamed about the other vastly more wonderful thing.
     
     
    WITH HUBBARD AND Pollok directing the operation, Bell would file his first patent related to his research on the multiple telegraph on March 6, 1875. Hubbard’s strategic hand was everywhere to be seen in Bell’s dealings with the U.S. Patent Office. But, as I researched Hubbard’s role in Bell’s patents, I learned that Hubbard’s handling of Bell’s later patent, for “Improvements in Telegraphy”—the one that would come to be known as the telephone patent—stood out in particular.
    Some of the most detailed information about Bell’s path to the telephone actually comes from legal testimony in patent lawsuits over the telephone’s first decade. Bell, Hubbard, and others, fighting off legal challenges to Bell’s patent, gave detailed testimony to substantiate their right to an exclusive claim over the telephone. Often their comments came in response to pointed questions about what had transpired. Bell’s book-length deposition in one such case—now an exceedingly rare volume—was even published in 1908 by the Bell Telephone Company in an edition the firm described as the most complete account ever given of the telephone’s development.
    Unfortunately, historians have too often failed to mine these rich legal documents adequately. Bell’s biographer Robert Bruce is something of an exception, but even he dismissively explains in the note accompanying his bibliography that
    Most of the 149 volumes of printed testimony in litigation unsuccessfully challenging the Bell telephone patents deal with alleged inventions of the telephone independent of and prior to Bell and so has [ sic ] no bearing on his story.
     
    There is little question that