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

these volumes of testimony make for often slow and painstaking reading, and I certainly cannot claim to have looked at most of their pages. But, based on the resources at my fingertips at the Dibner Institute’s library, I soon found that the testimony of Bell, Hubbard, and others often had momentous bearing on the story of the telephone. In one lawsuit challenging the invention, for instance, Bell made a most extraordinary admission under oath about the timing of his patent: he testified that on February 14, 1876, Hubbard had filed the telephone patent himself, against Bell’s specific wishes and directions.
    Bell explains that he had explicitly directed Hubbard and his lawyers to wait while Bell sent an emissary and family friend—George Brown, an editor at the Toronto Globe —to file for a patent in Britain. At the time, the British Patent Office would issue a patent only if the specified technology had not already been patented in other countries.
    The British patent was important to Bell: not only was he, at the time, a subject of the British crown, but such British rights were not covered by his agreement with Hubbard and Sanders. Thus, Bell worked out a separate agreement with the Brown brothers, George and Gordon, under which he stood to control a full half of the profit his technology might bring if it could be successfully commercialized in Great Britain.
    George Brown had left by ship for Britain on January 25, 1876. On February 14, he had yet to cable about the matter. In Hubbard’s testimony in one case, he claims that Bell:
    did not hear from Mr. Brown as he expected, and finally wrote to me that if he did not hear by a certain day, that I might file it.
     
    In the voluminous archives of telephone arcana, no record survives of such a communication from Bell to Hubbard. More important, though, Bell’s own testimony on the matter tells a notably different story. As Bell explains in his deposition:
    Mr. Hubbard, becoming impatient at the delay, privately instructed my solicitors to file the specification in the American Patent Office, and on the fourteenth day of February, 1876, it was so filed without my knowledge or consent.
     
    Hubbard’s involvement had intrigued me from the first. But this discovery, perhaps more than any other, confirmed my commitment—no matter what the effort—to unravel the true story of the telephone’s development. Hubbard knew Bell had a formal, written agreement concerning his patent strategy in England. In fact, Hubbard was present at a meeting with Bell and George Brown during which they drew up a note to reflect their agreement. It read, in part:
    It is understood that Mr. Bell will not perfect his applications in the American Patent Office until he hears from Mr. Brown, that he may do so without interfering with European patents.
     
    As a lawyer, Hubbard would surely have been unlikely to take it upon himself to break Bell’s agreement lightly or frivolously. And yet, if Bell’s testimony is to be believed, Hubbard never consulted Bell about the matter. Nor, if he was merely impatient, is there any evidence to indicate that Hubbard tried to take the simple step of sending a cable to Brown to inquire about the delay.
    What prompted Hubbard to summarily negate Bell’s prior agreement without his consent? The most likely explanation is that Hubbard felt it was urgent to file when he did. Especially given the Bell team’s long-standing “neck and neck” competition with Gray, it strains credulity to imagine that Hubbard’s hurried, unilateral action came only coincidentally on the exact day that Gray’s caveat was filed.
    As I pondered the information, it seemed far more likely that Hubbard was somehow tipped off about Gray’s intention to file a caveat. The vague outlines of Hubbard and Pollok’s clever telephone gambit were just starting to emerge, but many unanswered questions remained. If Hubbard was tipped off, how did he get the information? And why