Elisha Gray and Alexander Bell telephone controversy

The Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell controversy considers the question of whether Bell or Gray invented the telephone independently and, if not, whether one stole the invention from the other. This controversy is more narrow than the broader question of who deserves credit for inventing the telephone, for which there are several claimants.

Bell's interests versus Gray's interests

Bell supporters cite numerous lawsuits in which the courts decided in favor of Bell and the telephone company he founded. Gray supporters cite the fact that Bell's first successful experiment in transmitting clear speech over a wire was on March 10, 1876 using the same transmitter design described in Gray's caveat but not described in Bell's patent. ["The Telephone Gambit" by Seth Shulman] There is a third side to this controversy, expressed in detail in a book by Evenson, ["The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876" by A. Edward Evenson] which concludes that it was Bell's lawyers, not Bell, who misappropriated Gray's invention.

Who got to the patent office first?

Bell's patent application for the telephone was filed in the US patent office on February 14, 1876. The usual story says that Bell got to the patent office an hour or two before his rival Elisha Gray, and that Gray lost his rights to the telephone as a result. [Rothman, page 144] But that is not what happened according to Evenson [Evenson, pages 68-69, 75] .

According to Gray's account, his patent caveat was taken to the US patent office a few hours before Bell's application, shortly after the patent office opened and remained near the bottom of the in-basket until that afternoon. Bell's application was filed shortly before noon on 14 February by Bell's lawyer who requested that the filing fee be entered immediately onto the cash receipts blotter and that Bell's application be taken to the examiner immediately. [Evenson, pages 68-69] Late that afternoon, the fee for Gray's caveat was entered on the cash blotter and the caveat was not taken to the examiner until the following day. The fact that Bell's filing fee was recorded earlier than Gray's fee led to the story that Bell had arrived at the patent office earlier. Bell was in Boston on February 14 and did not know this was happening until he arrived in Washington on February 26. Whether Bell's application was filed before or after Gray's caveat no longer mattered, because Gray abandoned his caveat, which opened the door to Bell being granted US patent|174465 for the telephone on 7 March 1876.

Conspiracy theories

Several conspiracy theories were presented during trials and appeals (1878-1888) in which the Bell Telephone Company sued competitors and later when Bell and his lawyers were accused of patent fraud. These theories were based on alleged corruption of the patent examiner Zenas Wilber who was an alcoholic. Wilber was accused of revealing secret information to Alexander Graham Bell and Bell's patent attorneys Anthony Pollok and Marcellus Bailey from patent applications and caveats of Bell's competitor Elisha Gray. One of the accusers was attorney Lysander Hill who charged that Bell's attorneys, Pollok and Bailey, had received this secret information from Wilber and that Wilber allowed Bell's attorney to insert a paragraph of seven sentences, based on this secret information, into Bell's patent application after both Gray's caveat and Bell's patent application had been filed in the patent office. However, Bell's original patent application shows no sign of alteration and Wilber declared an interference based on those seven sentences. Wilber noticed that the seven sentences contained subject matter very similar to the ideas expressed in Gray's caveat and declared an interference between Bell's application and the caveat which he would not have done if the seven sentences had not been there. The seven sentences were in the original patent application as filed on February 14, 1876. The conspiracy theories were rejected by the courts. [Evenson, pages 182-185]

One of the valuable claims in Bell's 1876 US patent 174,465 was Claim 4, a method of producing variable electrical current in a circuit by varying the resistance in the circuit. That feature was not shown in any of Bell's patent drawings, but was shown in Elisha Gray's drawings in his caveat filed the same day. A description of the variable resistance feature, consisting of the seven sentences, was inserted into a draft of Bell's application. [This draft with the insertion can be seen on pages 70 and A76 in "The Gray Matter"] That the seven sentences were inserted in Bell's draft is not disputed. Bell testified that he inserted the seven sentences "almost at the last moment before sending it off to Washington to be engrossed." He said the engrossed application (also called the "fair copy") was returned to him from his lawyers on January 18, 1876 and that he signed it and had it notarized in Boston on January 20. But this statement by Bell is disputed by Evenson, [Evenson, pages 64-69, 86-87, 110, 194-196] who argues that the seven sentences and Claim 4 were inserted into Bell's patent application without Bell's knowledge on February 13 or 14, just before Bell's application was hand carried to the Patent Office by one of Bell's lawyers.

Role of Gray's attorney

Evenson argues that it was not Wilber who leaked Gray's ideas to Bell's attorney after Gray's caveat was filed with the patent office, but somebody in the office of Gray's attorney, William D. Baldwin, and perhaps Baldwin himself, who leaked the variable resistance idea and the water transmitter idea to Bell's attorney before Gray's caveat and Bell's application were filed. It was Baldwin who advised Gray to abandon his caveat and not turn it into a patent application, because, Baldwin said, Bell had invented the telephone before Gray and Bell's application was notarized before Gray began his caveat. Baldwin urged Gray to write a letter to Bell congratulating him on his new telephone invention and "I do not claim even the credit of inventing it...”. Baldwin also failed to represent Gray's interests in the Dowd case. Baldwin was on the payroll of the Bell Telephone Company at the same time he was representing Gray in a patent office action involving the Bell company. [Evenson, page 86] ["The Gray Matter", page 49] Gray did not tell anybody about his new invention for transmitting voice sounds until Friday, February 11, 1876 when Gray requested that Baldwin prepare a caveat for filing. Sometime on the weekend of February 12–13, Bell's lawyers learned of Gray's caveat. They then rushed to get Bell's application filed on Monday before Gray's caveat, or to make it appear that Bell's application was filed first. [Evenson, pages 77-78]

There were several versions of Bell's application: ["The Gray Matter", page 117]
* version E: draft consisting of 10 pages that Bell gave to George Brown for filing in England. ["The Gray Matter", pages A60-A63]
* version F: draft consisting of 10 pages sent by Bell to Pollok & Bailey in early January 1876. ["The Gray Matter", pages A71-A81]
* version X: engrossed "fair copy" signed by Bell and notarized on January 20, 1876 (presumably 14 pages) ["The Gray Matter", "a third version that was never located ... conforming to version F had vanished" (and was not filed in the Patent Office), page 120]
* version G: final application consisting of 15 pages filed in the US Patent Office on February 14, 1876. After minor amendments were made, this version G was issued as a patent on March 7, 1876. ["The Gray Matter", pages A100-A114]

Versions E and F are almost identical except for minor changes and the seven sentence insertion that now appears in the margin of version F, page 6. The question is when was this insertion made. Evenson argues that the seven sentences were not in version E or F when Bell sent version F to Pollok in early January 1876. [Evenson, page 195] Pollok rewrote the claims on page 10 of version F and his clerk copied version F into an engrossed "fair copy" (version X) which Pollok sent to Bell. On January 20, Bell signed the last page of version X, had it notarized on the last page, and returned it to Pollok with instructions to hold it until Bell received a message from George Brown. There was probably no page number on the notarized page when it was notarized. Both the draft version F and the notarized version X remained in Pollok's file box.

Valentine's Day

According to Evenson, early on Monday, February 14, after learning of the variable resistance feature from Gray's lawyer, Pollok or Bailey inserted the seven sentences into version X, revised the claims, made other minor revisions, and had the clerk prepare a new engrossed fair copy, version G which consists of 14 pages, not including a signature page. Pollok or Bailey removed the unnumbered notarized signature page from version X and attached it to version G, wrote page number "15" at the bottom of the notarized page, and hand carried the application to the patent office before noon on February 14. The page number 15 on the notarized page is more than twice as large as page numbers on pages 10 through 14. ["The Gray Matter", page A114] The inserted seven sentences are at the top of page 9 and the page number 9 is twice as large as page numbers on pages 10 through 14. Evenson does not speculate about what Pollok did with the pages of version X that were replaced by version G. Version F still lacked the seven sentence insertion. When Bell arrived in Washington on February 26, 1876, Pollok apparently requested that Bell write the seven sentences and other changes onto version F in Bell's handwriting, thereby creating a draft containing the variable resistance feature that Bell could later testify was made before January 18, 1876 "almost at the last moment" before sending version F to his lawyers.

Did Bell steal the invention from Gray?

There was no "smoking gun" that proved that Bell had illegally acquired knowledge of Gray's invention from examiner Wilber. But the paper trail left by various drafts of Bell's patent application is evidence that his lawyers may have acquired the basic ideas of Gray's liquid transmitter which Bell then used successfully to transmit "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you" on March 10, 1876. Gray wrote to Bell saying: "I was unfortunate in being an hour or two behind you." There is no evidence that either knew that the other was working in this direction. [Evenson, page 105]

Gray changed his opinion after learning facts from the trials. Gray wrote that his caveat was filed first: "Whatever evidence there is, is in favor of the caveat having been filed first." [Evenson, page 218] In commenting on letters Gray and Bell wrote to each other before the trials, Gray wrote "Two or three letters passed and in one of them I told him of the caveat. In his [Bell's] answer he said: " 'I do not know about your caveat, except that it had something to do with a wire vibrating in water'," or words to that effect. "Vibrating in water" was the whole thing. How would he know that much?" [Evenson, page 219] About his caveat, Gray wrote "I showed Bell "how" to make the telephone. He could not mistake it, because the drawings were explicit, as well as the specifications." [Evenson, page 218]

Although Bell was accused, and is still accused, of stealing the telephone from Gray, ["The telephone Gambit", by Seth Shulman (2008), page 211.] Bell used Gray's water transmitter design only as a proof of concept scientific experiment [Evenson, page 99.] to prove to his own satisfaction that intelligible "articulate speech" (Bell's words) could be electrically transmitted. [Evenson, page 98.] After March 1876, Bell focused on improving the electromagnetic telephone and never used Gray's liquid transmitter in public demonstrations or commercial use. [Evenson, page 100.]

ee also

*Alexander Graham Bell
*Antonio Meucci
*Elisha Gray
*Emile Berliner
*Philipp Reis
*Telephone
*Thomas Edison

Cultural references

* In the 2005 episode of The Simpsons titled "The Girl Who Slept Too Little," the Simpsons visit the newly built Springfield Stamp Museum. An exhibit of oversized, interactive stamps shows the bust of Elisha Gray on a 1-cent stamp and Alexander Graham Bell on a 10-cent stamp. When Gray tells Bell that he stole the idea of the telephone from him, Bell holds up a medallion around his neck and says, "Read the patent number, bitch!"

* The 1939 film "The Story of Alexander Graham Bell" was so popular that there was, for several decades thereafter, a standing joke in entertainment circles that the telephone was invented by Don Ameche, the famous star who played the role of Bell.

References

* Evenson, A. Edward (2000), "The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876: The Elisha Gray - Alexander Bell Controversy", McFarland, North Carolina, 2000. ISBN 0-7864-0883-9
* Baker, Burton H. (2000), "The Gray Matter: The Forgotten Story of the Telephone", Telepress, St. Joseph, MI, 2000. ISBN 0-615-11329-X
* Shulman, Seth (2008), "The Telephone Gambit", W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2008. ISBN 978-0-393-06206-9
* Rothman, Tony (2003), "Everything's Relative", Wiley, 2003. ISBN 0-471-20257-6