Editor’s note: This marks the second and final installment of a unique profile—a detective story, really—of a Boston-area entrepreneur and his famous invention. The story was excerpted from Xconomy contributing writer Seth Shulman’s The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret (W. W. Norton 2008), which will be officially released on Monday. The first installment ran yesterday. Be sure to examine the pictures in today’s article.
*******
Over the next few days, in a binge of work, I puzzled over a complex knot of irregularities about Bell’s life-altering visit to Washington, D.C. To begin with, the timing of the trip seemed more than a little odd. Bell filed his telephone patent on February 14, 1876, but, according to Bell’s laboratory notebook, he did not successfully transmit intelligible speech over a telephone until March 10th. Was it true that, in the lingo of the patent office, Bell had yet to “reduce his invention to practice” at the time he filed his patent application? That, in other words, Bell patented an invention he had never actually made?
Even the logistics of this question were mystifying. I knew from reporting on disputes over intellectual property that working models of inventions were required by the U.S. Patent Office in the 1800s. It took only a little digging to learn that on February 14, 1876—the very day Bell filed his telephone patent—a U.S. Senate Committee held hearings on a bill calling for the agency to do away with this requirement. Supporters of the bill, proposed by Connecticut Senator James E. English, testified that the patent office’s attic coffers were literally overflowing and that there was no space to put the roughly twenty thousand new models the agency expected to receive in the coming year.
Of course, there would have been no point for the Senate to debate the issue unless, as of February 1876, the patent office at least technically continued to require working models to accompany patent applications. Why, then, hadn’t the patent examiner in Bell’s case required him to submit a functioning model of his telephone?
Equally baffling was the patent office’s decision to grant Bell his telephone patent even before he had returned to his lab in Boston on March 7, 1876. How was it, I wondered, that one of the most momentous patents in history was issued in just three weeks? When I looked at other patents filed and issued around the same time, they all seemed to have taken months, if not years, to issue…
The U.S. Patent Office’s speedy work to approve Bell’s patent seemed all the more extraordinary because, on February 19, 1876, the patent examiner had notified Bell that his patent would be “suspended” for three months, after which time, the letter said, the office would formally decide whether to declare so-called interference proceedings. Such interference disputes almost always include formal hearings to determine which inventor can rightfully claim “priority of conception.” Sorting out the interference claims on inventor Emile Berliner’s 1877 patent application on the microphone, for instance, ended up taking more than thirteen years. That was, of course, an extreme case, but even the more common interference proceedings lasted for one or more years.
There was no question about it: the swiftness of the patent office’s actions seemed highly unusual. I wondered what had made U.S. Patent officials change their minds so quickly about their contention that the claims of others overlapped with Bell’s. For that matter, I wondered exactly what those other claims were.
Thanks to the Dibner Institute’s extraordinary library at MIT, I easily answered the latter question. The filing that conflicted Bell’s telephone patent came from an electrical researcher named Elisha Gray.
Today, if he is remembered at all, Elisha Gray is known as a technological footnote: the unlucky sap whose patent claim for a telephone arrived just hours after that of Alexander Graham Bell.
History is harsh in ascribing winners and losers.
As I soon learned, once you start looking, you can find a good deal of information about the fight between Bell and Gray over rights to the telephone. The battle dragged on through the courts, in one form or another, for more than a decade. But it is not much remembered today. After all, there is little question about who prevailed in the end…
In the case of the telephone, I learned, Gray had filed what the patent office called a “caveat.” Although
