For seventeen months no one disputed Bell's claim to be the original
inventor of the telephone. All the honor, such as it was, had been given
to him freely, and no one came forward to say that it was not rightfully
his. No one, so far as we know, had any strong desire to do so. No one
conceived that the telephone would ever be any more than a whimsical
oddity of science. It was so new, so unexpected, that from Lord
Kelvin down to the messenger boys in the telegraph offices, it was an
incomprehensible surprise. But after Bell had explained his invention
in public lectures before more than twenty thousand people, after it
had been on exhibition for months at the Philadelphia Centennial, after
several hundred articles on it had appeared in newspapers and scientific
magazines, and after actual sales of telephones had been made in
various parts of the country, there began to appear such a succession of
claimants and infringers that the forgetful public came to believe that
the telephone, like most inventions, was the product of many minds.
Just as Morse, who was the sole inventor of the American telegraph in
1837, was confronted by sixty-two rivals in 1838, so Bell, who was the
sole inventor in 1876, found himself two years later almost mobbed by
the "Tichborne claimants" of the telephone. The inventors who had been
his competitors in the attempt to produce a musical telegraph, persuaded
themselves that they had unconsciously done as much as he. Any possessor
of a telegraphic patent, who had used the common phrase "talking wire,"
had a chance to build up a plausible story of prior invention. And
others came forward with claims so vague and elusive that Bell would
scarcely have been more surprised if the heirs of Goethe had demanded a
share of the telephone royalties on the ground that Faust had spoken of
"making a bridge through the moving air."
This babel of inventors and pretenders amazed Bell and disconcerted his
backers. But it was no more than might have been expected. Here was
a patent--"the most valuable single patent ever issued"--and yet the
invention itself was so simple that it could be duplicated easily by any
smart boy or any ordinary mechanic. The making of a telephone was like
the trick of Columbus standing an egg on end. Nothing was easier to
those who knew how. And so it happened that, as the crude little
model of Bell's original telephone lay in the Patent Office open and
unprotected except by a few phrases that clever lawyers might evade,
there sprang up inevitably around it the most costly and persistent
Patent War that any country has ever known, continuing for eleven years
and comprising SIX HUNDRED LAWSUITS.
The first attack upon the young telephone business was made by the
Western Union Telegraph Company. It came charging full tilt upon Bell,
driving three inventors abreast--Edison, Gray, and Dolbear. It expected
an easy victory; in fact, the disparity between the two opponents was so
evident, that there seemed little chance of a contest of any kind.
"The Western Union will swallow up the telephone people," said public
opinion, "just as it has already swallowed up all improvements in
telegraphy."
At that time, it should be remembered, the Western Union was the only
corporation that was national in its extent. It was the most powerful
electrical company in the world, and, as Bell wrote to his parents,
"probably the largest corporation that ever existed." It had behind it
not only forty millions of capital, but the prestige of the Vanderbilts,
and the favor of financiers everywhere. Also, it met the telephone
pioneers at every point because it, too, was a WIRE company. It owned
rights-of-way along roads and on house-tops. It had a monopoly of hotels
and railroad offices. No matter in what direction the Bell Company
turned, the live wire of the Western Union lay across its path.
From the first, the Western Union relied more upon its strength than
upon the merits of its case. Its chief electrical expert, Frank L. Pope,
had made a six months' examination of the Bell patents. He had bought
every book in the United States and Europe that was likely to have any
reference to the transmission of speech, and employed a professor
who knew eight languages to translate them. He and his men ransacked
libraries and patent offices; they rummaged and sleuthed and
interviewed; and found nothing of any value. In his final report to
the Western Union, Mr. Pope announced that there was no way to make
a telephone except Bell's way, and advised the purchase of the Bell
patents. "I am entirely unable to discover any apparatus or method
anticipating the invention of Bell as a whole," he said; "and I conclude
that his patent is valid." But the officials of the great corporation
refused to take this report seriously. They threw it aside and employed
Edison, Gray, and Dolbear to devise a telephone that could be put into
competition with Bell's.
As we have seen in the previous chapter, there now came a period
of violent competition which is remembered as the Dark Ages of the
telephone business. The Western Union bought out several of the Bell
exchanges and opened up a lively war on the others. As befitting its
size, it claimed everything. It introduced Gray as the original inventor
of the telephone, and ordered its lawyers to take action at once against
the Bell Company for infringement of the Gray patent. This high-handed
action, it hoped, would most quickly bring the little Bell group into
a humble and submissive frame of mind. Every morning the Western Union
looked to see the white flag flying over the Bell headquarters. But
no white flag appeared. On the contrary, the news came that the Bell
Company had secured two eminent lawyers and were ready to give battle.
The case began in the Autumn of 1878 and lasted for a year. Then it
came to a sudden and most unexpected ending. The lawyer-in-chief of
the Western Union was George Gifford, who was perhaps the ablest patent
attorney of his day. He was versed in patent lore from Alpha to Omega;
and as the trial proceeded, he became convinced that the Bell patent was
valid. He notified the Western Union confidentially, of course, that its
case could not be proven, and that "Bell was the original inventor of
the telephone." The best policy, he suggested, was to withdraw their
claims and make a settlement. This wise advice was accepted, and the
next day the white flag was hauled up, not by the little group of Bell
fighters, who were huddled together in a tiny, two-room office, but by
the mighty Western Union itself, which had been so arrogant when the
encounter began.
A committee of three from each side was appointed, and after months of
disputation, a treaty of peace was drawn up and signed. By the terms of
this treaty the Western Union agreed--
(1) To admit that Bell was the original inventor.
(2) To admit that his patents were valid.
(3) To retire from the telephone business.
The Bell Company, in return for this surrender, agreed--
(1) To buy the Western Union telephone system.
(2) To pay the Western Union a royalty of twenty per cent on all
telephone rentals.
(3) To keep out of the telegraph business.
This agreement, which was to remain in force for seventeen years, was a
master-stroke of diplomacy on the part of the Bell Company. It was the
Magna Charta of the telephone. It transformed a giant competitor into
a friend. It added to the Bell System fifty-six thousand telephones in
fifty-five cities. And it swung the valiant little company up to such a
pinnacle of prosperity that its stock went skyrocketing until it touched
one thousand dollars a share.
The Western Union had lost its case, for several very simple reasons:
It had tried to operate a telephone system on telegraphic lines, a
plan that has invariably been unsuccessful, it had a low idea of the
possibilities of the telephone business; and its already busy agents had
little time or knowledge or enthusiasm to give to the new enterprise.
With all its power, it found itself outfought by this compact body of
picked men, who were young, zealous, well-handled, and protected by a
most invulnerable patent.
The Bell Telephone now took its place with the Telegraph, the Railroad,
the Steamboat, the Harvester, and the other necessities of a civilized
country. Its pioneer days were over. There was no more ridicule and
incredulity. Every one knew that the Bell people had whipped the
Western Union, and hastened to join in the grand Te Deum of applause.
Within five months from the signing of the agreement, there had to be
a reorganization; and the American Bell Telephone Company was created,
with six million dollars capital. In the following year, 1881, twelve
hundred new towns and cities were marked on the telephone map, and
the first dividends were paid--$178,500. And in 1882 there came such
a telephone boom that the Bell System was multiplied by two, with more
than a million dollars of gross earnings.
At this point all the earliest pioneers of the telephone, except Vail,
pass out of its history. Thomas Sanders sold his stock for somewhat less
than a million dollars, and presently lost most of it in a Colorado gold
mine. His mother, who had been so good a friend to Bell, had her fortune
doubled. Gardiner G. Hubbard withdrew from business life, and as it was
impossible for a man of his ardent temperament to be idle, he plunged
into the National Geographical Society. He was a Colonel Sellers whose
dream of millions (for the telephone) had come true; and when he died,
in 1897, he was rich both in money and in the affection of his friends.
Charles Williams, in whose workshop the first telephones were made, sold
his factory to the Bell Company in 1881 for more money than he had ever
expected to possess. Thomas A. Watson resigned at the same time, finding
himself no longer a wage-worker but a millionaire. Several years later
he established a shipbuilding plant near Boston, which grew until it
employed four thousand workmen and had built half a dozen warships for
the United States Navy.
As for Bell, the first cause of the telephone business, he did what a
true scientific Bohemian might have been expected to do; he gave all
his stock to his bride on their marriage-day and resumed his work as an
instructor of deaf-mutes. Few kings, if any, had ever given so rich a
wedding present; and certainly no one in any country ever obtained and
tossed aside an immense fortune as incidentally as did Bell. When the
Bell Company offered him a salary of ten thousand dollars a year to
remain its chief inventor, he refused the offer cheerfully on the ground
that he could not "invent to order." In 1880, the French Government gave
him the Volta Prize of fifty thousand francs and the Cross of the Legion
of Honor. He has had many honors since then, and many interests. He
has been for thirty years one of the most brilliant and picturesque
personalities in American public life. But none of his later
achievements can in any degree compare with what he did in a cellar in
Salem, at twenty-eight years of age.
They had all become rich, these first friends of the telephone, but not
fabulously so. There was not at that time, nor has there been since, any
one who became a multimillionaire by the sale of telephone service. If
the Bell Company had sold its stock at the highest price reached, in
1880, it would have received less than nine million dollars--a huge
sum, but not too much to pay for the invention of the telephone and the
building up of a new art and a new industry. It was not as much as the
value of the eggs laid during the last twelve months by the hens of
Iowa.
But, as may be imagined, when the news of the Western Union agreement
became known, the story of the telephone became a fairy tale of success.
Theodore Vail was given a banquet by his old-time friends in the
Washington postal service, and toasted as "the Monte Cristo of the
Telephone." It was said that the actual cost of the Bell plant was only
one-twenty-fifth of its capital, and that every four cents of investment
had thus become a dollar. Even Jay Gould, carried beyond his usual
caution by these stories, ran up to New Haven and bought its telephone
company, only to find out later that its earnings were less than its
expenses.
Much to the bewilderment of the Bell Company, it soon learned that the
troubles of wealth are as numerous as those of poverty. It was beset by
a throng of promoters and stock-jobbers, who fell upon it and upon
the public like a swarm of seventeen-year locusts. In three years,
one hundred and twenty-five competing companies were started, in open
defiance of the Bell patents. The main object of these companies was
not, like that of the Western Union, to do a legitimate telephone
business, but to sell stock to the public. The face value of their stock
was $225,000,000, although few of them ever sent a message. One company
of unusual impertinence, without money or patents, had capitalized its
audacity at $15,000,000.
How to HOLD the business that had been established--that was now the
problem. None of the Bell partners had been mere stock-jobbers. At one
time they had even taken a pledge not to sell any of their stock to
outsiders. They had financed their company in a most honest and simple
way; and they were desperately opposed to the financial banditti whose
purpose was to transform the telephone business into a cheat and a
gamble. At first, having held their own against the Western Union, they
expected to make short work of the stock-jobbers. But it was a vain
hope. These bogus companies, they found, did not fight in the open, as
the Western Union had done.
All manner of injurious rumors were presently set afloat concerning
the Bell patent. Other inventors--some of them honest men, and some
shameless pretenders--were brought forward with strangely concocted
tales of prior invention. The Granger movement was at that time a strong
political factor in the Middle West, and its blind fear of patents and
"monopolies" was turned aggressively against the Bell Company. A few
Senators and legitimate capitalists were lifted up as the figureheads of
the crusade. And a loud hue-and-cry was raised in the newspapers against
"high rates and monopoly" to distract the minds of the people from the
real issue of legitimate business versus stock-company bubbles.
The most plausible and persistent of all the various inventors who
snatched at Bell's laurels, was Elisha Gray. He refused to abide by the
adverse decision of the court. Several years after his defeat, he came
forward with new weapons and new methods of attack. He became more
hostile and irreconcilable; and until his death, in 1901, never
renounced his claim to be the original inventor of the telephone.
The reason for this persistence is very evident. Gray was a professional
inventor, a highly competent man who had begun his career as a
blacksmith's apprentice, and risen to be a professor of Oberlin. He
made, during his lifetime, over five million dollars by his patents.
In 1874, he and Bell were running a neck-and-neck race to see who could
first invent a musical telegraph--when, presto! Bell suddenly turned
aside, because of his acoustical knowledge, and invented the telephone,
while Gray kept straight ahead. Like all others who were in quest of a
better telegraph instrument, Gray had glimmerings of the possibility of
sending speech by wire, and by one of the strangest of coincidences
he filed a caveat on the subject on the SAME DAY that Bell filed the
application for a patent. Bell had arrived first. As the record book
shows, the fifth entry on that day was: "A. G. Bell, $15"; and the
thirty-ninth entry was "E. Gray, $10."
There was a vast difference between Gray's caveat and Bell's
application. A caveat is a declaration that the writer has NOT invented
a thing, but believes that he is about to do so; while an APPLICATION is
a declaration that the writer has already perfected the invention. But
Gray could never forget that he had seemed to be, for a time, so close
to the golden prize; and seven years after he had been set aside by the
Western Union agreement, he reappeared with claims that had grown larger
and more definite.
When all the evidence in the various Gray lawsuits is sifted out, there
appear to have been three distinctly different Grays: first, Gray the
SCOFFER, who examined Bell's telephone at the Centennial and said it
was "nothing but the old lover's telegraph. It is impossible to make
a practical speaking telephone on the principle shown by Professor
Bell.... The currents are too feeble"; second, Gray the CONVERT, who
wrote frankly to Bell in 1877, "I do not claim the credit of inventing
it"; and third, Gray the CLAIMANT, who endeavored to prove in 1886 that
he was the original inventor. His real position in the matter was once
well and wittily described by his partner, Enos M. Barton, who said: "Of
all the men who DIDN'T invent the telephone, Gray was the nearest."
It is now clearly seen that the telephone owes nothing to Gray. There
are no Gray telephones in use in any country. Even Gray himself, as he
admitted in court, failed when he tried to make a telephone on the lines
laid down in his caveat. The final word on the whole matter was recently
spoken by George C. Maynard, who established the telephone business in
the city of Washington. Said Mr. Maynard:
"Mr. Gray was an intimate and valued friend of mine, but it is no
disrespect to his memory to say that on some points involved in the
telephone matter, he was mistaken. No subject was ever so thoroughly
investigated as the invention of the speaking telephone. No patent has
ever been submitted to such determined assault from every direction as
Bell's; and no inventor has ever been more completely vindicated. Bell
was the first inventor, and Gray was not."
After Gray, the weightiest challenger who came against Bell was
Professor Amos E. Dolbear, of Tufts College. He, like Gray, had written
a letter of applause to Bell in 1877. "I congratulate you, sir," he
said, "upon your very great invention, and I hope to see it supplant
all forms of existing telegraphs, and that you will be successful in
obtaining the wealth and honor which is your due." But one year later,
Dolbear came to view with an opposition telephone. It was not an
imitation of Bell's, he insisted, but an improvement upon an electrical
device made by a German named Philip Reis, in 1861.
Thus there appeared upon the scene the so-called "Reis telephone," which
was not a telephone at all, in any practical sense, but which served
well enough for nine years or more as a weapon to use against the Bell
patents. Poor Philip Reis himself, the son of a baker in Frankfort,
Germany, had hoped to make a telephone, but he had failed. His machine
was operated by a "make-and-break" current, and so could not carry
the infinitely delicate vibrations made by the human voice. It could
transmit the pitch of a sound, but not the QUALITY. At its best, it
could carry a tune, but never at any time a spoken sentence. Reis, in
his later years, realized that his machine could never be used for the
transmission of conversation; and in a letter to a friend he tells of a
code of signals that he has invented.
Bell had once, during his three years of experimenting, made a Reis
machine, although at that time he had not seen one. But he soon threw
it aside, as of no practical value. As a teacher of acoustics, Bell knew
that the one indispensable requirement of a telephone is that it shall
transmit the WHOLE of a sound, and not merely the pitch of it. Such
scientists as Lord Kelvin, Joseph Henry, and Edison had seen the little
Reis instrument years before Bell invented the telephone; but they
regarded it as a mere musical toy. It was "not in any sense a speaking
telephone," said Lord Kelvin. And Edison, when trying to put the Reis
machine in the most favorable light, admitted humorously that when he
used a Reis transmitter he generally "knew what was coming; and knowing
what was coming, even a Reis transmitter, pure and simple, reproduces
sounds which seem almost like that which was being transmitted; but
when the man at the other end did not know what was coming, it was very
seldom that any word was recognized."
In the course of the Dolbear lawsuit, a Reis machine was brought into
court, and created much amusement. It was able to squeak, but not to
speak. Experts and professors wrestled with it in vain. It refused
to transmit one intelligible sentence. "It CAN speak, but it WON'T,"
explained one of Dolbear's lawyers. It is now generally known that while
a Reis machine, when clogged and out of order, would transmit a word or
two in an imperfect way, it was built on wrong lines. It was no more a
telephone than a wagon is a sleigh, even though it is possible to chain
the wheels and make them slide for a foot or two. Said Judge Lowell, in
rendering his famous decision:
"A century of Reis would never have produced a speaking telephone by
mere improvement of construction. It was left for Bell to discover that
the failure was due not to workmanship but to the principle which was
adopted as the basis of what had to be done. ... Bell discovered a new
art--that of transmitting speech by electricity, and his claim is not as
broad as his invention.... To follow Reis is to fail; but to follow Bell
is to succeed."
After the victory over Dolbear, the Bell stock went soaring skywards;
and the higher it went, the greater were the number of infringers and
blowers of stock bubbles. To bait the Bell Company became almost a
national sport. Any sort of claimant, with any sort of wild tale of
prior invention, could find a speculator to support him. On they came,
a motley array, "some in rags, some on nags, and some in velvet gowns."
One of them claimed to have done wonders with an iron hoop and a file
in 1867; a second had a marvellous table with glass legs; a third swore
that he had made a telephone in 1860, but did not know what it was until
he saw Bell's patent; and a fourth told a vivid story of having heard
a bullfrog croak via a telegraph wire which was strung into a certain
cellar in Racine, in 1851.
This comic opera phase came to a head in the famous Drawbaugh case,
which lasted for nearly four years, and filled ten thousand pages with
its evidence. Having failed on Reis, the German, the opponents of Bell
now brought forward an American inventor named Daniel Drawbaugh, and
opened up a noisy newspaper campaign. To secure public sympathy for
Drawbaugh, it was said that he had invented a complete telephone and
switchboard before 1876, but was in such "utter and abject poverty" that
he could not get himself a patent. Five hundred witnesses were examined;
and such a general turmoil was aroused that the Bell lawyers were
compelled to take the attack seriously, and to fight back with every
pound of ammunition they possessed.
The fact about Drawbaugh is that he was a mechanic in a country village
near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He was ingenious but not inventive; and
loved to display his mechanical skill before the farmers and villagers.
He was a subscriber to The Scientific American; and it had become the
fixed habit of his life to copy other people's inventions and exhibit
them as his own. He was a trailer of inventors. More than forty
instances of this imitative habit were shown at the trial, and he
was severely scored by the judge, who accused him of "deliberately
falsifying the facts." His ruling passion of imitation, apparently, was
not diminished by the loss of his telephone claims, as he came to public
view again in 1903 as a trailer of Marconi.
Drawbaugh's defeat sent the Bell stock up once more, and brought on a
Xerxes' army of opposition which called itself the "Overland Company."
Having learned that no one claim-ant could beat Bell in the courts, this
company massed the losers together and came forward with a scrap-basket
full of patents. Several powerful capitalists undertook to pay the
expenses of this adventure. Wires were strung; stock was sold; and the
enterprise looked for a time so genuine that when the Bell lawyers asked
for an injunction against it, they were refused. This was as hard a blow
as the Bell people received in their eleven years of litigation; and
the Bell stock tumbled thirty-five points in a few days. Infringing
companies sprang up like gourds in the night. And all went merrily with
the promoters until the Overland Company was thrown out of court, as
having no evidence, except "the refuse and dregs of former cases--the
heel-taps found in the glasses at the end of the frolic."
But even after this defeat for the claimants, the frolic was not wholly
ended. They next planned to get through politics what they could not get
through law; they induced the Government to bring suit for the annulment
of the Bell patents. It was a bold and desperate move, and enabled the
promoters of paper companies to sell stock for several years longer. The
whole dispute was re-opened, from Gray to Drawbaugh. Every battle was
re-fought; and in the end, of course, the Government officials learned
that they were being used to pull telephone chestnuts out of the fire.
The case was allowed to die a natural death, and was informally dropped
in 1896.
In all, the Bell Company fought out thirteen lawsuits that were of
national interest, and five that were carried to the Supreme Court in
Washington. It fought out five hundred and eighty-seven other lawsuits
of various natures; and with the exception of two trivial contract
suits, IT NEVER LOST A CASE.
Its experience is an unanswerable indictment of our system of protecting
inventors. No inventor had ever a clearer title than Bell. The Patent
Office itself, in 1884, made an eighteen-months' investigation of all
telephone patents, and reported: "It is to Bell that the world owes the
possession of the speaking telephone." Yet his patent was continuously
under fire, and never at any time secure. Stock companies whose paper
capital totalled more than $500,000,000 were organized to break it down;
and from first to last the success of the telephone was based much
less upon the monopoly of patents than upon the building up of a well
organized business.
Fortunately for Bell and the men who upheld him, they were defended by
two master-lawyers who have seldom, if ever, had an equal for team work
and efficiency--Chauncy Smith and James J. Storrow. These two men were
marvellously well mated. Smith was an old-fashioned attorney of the
Websterian sort, dignified, ponderous, and impressive. By 1878, when he
came in to defend the little Bell Company against the towering Western
Union, Smith had become the most noted patent lawyer in Boston. He was a
large, thick-set man, a reminder of Benjamin Franklin, with clean-shaven
face, long hair curling at the ends, frock coat, high collar, and beaver
hat.
Storrow, on the contrary, was a small man, quiet in manner,
conversational in argument, and an encyclopedia of definite information.
He was so thorough that, when he became a Bell lawyer, he first spent
an entire summer at his country home in Petersham, studying the laws
of physics and electricity. He was never in the slightest degree
spectacular. Once only, during the eleven years of litigation, did
he lose control of his temper. He was attacking the credibility of a
witness whom he had put on the stand, but who had been tampered with by
the opposition lawyers. "But this man is your own witness," protested
the lawyers. "Yes," shouted the usually soft-speaking Storrow; "he WAS
my witness, but now he is YOUR LIAR."
The efficiency of these two men was greatly increased by a third--Thomas
D. Lockwood, who was chosen by Vail in 1879 to establish a Patent
Department. Two years before, Lockwood had heard Bell lecture in
Chickering Hall, New York, and was a "doubting Thomas." But a closer
study of the telephone transformed him into an enthusiast. Having a
memory like a filing system, and a knack for invention, Lockwood was
well fitted to create such a department. He was a man born for the
place. And he has seen the number of electrical patents grow from a few
hundred in 1878 to eighty thousand in 1910.
These three men were the defenders of the Bell patents. As Vail built up
the young telephone business, they held it from being torn to shreds
in an orgy of speculative competition. Smith prepared the comprehensive
plan of defence. By his sagacity and experience he was enabled to
mark out the general principles upon which Bell had a right to stand.
Usually, he closed the case, and he was immensely effective as he would
declaim, in his deep voice: "I submit, Your Honor, that the literature
of the world does not afford a passage which states how the human voice
can be electrically transmitted, previous to the patent of Mr. Bell."
His death, like his life, was dramatic. He was on his feet in the
courtroom, battling against an infringer, when, in the middle of
a sentence, he fell to the floor, overcome by sickness and the
responsibilities he had carried for twelve years. Storrow, in a
different way, was fully as indispensable as Smith. It was he who built
up the superstructure of the Bell defence. He was a master of details.
His brain was keen and incisive; and some of his briefs will be studied
as long as the art of telephony exists. He might fairly have been
compared, in action, to a rapid-firing Gatling gun; while Smith was a
hundred-ton cannon, and Lockwood was the maker of the ammunition.
Smith and Storrow had three main arguments that never were, and never
could be, answered. Fifty or more of the most eminent lawyers of that
day tried to demolish these arguments, and failed. The first was
Bell's clear, straightforward story of HOW HE DID IT, which rebuked and
confounded the mob of pretenders. The second was the historical fact
that the most eminent electrical scientists of Europe and America
had seen Bell's telephone at the Centennial and had declared it to be
NEW--"not only new but marvellous," said Tyndall. And the third was
the very significant fact that no one challenged Bell's claim to be the
original inventor of the telephone until his patent was seventeen months
old.
The patent itself, too, was a remarkable document. It was a Gibraltar of
security to the Bell Company. For eleven years it was attacked from all
sides, and never dented. It covered an entire art, yet it was sustained
during its whole lifetime. Printed in full, it would make ten pages of
this book; but the core of it is in the last sentence: "The method of,
and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically,
by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations
of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sounds." These words
expressed an idea that had never been written before. It could not be
evaded or overcome. There were only thirty-two words, but in six years
these words represented an investment of a million dollars apiece.
Now that the clamor of this great patent war has died away, it is
evident that Bell received no more credit and no more reward than he
deserved. There was no telephone until he made one, and since he made
one, no one has found out any other way. Hundreds of clever men have
been trying for more than thirty years to outrival Bell, and yet every
telephone in the world is still made on the plan that Bell discovered.
No inventor who preceded Bell did more, in the invention of the
telephone, than to help Bell indirectly, in the same way that Fra Mauro
and Toscanelli helped in the discovery of America by making the map and
chart that were used by Columbus. Bell was helped by his father, who
taught him the laws of acoustics; by Helmholtz, who taught him the
influence of magnets upon sound vibrations; by Koenig and Leon Scott,
who taught him the infinite variety of these vibrations; by Dr. Clarence
J. Blake, who gave him a human ear for his experiments; and by Joseph
Henry and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who encouraged him to persevere. In
a still more indirect way, he was helped by Morse's invention of
the telegraph; by Faraday's discovery of the phenomena of magnetic
induction; by Sturgeon's first electro-magnet; and by Volta's electric
battery. All that scientists had achieved, from Galileo and Newton to
Franklin and Simon Newcomb, helped Bell in a general way, by creating a
scientific atmosphere and habit of thought. But in the actual making of
the telephone, there was no one with Bell nor before him. He invented it
first, and alone.