A Bell I'd Like to Ring

"Mr. Bell, come here. I want to sue you." Yes, I'm talking to you, Alexander Graham Bell. You stole my invention of the telephone. I admit we were both working on a practical means to send voice messages, but the resulting company should have been called the Gray, as in Elisha, Telephone System, not the Bell .

We were both working on a telephone device in the 1870s.  I had been a professor of electricity and science at Oberlin College in my native state of Ohio, though I never bothered to take a degree myself. The telegraph had been the primary technology of instant communications since the 1850s so when I took up inventing, I worked on things that used telegraph technology. I started a factory that made equipment for Western Union. I invented a music synthesizer using different telegraph wires to change musical tones. Then there was my device that could send handwriting across a telegraph wire. I even came up with a primitive closed circuit television system using the telegraph.

I knew the telephone was the next big thing, but I needed money to get my idea patented. My main investor was a Philadelphia dentist who had gotten rich making porcelain teeth. He wanted me to stick to the telegraph, so I had to work on the telephone on the side. Of course this slowed me down. I presented my application for a telephone to the Patent Office on this day in 1876. Bell's lawyers in Washington got wind of this and rushed Bell's application in the same day. They're still arguing about who got there first.

The United Sates is unique in awarding inventor status not to the person who gets their application in first, but to the person who can prove they came up with the idea first. That's what all the lawsuits over the next twelve years were about. I'll spare you the details, except this one. The patent examiner who received both applications was a fellow named Zenas Wilbur. It was revealed later that he was an alcoholic and heavily in debt to one of Bell's lawyers. Wilbur let Bell's lawyers review my application. There are seven sentences written on the front of Bell's application that supposedly show that Bell had been working on a telephone transmitter before I made mine.

Western Union eventually backed my lawsuits. They recognized there were fortunes to be made. Government officials, including Congressmen, were bribed. I did not approve of that and it did no good in the end. Bell won out and became a very wealthy man.

If you wanted a phone in the early days, you had to run a wire to the person you wanted to talk to. Only the wealthy could afford telephones, but soon central exchanges were popping up and by the time I died in 1901 almost three million people in the U.S. were connected by telephone.

I foresee a day when my music synthesizer, my television, and the telephone will all be combined in a single apparatus. You will then be connected to the entire world. It would be fine if you didn't have to be attached to a wire, but that will never happen, I don't think.

Happy Valentine's Everyone!

Chairman Joe