Elisha Gray and Alexander Bell Controversy

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The Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell Controversy revolves around the question of whether Bell and 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.

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[edit] Bell Interests Versus Gray Interests

Bell supporters cite numerous law suits 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 7, 1876 using the same transmitter design described in Gray's caveat but not described in Bell's patent. There is a third side to this controversy, expressed in detail in a book by Evenson,[1] which concludes that Bell's lawyers, not Bell, misappropriated Gray's invention.

[edit] Does it matter 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. Whenever this story is told, it is usually said 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.[2] But that is not what happened according to Evenson[3].

Contrary to the conventional story, Gray's caveat was taken to the US patent office a few hours before Bell's application. Gray's caveat was taken to the patent office in the morning of 14 February 1876 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.[4] 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 and that opened the door to Bell being granted US patent 174,465 for the telephone on 7 March 1876.

[edit] Conspiracy Theories

Several conspiracy theories were presented during trials and appeals (1878-1888) in which the Bell Telephone Company sued competitors and later when Alexander 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 examiner Wilber and that Wilber allowed Bell's attorney to insert a paragraph of 7 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. This theory is without merit because Bell's original patent application shows no sign of alteration and examiner Wilber declared an interference based on those 7 sentences. Wilber noticed that the 7 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 7 sentences had not been there. The 7 sentences were in the original patent application as filed on February 14, 1876. The conspiracy theories were rejected by the courts.[5]

One of the valuable claims in Bell's 1876 U.S. Patent 0,174,465  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 7 sentences, was inserted into a draft of Bell's application.[6] That the 7 sentences were inserted in Bell's draft is not disputed. Bell testified that he inserted the 7 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 [7] who argues that the 7 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.

[edit] Gray's disloyal attorney

Evenson argues that it was not Wilber who leaked the ideas of Elisha Gray 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, 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 William 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. William 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.[8] [9] 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.[10]

To understand how Bell's attorneys Anthony Pollok and Marc Bailey were able on short notice to insert Gray's ideas into Bell's patent application without Bell being present and weeks after Bell's application had been signed and notarized, it is necessary to follow the paper trail. There were several versions of Bell's application:[11]

  • version E: draft consisting of 10 pages that Bell gave to George Brown for filing in England.[12]
  • version F: draft consisting of 10 pages sent by Bell to Pollok & Bailey in early January 1876.[13]
  • version X: engrossed "fair copy" signed by Bell and notarized on January 20, 1876 (presumably 14 pages)[14]
  • 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. [15]

Versions E and F are almost identical except for minor changes and the 7 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 7 sentences were not in version E or F when Bell sent version F to Pollok in early January 1876.[16] Pollok rewrote the claims on page 10 of version F and his clerk copied version F into an engrossed "fair copy" which we will call version X, the fair copy that Pollok sent to Bell. On January 20, Bell signed the last page of version X, had it notarized on the last page, and returned version X 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.

[edit] Valentine's Day

Early on Monday February 14, after learning of the variable resistance feature from Gray's lawyer, Pollok or Bailey inserted the 7 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.[17] The inserted 7 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 7 sentence insertion. When Bell arrived in Washington on February 26, 1876, Pollok apparently requested that Bell write the 7 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.

[edit] Did Bell steal the telephone 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 Pollock or Bailey did acquire 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 7, 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.[18]

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."[19] 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?"[20] 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."[21]

[edit] See also

[edit] 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
  • Rothman, Tony (2003), Everything's Relative, Wiley, 2003. ISBN 0-471-20257-6
  1. ^ The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876 by A. Edward Evenson
  2. ^ Rothman, page 144
  3. ^ Evenson, pages 68-69, 75
  4. ^ Evenson, pages 68-69
  5. ^ Evenson, pages 182-185
  6. ^ This draft with the insertion can be seen on pages 70 and A76 in The Gray Matter
  7. ^ Evenson, pages 64-69, 86-87, 110, 194-196
  8. ^ Evenson, page 86
  9. ^ The Gray Matter, page 49
  10. ^ Evenson, pages 77-78
  11. ^ The Gray Matter, page 117
  12. ^ The Gray Matter, pages A60-A63
  13. ^ The Gray Matter, pages A71-A81
  14. ^ 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
  15. ^ The Gray Matter, pages A100-A114
  16. ^ Evenson, page 195
  17. ^ The Gray Matter, page A114
  18. ^ Evenson, page 105
  19. ^ Evenson, page 218
  20. ^ Evenson, page 219
  21. ^ Evenson, page 218
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