What if Alexander Graham Bell's Lawyer had stopped to smell the roses?

One dawdling lawyer → Gray invents the telephone → There’s a new novelty title in the Hot 100

The telephone is supposed to be useful, but of course it is nothing of the kind: see how man is seized with convulsions as he screams Hello! into his receiver. What is he but an addict of the dope called sound, dead-drunk with conquered space and the transmitted voice?
•Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (1926).

Alexander Graham Bell created two new breeds of sheep. He invented the wax cylinder, precursor to the phonograph record. He invented a metal detector (and tried, unsuccessfully, to use it to locate the assassin’s bullet in a dying President Garfield). He didn’t invent the comic strip (that would be silly), but he endorsed using comic-like pictures for educational purposes, long before anyone else took the medium seriously. He invented a method of desalinating water, and a method of threshing grain, and a primitive air conditioner. But this was the nineteenth century, when people, usually Thomas Edison, were inventing new things every day. Inventions were no big whoop. Alexander Graham Bell would be forgotten today if it weren’t for the telephone.

On March 10, 1876, Bell transmitted words over electrical wires for the first time. The words were: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” Thomas Watson was Bell’s assistant, and, at least according to Watson, the whole reason for the call was that Bell had spilled acid on himself. If this is true (Watson was writing many years after the fact, when all other witnesses were already dead), Bell displayed a remarkable equanimity. “I want to see you” is not what I would have said, had I spilled acid on myself.

The device was barely working on March 10; Bell had applied for a patent a month earlier, on Valentine’s Day, before the device was working at all. Although the patent office preferred seeing a working model of an invention, they did not strictly speaking (as of 1870) need to; and the patent was issued without one.

Actually, Bell didn’t file the patent application; a lawyer did. Bell didn’t even know about it; he had wanted to secure the patent in England first, and was awaiting a telegram from another (feckless, irresponsible) lawyer, in London. He waited and waited. The patent was filed behind Bell’s back at the order of his former roommate, Gardiner Hubbard, who had simply grown sick of watching Bell sit there waiting.

Hubbard’s lawyer took the unusual precaution of carrying the patent to the Washington patent office himself, and hand delivering it.

The next year, on the strength of the patent and Bell’s gradually improving invention, Hubbard organized the Bell Telephone Company. Hubbard would be its first president.

Bell married Hubbard’s daughter.

ii. Of all the silly, minor decisions an attorney makes, the decision to hand deliver a patent must seem among the least consequential. Perhaps he was restless and simply wanted to take a stroll. Perhaps there were Valentine’s flowers to pick up along the way (perhaps even Valentine’s roses to smell?). Perhaps it was a pleasantly mild February day—John Paul Bocock claims the weather was “stormy,” but he is not to be trusted. If Bocock says it was stormy, it was probably mild.

For whatever reason, the attorney walked (everyone agrees) to the patent office. What if he had dropped the application in the mail instead? What if he had gone out for a long lunch, only hitting the patent office a few hours later? What could possibly have happened?

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One dawdling lawyer → Gray invents the telephone → There’s a new novelty title in the Hot 100

God never changes and the Will never changes. Nothing ever changes except the mode of the manifestation.
•Franz Hartmann, Magic, White and Black: The Science of Finite and Infinite Life Containing Practical Hints for Students of Occultism (1886).

History is composed of an infinite series of coincidences. Aldous Huxley, author of the second-most famous dystopian novel (Brave New World) was George “First Most Famous” Orwell’s French teacher at Eton. During the Boer War, long before he Was prime Minister of the UK, a young Winston Churchill was taken captive by a Boer soldier, who proved to be none other than Louis Botha—later prime minister of South Africa; the two statesmen had to work together during World War I, the soldier and his former prisoner.

“The meeting of these men, under the circumstances, is one of a thousand occurrences appearing exaggerated in fiction; but, nevertheless, frequently realized in actual lives of adventure,” is how Herman Melville justifies such an encounter in one of his novels. So let’s look at Melville.

Melville was in fact born with the name Melvill; when he was a boy his family added an e to escape creditors. Nathaniel Hawthorne (on the other hand) was born with the name Hathorne; as a young man he added a w to hide the humiliating fact that he was descended from a Salem witch trial judge. None of this would be particularly surprising or coincidental except that not only are Melville and Hawthorne the two most important (by far) mid-nineteenth century American novelists, they would also become best buds.

Their works are both cataloged under the call number 813.3 in libraries using the Dewey decimal system, invented by Melvil Dewey—who was born Melville Dewey, but dropped the le in solidarity with a late nineteenth-century spelling reform fad; for that matter, a century after Moby Dick, an American would write a similarly dense and thick novel that (in the words of one Harvard thesis) “mirrors and reinvents” the earlier doorstopper, which is only relevant because said American was scion of the old Pynchon family, Salem natives in the days of the Hathornes, that Hawthorne had referenced in his second-most-famous work by the just-add-an-e codename Pyncheon; it just keeps going.

This is all pretty good. In 1900 Iceland had a population of 77,000 and the US had a population of nearly 77 million; in 2000, Iceland had a population of 282,000 and the US had a population of 282 million (obviously I rounded off). This is pretty good, but Iceland doesn’t worry us here. None of this is what worries us.

What worries us is that a few hours later on February 14, 1876, a man named Elisha Gray tried to patent the telephone.

ii. Technically speaking, Gray did not file a patent; he filed a caveat, which is more or less a reservation on a patent. It hasn’t been used as part of the patent system for over a century, but back in the day an active caveat could prevent someone else from patenting an invention.

Don’t ask me why, but nothing gets people’s conspiracy gears grinding like nineteenth-century intellectual property controversies. Go talk to a Nikolai Tesla enthusiast for five minutes if you don’t believe me. I’ll wait.

The Gray/Bell morass is not quite Tesla-deep, but it’s deep. Did one of them steal from the other? Bell himself harbored “ungenerous thoughts” of Gray, and suspected him “capable of spying,” but, with typical Bell magnanimity, he later recanted, and absolved Gray of all blame. Gray, on the other hand, wrote, in a note found only after his death, when there was no way to recant anything: “The history of the telephone will never fully be written…it is partially hidden away…and partially lying in the hearts and consciences of a few whose lips are sealed—some in death and others by a golden clasp whose grip is even tighter.”

I have no interest—I started out with an interest, but then I stuck just my toe in the morass, and found I actually have no interest—in figuring out who invented the telephone. You can dig up your own dirt, if you’d like. Possible villains include not only Bell and Gray but also Bell’s “dishonorable and blackmailing” lawyer Joseph Adams, rival inventors Amos Dolbear and Antonio Meucci, con man Daniel Drawbaugh, and the archfiend of nineteenth-century intellectual property conspiracy: Thomas Edison.

If you want to stick your toe in, you may find John Paul Bocock’s sensationalistic 1900 article “The Romance of the Telephone” a good place to start. Bocock’s overwrought prose conveys facts contradicted by most other sources; he is completely bamboozled by an obvious fraud like Daniel “I Invented That Years Ago and Never Told Anyone” Drawbaugh; nevertheless, I have no way, of course, of proving his century-old allegations (he in an alleger; he alleges) are false.

The courts decided Bell held the phone patent, and there may have been many reasons for this: truth, perhaps; perhaps the “golden clasp.” “By a strange series of coincidences” (as Bocock puts it) “at least a dozen men in different parts of this country were at this very time working at telephone inventions”; determining who invented what first was probably literally impossible even in the months following; the courts were concerned with legal rights, and not moral rights. Technically, the legal rights were supposed to align with moral rights, and not just be about who filed paperwork first. But when everything is so higgledy-piggledy, what is a judge to base his ruling on?

Not with Drawbaugh; Drawbaugh is right out; but Gray was an honest if perhaps paranoid man. He was a legitimate inventor. If no judge outright said, in deciding for Bell, “Bell’s patent came in first,” nevertheless every judge was aware that his patent had come in first.

Gray spent the rest of his life trying to prove that his caveat actually arrived before Bell’s application (the order of events being fudged by dishonest patent clerks). He wouldn’t have bothered if the order hadn’t mattered.

iii. So if Gray had gotten his caveat in first he could have forestalled Bell; he could have de jure invented the telephone. Would the world be different?

William Goldman’s 1982 time-travel thriller Control involved a plan to test the possibility of changing the past by killing Alexander Graham Bell; it was a safe experiment because almost nothing in history would have been affected, just the one small difference: that in 1982 Gray, not Bell telephones would be everywhere.

“Mighty events turn on a straw,” Carlyle says; “the crossing of a brook decides the conquest of the world.” But sometimes a straw just turns, and nothing happens. If you ignore the caveats in the postlude to IH (q.v.), then thats’s just it. Bell to Gray. Nothing happens.

Or almost nothing happens. In 1984, in response to the FTC’s breakup of Bell Telephone, an ad hoc comedy band calling themselves The American Comedy Network released a single,‎ “Breaking Up Is Hard on You.” You can hear it here; it peaked at #70 on the Billboard charts. A parody of Neil Sedaka’s 1962 hit, it lamented the end of “Ma Bell” and the impending decline in service. It may be the only explicitly pro-monopoly song of the rock era.

If Bell’s attorney had dawdled, “Breaking Up Is Hard on You” would have different lyrics, of course. It would have no mention of “Ma Bell,” for example. But here’s where history could have been different. In a world where Gray Telephone was the monopoly, the American Comedy Network could sing about “wash[ing] away the gray.” They could sample an old shampoo commercial jingle.

“Wash away the Gray.” In 1984, the final echo of an 1876 lawyer’s stroll sounds.

References: Herman Melville, Typee, Omoo, Mardi (Library of America, 1982) p.423; “ungenerous thoughts”: Catherine Mackenzie, Alexander Graham Bell: The Man Who Contracted Space (Houghton Mifflin, 1928) p. 108; “The history of the telephone”: Mark Kay Carson, Alexander Graham Bell: Giving Voice to the World (Sterling, 2007) p. 61; “dishonorable and blackmailing”: Robert V. Bruce, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (Little, Brown, 1973) p. 135; Carlyle: Essay on Burns (Houghton Mifflin, 1896) p. 51; obv. this whole chapter is inspired by Goldman’s Control.