The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret | 
 enlarge | Author: Seth Shulman
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 41738
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.1
ISBN: 0393062066
Dewey Decimal Number: 621.38509
EAN: 9780393062069
ASIN: 0393062066
Publication Date: January 7, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand-new, MINT condition! Unread and free of rips/tears/folds/etc.! Spine unbroken!
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Amazon.com
Amazon Best of the Month, January 2008: Seth Shulman closely examines the race to build the first telephone and uncovers potential bombshells with The Telephone Gambit. Although Alexander Graham Bell is widely accepted as the father of the telephone (despite the fact that rival inventor Elisha Gray submitted a similar claim the same day Bell filed his patent), Schulman provides intriguing evidence questioning if the scales were deliberately tipped in Alexander's favor. Was the venerable inventor party to theft from Gray's own research? Or are such accusations merely sour grapes from a bitterly contested legal battle? Fraught with controversy, conspiracy, and possible chicanery, Shulman spins real-life Da Vinci Code drama around one of the most influential inventions of the modern era. --Dave Callanan
Product Description
A gripping intrigue at the heart of one of the world's most important inventions.
While researching Alexander Graham Bell at MIT's Dibner Institute, Seth Shulman scrutinized Bell's journals and within them he found the smoking gun, a hint of deeply buried historical intrigue. Delving further, Shulman unearthed the surprising story behind the invention of the telephone: a tale of romance, corruption, and unchecked ambition.
Bell furtively—and illegally—copied part of Elisha Gray's invention in the race to secure what would become the most valuable U.S. patent ever issued. And afterward, as Bell's device led to the world's largest monopoly, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, he hid his invention's illicit beginnings. In The Telephone Gambit, Shulman challenges the reputation of an icon of invention, rocks the foundation of a corporate behemoth, and offers a probing meditation on how little we know about our own history.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
 Central Thesis Debunked July 2, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
The central thesis of this book - that Bell stole the intellectual property needed to complete the telephone, was thoroughly destroyed in the review in the Spring / Summer issue of American Heritage magazine by another of Bell's biographers and a physicist who has written on early telephones.
They make two points. First, the central piece of evidence was manufactured for use by the Pan-Electric company, which had corrupted key members of Congress and the Cleveland Administration. These issues were litigated and rejected by courts during Bell's life time, and are not new. Next, the document that Bell supposedly copied dealt with an irrelevant technology that ultimately was never used in the final product.
The only coverup is the author's July 2, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
The more ridiculous the conspiracy theory, the more people buy into it. The real coverup is not Bell's but the author's. He selectively omits or downplays the following facts: 1) Elisha Gray did NOT file a patent application for the telephone--the same day or ever. A patent application--such as Bell's--was for a completed invention. What Gray filed was a "caveat," a description of a concept that had not yet resulted in an invention. Caveats are no longer permitted and ignorance of the difference between the two types of documents plays into author Shulman's hands. 2) Gray himself long made no claim that he invented the telephone. In fact, he wrote a congratulatory letter to Bell stating that a "mere idea" should not be "dignified with the name invention." 3) All Gray really claimed--long afterwards--was that Bell had improved upon the telephone by borrowing Gray's idea of using acidified water in the transmitter. But Bell had already been experimenting with acidified water and had described its use in a multiple telegraph patent description a year earlier. 4) Bell never used acidified water--the only idea Gray actually claimed was stolen--in his patent application, his 1876 public demonstrations, or his 1877 commercial telephones. So what was "stolen"? All American heroes have had their faults, but creating artificial scandals that libel them posthumously is reprehensible.
 The Great Temptation May 27, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
What an interesting story! And how dismaying it is to read how the honorable Alexander Graham Bell compromised himself, and then managed to suppress the truth from his mind in order to enjoy the fruits of his actions. He was in love with the daughter of a powerful lawyer, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, who saw the opportunity to achieve his own agenda by using Bell's invention. Bell was a teacher of the deaf and knew acoustics. He recognized that "undulating currents" were the key to carrying voice via electrical circuits, but did not know how to implement it until he saw a sketch by Elisha Gray, made available to him surreptitiously by the nefarious manipulations of his mentor and future father-in-law, Hubbard. Seth Shulman takes us along in his personal experiences in pursuing the facts, which lead inexorably to the conclusion which he did not want to believe -- that Bell had stolen the basic method of creating a telephone and received the most valuable patent of all time. In fact, Shulman shows that Philipp Reis in Germany had a working telephone in 1863, thirteen years before March 10, 1876, when the story of legend has it that Thomas Watson heard Bell's voice in the first telephone call. I recommend that you join Shulman in his personal adventure and read this most interesting story.
Shulman Nails It May 1, 2008
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is an excellent book. I bought it hoping it would give me (a retired electrical engineer with more than a dozen patents) some understanding of the telephone's genesis, which I knew to be a complicated tale with claims that Bell didn't deserve the credit. Frankly I was hoping for a good story and Shulman delivers. He lays out the twists and turns of this story in a remarkably clear narrative, but this is not just another retelling of the telephone story.
Shulman started working on this book only because he made a startling discovery in Bell's lab notebooks. He found that Bell's sketch of his first (functioning) telephone transmitter was nearly identical to a sketch drawn by Elisha Gray in his (supposedly) secret filing with patent office a month earlier. And even more suspiciously Bell had drawn the sketch in his notebook just days after returning from Washington where he had conferred with his patent lawyers and the patent examiner. Shulman has researched in depth if, how, who, and why fraud was committed in the patenting of the telephone, with close attention to how things were later explained in court depositions and testimony. The picture Shulman draws is very convincing that major hanky panky (fraud) occurred in Bell's patenting of the telephone. Shulman lays out the case that Bell had a strong motive (love first, money second) to go along with the fraud, even though he many not have initiated it, and as Shulman argues, his shame and need to conceal his use of Gray's idea nicely explains many of his later actions that have always been puzzling. It all hangs together very well. The case for patent fraud is overwhelming, and Shulman draws the appropriate conclusions.
So is Bell essentially just a crook who stole Gray's design and deserves no credit? Well it's easy to jump to this conclusion after reading this book, but there's another side to this story. For starters read the Wikipedia article: 'Elisha Gray and Alexander Bell Telephone Controversy'. It explains, based on facts fully consistent with Shulman's book, why (in their opinion) Bell did not steal Gray's invention. My opinion, after reading Bell's patents, researching the design of the first US telephones, and doing some reading of Bell's notebooks (available online from the Library of Congress) is that while it appears that Bell stole Gray's idea in the legal sense (via patent fraud), he didn't steal it in the engineering sense.
The undisputed fact is that Bell and his partners started the telephone business in the US with a Bell designed electromagnetic telephone. By modern standards it was primitive (weak, distorted, and only good for 10-20 miles or so), and it lasted in the marketplace less than two years before being replaced by a telephone much closer to modern phones with a variable resistance carbon transmitter. On the other hand the Bell design was simple (it was a combo receiver/transmitter), easy to manufacture, and most importantly it worked well enough so that thousands of people put down their money to buy or rent one.
Note Bell's electromagnetic telephone design was indisputably his own design. It had nothing to do with the famous seven (disputed) paragraphs written in the patent margin, which described the concept of a variable resistance transmitter. The variable resistance transmitter required another year of development work (by Edison, Blake and others) and was not introduced into the market (by Western Electric) until about a year after Bell's phone business began.
So did Bell 'invent' the telephone? The early phone (and associated telephone exchanges) were the work of Bell, Edison, Blake, and others, but Bell by using a simple, low performance design of his own was able to get to market a year ahead of his competitors and get the US telephone business off the ground. So if there is to be a 'single' inventor, Bell (by virtue of his being first) is the inventor of the telephone.
Great story- interesting research April 28, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
Working in the telecom industry, I had heard the story many time over about how Alexander Graham Bell beat Elisha Gray to the patent office by mere hours to earn the most lucrative patent in history. I'd also read about suspicions that Bell plagiarized the telephone design from multiple inventors. This book was well organized, well written, well researched, and definitely entertaining. If you have any interest in telecommunications, history, technology, or patent law, this book will be of interest to you. Perhaps most interesting is towards the end when the author describes Bell's attitude of wanting to clean his hands of anything to do with the invention of the telephone. The book really makes you wonder if Bell was indeed guilty of intellectual theft. Highly recommended reading.
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