The seven most famous words in telecommunications history are: "Come here, Mr Watson, I want you". Actually, if the Sherlock Holmes stories had taken a funny turn towards the end of Conan Doyle's life, a variation on the above could have formed the seven most famous words in detective literature as well. Sadly, Conan Doyle had no time for homosexual jiggery-pokery and Holmes and Watson have so far been denied their rightful status as gay icons.
Still, the impact of the words "Come here, Mr Watson, I want you", as uttered by Alexander Graham Bell, continues to resonate over a century after they were spoken. On March 10th, 1876, these were the first words ever uttered over the telephone as Bell attempted to summon his assistant, immortalising him in the process. Interestingly, what is not widely known is why Bell wanted Watson so badly. The reason was that Bell had just spilled sulphuric acid over his clothes, since he was using acid to alter the electric current in response to the changing sound waves. It is likely, therefore, that Bell spoke with considerable urgency, as sulphuric acid is a tricky customer with a tendency to cause a great deal of damage to clothing, skin and flesh. All things considered, "Bugger it! Ouch. Come here, Mr Watson - bugger, bugger, bugger - I want you. Bugger, that hurts! Come here now, Watson. Now!," is probably closer in spirit to what Bell was trying to say.
Teacher of the deaf
And so we learn that Alexander Graham Bell - who was, somewhat ironically, a teacher of the deaf - invented the telephone, leading to the development of what was to become the telecommunications giant AT&T (now worth a great deal of money) and also, indirectly, Eircell's customer help service (absolutely worthless, except to give customers some concept of what eternity might be like while they wait for a response).
What the history books fail to mention is that there is strong evidence to suggest that Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone and that a Chicago inventor named Elisha Gray did.
Gray was the founder of the Western Electric Company, which was backed by Western Union, then the biggest company in the United States. In 1874, Gray managed to transmit musical tones over wires, which was only a step away from transmitting the human voice. It seemed only a matter of time before Gray would invent a machine that would revolutionise human communication. Gray duly invented such a device and by 1876 he was ready to patent it. At this point, Fate intervened and dealt Gray a blow so underhand that he never fully recovered.
On February 14th, 1876, a man named Gardiner Hubbard arrived at the US Patent Office in Washington D.C. and filed a patent for a transmitter/receiver capable of sending the human voice over wires. Hubbard was the business partner of one Alexander Graham Bell.
Two hours later, Gray's attorney arrived at the same office and filed an announcement of a pending patent application for a similar device. Since the two applications were clearly conflicting, the Patents Office froze both applications for 90 days in order to examine them.
Varying current
What was new about these two devices, and what distinguished them from the telegraph, was the fact that they used a varying electric current rather than the simple switch of a circuit. Gray proposed using a rod immersed in acidified water to vary the current, while Bell's idea was cruder, involving a strip of iron moving through an electromagnetic field to convert the sound into electric current.
In fact, a great many inventors were working on the idea of the telephone, including Thomas Edison, whose carbon receiver was superior to the inventions of either Bell or Gray. Bell and Gray were just a little quicker off the mark than the rest. Actually, Bell, it would emerge, was quicker off the mark than any of them. When the Patent Office announced that the applications were to be frozen, Bell went straight to Washington in an effort to present his case and was granted a meeting with the patent examiner, a gentleman named Wilber. Wilber was a deaf mute and was probably aware of Bell's work in this field, which might have made him naturally sympathetic to Bell and may have led him to commit a breach of ethics.
Use of acid
Wilber, as he later admitted, showed Bell the patent announcement filed by Gray's attorney, which contained details of Gray's invention. When Bell's patent was eventually revealed some time later, a handwritten line had been inserted detailing a description of the potential use of acid rather than iron in the phone. When Bell was eventually granted the patent in March of that year, the phone he had constructed was based on Gray's model and not the original patent filed by Bell, unless one took into account the handwritten addition.
And so it was that Alexander Graham Bell became the man who spilt acid on his clothes, called his assistant on the telephone in an effort to ensure that he didn't suffer major burns, and entered the history books as the inventor of the telephone. Gray protested, but the Bell Telephone Company continued to grow in power and did its best to ensure that Gray's name did not sully its founder's reputation.
Elisha Gray died in 1901. In 1994, a young American writer named Neil Steinberg, who was attempting to research the story of Gray and Bell for a book on failure, tried to locate Gray's grave in Chicago's Rosehill Cemetery. He did not succeed, for the grave was nowhere to be found. Fate, it seemed, had managed to cheat Gray of even that small claim on remembrance.