Alexander Graham Bell, Fraud?

Posted by Eric Krapf | Dec 26, 2007

Oh, now this is just depressing.
I simply refuse to believe that aggressive lawyers and corrupt government officials were behind Alexander Graham Bell's rise to prominence. It's so unlike what came after.

Seriously, though, I don't know if this latest book proves its case against Bell, but I think this is an instructive quote from the AP story:

Shulman [the latest author] explores why historical memory has favored Bell and not [Elisha] Gray — nor German inventor Philipp Reis, who beat them both with 1860s telephones that employed a different principle.

One reason is simply that Bell, not Gray, actually demonstrated a phone that transmitted speech. Gray was focused instead on his era's pressing communications challenge: how to send multiple messages simultaneously over the same telegraph wire. As Gray huffed to his attorney, "I should like to see Bell do that with his apparatus."

That remark of Gray's, if quoted accurately, says it all. Even if you concede, for the sake of argument, that Gray came up with the method for transmitting voice and Bell stole it, it seems clear that Gray didn't understand the value of the thing that Bell had "stolen" from him.

It's the oldest story in the business (literally): Somebody invents a technology but doesn't understand its true value; somebody else comes along and does understand that, and the second guy gets rich.