The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) by Seth Shulman

had been an enterprising, earnest teenager with little formal education, who had worked for a living since he was thirteen years old. In July 1872, at the age of eighteen, Watson landed a job at the Charles Williams machine shop on Court Street. As Watson recalls, it was a thrilling place for a young man like him—a hub for visionary inventors attempting to build all sorts of machines that tapped the potential of the exciting and little-understood “power of electricity.”
    Among these young inventors was Thomas Edison, who, in the late 1860s, set up his office in the same building as the Williams shop to best avail himself of its services. It was here, in fact, that Edison won his first patent—for an electrical vote recorder—only to realize that no one would buy the machine. Perhaps, given today’s controversies over voting technology, Edison’s invention simply came a century and a half ahead of its time. Nonetheless, it was, Edison said later, the last time he would invent anything without first making sure there was a market for it.
    As a machinist, Watson’s job was to make prototypes to the specifications of the shop’s patrons, including people like Edison and Moses Farmer, another respected electrical researcher of the day. As Watson memorably recalls in his autobiography, Exploring Life (1926), no one in the Williams shop ever knew what to expect. Watson certainly did not expect the dramatic arrival of a man who would change his life:
    One day early in 1874 when I was hard at work for Mr. Farmer on his apparatus for exploding submarine mines by electricity and wondering what was coming next, there came rushing out of the office door and through the shop to my workbench a tall, slender, quick-motioned young man with a pale face, black side-whiskers and drooping mustache, big nose and high, sloping forehead crowned with bushy jet-black hair. It was Alexander Graham Bell, a young professor in Boston University, whom I then saw for the first time.
     
    Bell stormed into the shop holding two small instruments Watson had crafted for him. Breaking with normal procedure, he headed straight onto the shop floor to complain directly to Watson that the machines had not been built according to his instructions. Bell’s demeanor was exceedingly formal; but he was also frequently hot-tempered, and in this case, he got right to the point, demanding that Watson correct his mistakes. Watson was happy to comply. He listened with interest to Bell’s explanations about the strange contraptions he had constructed with no idea what they were intended for.
    The pair of instruments Watson pledged to rebuild descended directly from Bell’s tuning fork experiments in Scotland. Since moving to Boston, Bell believed he had found a practical application for his ideas about sympathetic vibration. He knew the telegraph industry was having difficulty keeping pace with the voluminous number of telegrams being sent. More and more unsightly wires were rapidly being strung on telegraph poles that, at considerable expense to the industry, were proliferating across the continent. In parts of some cities like Boston, the tangle of overhead telegraph wires was becoming oppressive, all but blocking out the sky. As a result, Western Union had announced that it was willing to pay up to $1 million to the inventor who could ease the congestion by allowing telegraph wires to carry multiple messages simultaneously.
    One researcher and patron of the Williams shop named Joseph Stearns had recently invented a “duplex telegraph” that allowed a single telegraph wire to carry both an outgoing and an incoming message simultaneously. Stearn’s scheme used a parallel circuit at each end of the main telegraph line that would blot out only the outgoing messages from that end of the line, leaving the telegraph device free to accurately receive incoming messages at the same time. It was an important advance. But Bell thought he had an even better solution