Who invented the telephone: Lawyers, patents, and the judgments of history

Technology and Culture

Volumn 51, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 854-878

  Beauchamp, Christopher ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA LAW SCHOOL   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 78649844925     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: 10973729     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (169)

1. "The Top 100," Atlantic Monthly, December 2006, 61-78
2. Original wording from Alexander Graham Bell to his father Alexander Melville Bell, 10 March 1876, in Bell Family Papers (hereafter BFP), folder "Alexander Melville Bell, Family Correspondence, Alexander Graham Bell, 1876," box 5, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
3. A number of textbooks and general histories of the United States use Bell and his telephone as shorthand for late-nineteenth-century invention. See, for example, John M. Blum, ed., The National Experience: A History of the United States (New York, 1993), 473
4. Bernard Bailyn et al., The Great Republic: A History of the American People (Lexington, Mass., 1992), 2:84-89
5. See, for example, American Telephone & Telegraph Company, The Career of Alexander Graham Bell (New York, 1946)
6. New York Telephone Company, Alexander Graham Bell, Inventor of the Telephone (New York, 1952). On the Bell System more generally
7. see Richard R. John, "Recasting the Information Infrastructure for the Industrial Age," in A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present, ed. Alfred D. Chandler and James W. Cortada (New York, 2000), 55-106
8. A. Edward Evenson, The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876: The Elisha Gray - Alexander Bell Controversy and Its Many Players (Jefferson, N.C., 2000)
9. Burton H. Baker, The Gray Matter: The Forgotten Story of the Telephone (St. Joseph, Mich., 2000)
10. Seth Shulman, The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (New York, 2008).
11. An important assessment of Evenson's, Baker's, and Shulman's claims is Bernard S. Finn, "Bell and Gray: Just a Coincidence?" Technology and Culture 50 (2009): 193-201.
12. See also Frederick Leland Rhodes, Beginnings of Telephony (New York, 1929)
13. William Aitken, Who Invented the Telephone? (London, 1939)
14. Lewis Coe, The Telephone and Its Several Inventors (Jefferson, N.C., 1995)
15. and Basilio Catania, Antonio Meucci: L'Inventore e il suo Tempo, 2 vols. (Turin, 1994).
16. A comprehensive list, ranging from railroad brakes to rubber dentures, would fill many pages.
17. See, for example, Edwin J. Prindle, Patents as a Factor in Manufacturing (New York, 1908), 14-15
18. and Frank Keiper, Pioneer Inventions and Pioneer Patents (Rochester, N.Y., 1924).
19. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York, 1973), 58.
20. Catherine Fisk, "Removing the 'Fuel of Interest' from the 'Fire of Genius': Law and the Employee Inventor, 1830-1930" University of Chicago Law Review 65 (1998): 1127-98
21. B. Zorina Khan and Kenneth Sokoloff, "'Schemes of Practical Utility': Entrepreneur - ship and Innovation among 'Great Inventors' in the United States, 1790-1865," Journal of Economic History 53 (1993): 289-307
22. Naomi Lamoreaux and Kenneth Sokoloff, "Inventors, Firms, and the Market for Technology: U.S. Manufacturing in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries," in Learning by Doing in Firms, Markets, and Countries, ed. Naomi Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin (Chicago, 1999), 19-60
23. Naomi Lamoreaux and Kenneth Sokoloff, "Intermediaries in the U.S. Market for Technology, 1870-1920," in Finance, Intermediaries, and Economic Development, ed. Stanley L. Engerman et al. (Cambridge, 2003), 209-46
24. Kara Swanson, "The Emergence of the Professional Patent Practitioner," Technology and Culture 50 (2009): 519-48
25. Steven W. Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation: Business, Technology, and Politics in America, 1840-1920 (Cambridge, 2002)
26. Steven W. Usselman and Richard R. John, "Patent Politics: Intellectual Property, the Railroad Industry, and the Problem of Monopoly," Journal of Policy History 18 (2006): 96-125
27. Josh Lerner," 150 years of Patent Protection," National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper Series, Working Paper 7478 (2000).
28. Johann Peter Murmann, Knowledge and Competitive Advantage: The Coevolution of Firms, Technology, and National Institutions (Cambridge, 2003)
29. Brooke Hindle, Emulation and lnvention (New York, 1983), 128. See also Carolyn C.
30. See also Carolyn C Cooper, Shaping Invention: Thomas Blanchard's Machinery and Patent Management in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1991), 29-56
31. Christine MacLeod, "Concepts of Invention and the Patent Controversy in Victorian Britain," in Technological Change: Methods and Themes in the History of Technology, ed. Robert Fox (Amsterdam, 1996), 137-53
32. Cai Guise-Richardson, "Redefining Vulcanization: Charles Goodyear, Patents, and Industrial Control, 1834-1865," Technology and Culture 51 (2010): 357-87.
33. The leading work in this field is B. Zorina Khan, "Property Rights and Patent Litigation in Early Nineteenth-Century America" Journal of Economic History 55 (1995): 58-97. On patent doctrine
34. see Oren Bracha, "Owning Ideas: A History of Anglo-American Intellectual Property" (S.J.D. diss., Harvard Law School, 2005), chap. 4. A perceptive discussion of patent law during the 1870s and 1880s appears in Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation, chap. 4. Numerous single-industry studies discuss patent lawsuits in detail, albeit with little reflection on the broader legal context.
35. See, for example, Harold C. Passer, The Electrical Manufacturers, 1875-1900: A Study in Competition, Entrepreneurship, Technical Change, and Economic Growth (Cambridge, Mass., 1953)
36. William Greenleaf, Monopoly on Wheels: Henry Ford and the Selden Automobile Patent (Detroit, 1961)
37. Richard Korman, The Goodyear Story: An Inventor's Obsession and the Struggle for a Rubber Monopoly (San Francisco, 2002).
38. The Bell parent company operated after 1900 as the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, eventually shortened to AT&T.
39. Alexander Graham Bell to Mabel Hubbard Bell, 26 January 1879, in BFP, folder "Mabel Hubbard Bell, Family Correspondence, Alexander Graham Bell, January-February 1879," box 39.
40. Alexander Graham Bell, U.S. Patent 174,465, dated 7 March 1876, for "Improvement in Telegraphy.
41. Alexander Graham Bell to Mabel Hubbard Bell, 26 January 1879.
42. Ibid..
43. Bell, U.S. Patent 174,465, 4.
44. "Telephone Litigation in America" Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, 20 June 1885, 558.
45. Cited inscription on Royal Society's Hughes Medal, awarded 1913, quoted in J. E. Kingsbury, The Telephone and Telephone Exchanges (London, 1915), 191.
46. William K. Townsend, "Patents," in Two Centuries' Growth of American Law, 1701-1901, ed. Members of the Faculty of the Yale Law School (New York, 1901), 391-421, quote on 406. On the doctrine of primary and secondary patents, see McCormick v. Talcott, 61 U.S. 402 (1857)
47. Albert H. Walker, Text-Book of the Patent Laws of the United States of America (New York, 1883), 262-65
48. and Simon G. Croswell, "Infringement Cases in Patent Law," Harvard Law Review 3 (1889): 206-12.
49. Chicago & N.W. Railway Co. v. Sayles, 97 U.S. 554, 556-57 (1878).
50. Figures calculated from U.S. Patent Office, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1892, 52nd Cong., 2nd sess., Senate Miscellaneous Document 53 (Washington, D.C., 1893), xii.
51. Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 (New York, 1989), 15-16
52. Merritt Roe Smith, "Technological Determinism in American Culture" in Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, ed. Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 5-8.
53. The most in-depth analysis of heroic invention as a cultural construct, albeit in the somewhat different British context, is Christine MacLeod, Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British Identity, 1750-1914 (Cambridge, 2007).
54. Chicago & N.W. Railway Co. v. Sayles, 97 U.S. at 556.
55. William W. Fisher, Morton Horwitz, and Thomas A. Reed, eds., American Legal Realism (New York, 1993).
56. Rosario J. Tosiello, The Birth and Early Years of the Bell Telephone System, 1876-1880 (New York, 1979), 235, 239-40, 249.
57. In the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Massachusetts, Bell Telephone Company etal. v. Peter A. Dowd. Pleadings, Evidence and Exhibits, 2 vols. (Boston, 1880).
58. On Gray, see David Hounshell, "Elisha Gray and the Telephone: On the Disadvantages of Being an Expert," Technology and Culture 16 (1975): 133-61.
59. Tosiello, 225-28.
60. David Hochfelder, "Constructing an Industrial Divide: Western Union, A.T.&T., and the Federal Government, 1876-1971," Business History Review 76 (2002): 713-15
61. Kenneth Lipartito, The Bell System and Regional Business: The Telephone in the South, 1877-1920 (Baltimore, 1989), 49-50.
62. American Bell Telephone Company v. Spencer, 8 F. 509 (C.C.D.Mass. 1881); Rhodes (n. 5 above), 208-9.
63. American Bell Telephone Company v. Spencer, 8 F. at 509-10.
64. Ibid., 8 F. at 511.
65. "Important Telephone Decision" Scientific American, 16 July 1881, 32 (emphasis in original).
66. Arthur P. Greeley, Foreign Patent and Trademark Laws: A Comparative Study (Washington, D.C., 1899).
67. American Bell Telephone Company v. People's Telephone Company, 22 F. 309, 326 (C.C.S.D.N.Y. 1884).
68. American Bell Telephone Company v. American Cushman Telephone Company, 35 F. 734 (C.C.N.D.Ill. 1888).
69. American Bell Telephone Company v. Globe Telephone Company, 31 F. 729, 733-34 (C.C.S.D.N.Y. 1887).
70. See also Basilio Catania, "Antonio Meucci: Telephone Pioneer," Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 21 (2001): 55-76
71. and Catania, "Antonio Meucci, Inventor of the Telephone: Unearthing the Legal and Scientific Proofs," Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 24 (2004): 115-37.
72. Basilio Catania, "The U.S. Government versus Alexander Graham Bell: An Important Acknowledgment for Antonio Meucci," Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 22 (2002): 426-424.
73. Silvanus P. Thompson, Philipp Reis: Inventor of the Telephone (London, 1883)
74. see also the collection of articles by pro-Reis American scientists reprinted in the Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, 22 and 29 January 1886.
75. Thompson, 47-48; American Bell Telephone Company v. Molecular Telephone Company, 32 F. 214, 217-18 (C.C.S.D.N.Y. 1885); Evenson (n. 5 above), 158.
76. "The Problem of the Telephone," Scientific American, 17 February 1883, 96.
77. "The Course of Telephone Litigation" Electrical World, 2 February 1884, 36
78. "The Directorate of the Globe Company" Electrical World, 5 April 1884, 115; "The Telephone Cases in America" Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, 24 January 1885, 82
79. "The Telephone," Western Electrician, 21 January 1888, 35
80. In the U.S. Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York, American Bell Telephone Company v. The People's Telephone Company et al., Evidence for Complainants (Boston, 1882), 1:85-104
81. In the U.S. Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York, American Bell Telephone Company v. The People's Telephone Company etal., Appendix to Complainants'Briefs (Boston, 1882), 162-65
82. The Telephone Cases, 126 U.S. 1, 547-52, 561 (1888).
83. American Bell Telephone Company v. Molecular Telephone Company, 32 F. 214
84. Thomas Lockwood, "Memorandum Relating to the Litigation of the Bell Patents," undated typescript, 37, 40, box 1056, AT&T archives, Warren, N.J.; Rhodes (n. 5 above), 211-13.
85. U.S. Congress, House, Select Committee on Pan-Electric Telephone Stock, Report of the Minority, 49th Cong., 1st sess., H. Rpt. no. 3,142 (Washington, D.C., 1886), 73, 84
86. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Pan-Electric Telephone Company, Testimony Taken by Committee on Pan-Electric Telephone Company, 49th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, D.C., 1886), 45-51
87. Rhodes, 217-18.
88. "The Great Telephone Suit," Scientific American, 4 October 1884, 208-9.
89. In the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of New Jersey, American Bell Telephone Company v. John J. Ghegan. Complainants' Moving Papers on Motion for Preliminary Injunction (Boston, 1882), 9.
90. Harding's career is described in Albert H. Walker, "George Harding," in Great American Lawyers, ed. William Draper Lewis (Philadelphia, 1909), 43-87. On Edmunds
91. see Samuel B. Hand, "Edmunds, George Franklin (1828-1919)," in American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, vol. 8 (New York, 1999), 8:320-21.
92. Donald Grier Stephenson, The Waite Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2003), 133.
93. "Talking about the Telephone: Distinguished Counsel Watching while Another Lawyer Lectures," New York Times, 23 September 1884.
94. American Bell Telephone Company v. People's Telephone Company (n. 35 above), 22 F. at 327.
95. American Bell Telephone Company v. Molecular Telephone Company (n. 40 above), 32 F. 214
96. "The Legal Effect of the Wallace Decision," Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, 10 January 1885, 34-35
97. affidavit of W. Van Benthuysen, 13 November 1885, in U.S. Department of the Interior, The Telephone Case: Record (Washington, D.C., 1885), 178
98. Lockwood (n. 44 above), 44-45.
99. Goodyear Dental Vulcanite Company v. Willis, 10 F. Cas. 754, 756 (C.C.Mich. 1874).
100. Khan (n. 10 above); Lamoreaux and Sokoloff, "Inventors, Firms" (n. 8 above).
101. Edward A. Purcell, Litigation and Inequality: Federal Diversity Jurisdiction in Industrial America, 1870-1958 (New York, 1992).
102. Opinion of Judge Wallace in American Bell Telephone Company v. Molecular Telephone Company, 32 F. at 216
103. "Another Telephone Decision" Scientific American, 18 July 1885, 32.
104. American Bell Telephone Company v. National Improved Telephone Company et al. (n. 51 above), 27 F. at 664-65.
105. See Richard White, "Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age" Journal of American History 90 (2003): 19-43.
106. Evenson (n. 5 above); Catania, "The U.S. Government versus Alexander Graham Bell" (n. 38 above)
107. Shulman (n. 5 above).
108. Department of the Interior (n. 52 above), 1-2, 7-15; The Telephone Cases (n. 43 above), 126 U.S. at 311-53
109. Evenson, 167-71.
110. Based on experiments conducted at the Smithsonian Institution in the 1960s, Finn (n. 5 above, 199) has argued that neither man's liquid-transmitter design worked well enough to be of practical value, and he determines on this basis that the liquid-transmitter concept should not be considered "of any consequence in determining who was 'the inventor' of the telephone." The allegation of theft certainly endangered the validity of Bell's patent, however, and is therefore highly consequential here.
111. U.S. Congress, House, Select Committee on Pan-Electric Telephone Stock (n. 45 above), 73-80.
112. John Brooks, Telephone: The First Hundred Years (New York, 1976), 88-89; Lipartito (n. 29 above), 82-84.
113. Mowry v. Whitney, 81 U.S. 434 (1871).
114. The circumstances of the cases and of the lumbermen's response are described in "The Woodbury Patent," Scientific American, 9 January 1875, 16
115. "The Woodbury Patent," Scientific American, 18 September 1875, 176. Details of the government's involvement appear in the letter of J. Drew (counsel for L. Gould) to Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont, 29 May 1875, in Year File 1885/6921, box 136, "Letters Received, General Records of the Department of Justice, 1849-1989,"RG 60.3.2, U.S. National Archives, College Park, Md. (hereafter GR-DOJ-USNA).
116. The Supreme Court struck down the patent on other grounds in Woodbury Patent Planing-Machine Company v. Keith, 101 U.S. 479 (1879).
117. "Statement of General Duncan Walker in reference to the 'Roberts Torpedo' and 'Barbed Wire' cases" in Department of the Interior (n. 52 above), 406-20
118. John J. Mc-Laurin, Sketches in Crude Oil: Some Accidents and Incidents of the Petroleum Development in All Parts of the Globe (Harrisburg, Pa., 1898), 386-88.
119. Earl W. Hayter, "An Iowa Farmers' Protective Association: A Barbed Wire Patent Protest Movement" Iowa Journal of History and Politics 37 (1939): 352
120. J. M. McFadden, "Monopoly in Barbed Wire: The Formation of the American Steel and Wire Company," Business History Review 52 (1978): 466-70.
121. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Patents, Patent Infringements and Practice in Patent Suits, 48th Cong., 1st sess., SPat-T. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1884)
122. Earl W. Hayter, "The Patent System and Agrarian Discontent, 1875-1888," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 34 (1947): 59-82
123. Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation (n. 8 above), 146-53.
124. Chauncey Smith, "A Century of Patent Law," Quarterly Journal of Economics 5 (1890): 58-59.
125. Department of the Interior (n. 52 above)
126. Secretary of the Interior L. C. Q. Lamar to Solicitor General John Goode, 14 January 1886, box 136, in GR-DOJ-USNA.
127. U.S. Congress, House, Select Committee on Pan-Electric Telephone Stock (n. 45 above), 87, 89.
128. "The Bell Telephone before the Supreme Court," Scientific American, 19 February 1887, 113.
129. Grosvenor P. Lowrey to Allen G. Thurman, 9 April 1886, box 135, in GR-DOJ-USNA.
130. Eppa Hunton and Jeff. Chandler to Solicitor General John Goode, undated (1886), box 136, in GR-DOJ-USNA.
131. Grosvenor P. Lowrey to Solicitor General John Goode, 23 June 1886, box 135, in GR-DOJ-USNA.
132. Milton Mueller, Universal Service: Competition, Interconnection, and Monopoly in the Making of the American Telephone System (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 57.
133. J. J. Storrow to John E. Hudson, 17 November 1891, quoted in N. R. Danielian, A.T.&T.: A Story of Industrial Conquest (New York, 1939), 97.
134. "The Bell Telephone Suits" Scientific American, 5 February 1887, 80.
135. R. L. Mahon, "The Telephone in Chicago, Brief based on materials collected by Historical Committee," typescript ca. 1951, folder 1, box 447 04 02, AT&T archives, Warren, N.J.
136. Resolution of New York Board of Trade and Transportation, 14 October 1885, in Department of the Interior (n. 52 above), 24c-24d.
137. "A Million on Paper for $100 Cash," Electrical World, 8 August 1885, 59.
138. Lockwood (n. 44 above), 21, 40; American Bell Telephone Company v. Dolbear, 15 F. 448 (C.C.D.Mass. 1883).
139. Editorial, Electrical World, 14 March 1885, 101.
140. "The Bell Telephone Suits" (n. 78 above), 80; Lockwood, 62.
141. "Bell and the Bench" and "Remarkable Revelations," New York Herald, 2 December 1886; "Hello! Hello!" and "The Bar and the Bell," New York Herald, 3 December 1886.
142. The Telephone Cases (n. 43 above), 126 U.S. at 232-42.
143. Ibid., 126 U.S. at 243-57. The Telephone Cases,126 at 232-42
144. Letters of W. C. Barney reporting on oral arguments, box 138, in GR-DOJ-USNA; "The Bell Telephone Suits," 80.
145. Opinion of Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, in The Telephone Cases, 126 U.S. at
146. The Telephone Cases, 126 U.S. at 163-212.
147. Ibid., 126 U.S. at 329-89. Dickinson was a prominent party man, a Democrat to 570. partner the Republican Edmunds. A confidant of President Cleveland, he became postmaster general in 1888. The Telephone Cases, 126 U.S. at 163-212
148. See Robert Bolt, "Donald McDonald Dickinson" in American National Biography (n. 47 above), vol. 6, 6:561-62.
149. The Telephone Cases (n. 43 above), 126 U.S. at 394.
150. Electrical World, 19 February 1887, 87
151. "Drawbaugh Stock" Electrical World, 5 March 1887, 125, quoting the Boston Evening Transcript.
152. Dissent of Justice Bradley, in The Telephone Cases, 126 U.S. at 573.
153. Ibid., 126 U.S. at 576. Bradley was right to identify James Watt as Britain's iconic inventor; see MacLeod (n. 22 above), chaps. 4-5. Dissent of Justice Bradley, in The Telephone Cases.
154. See, for example, Edward Purcell, "The Particularly Dubious Case of Hans v. Louisiana: An Essay on Law, Race, History, and 'Federal Courts,'" North Carolina Law Review 81 (2003): 1927-2059.
155. Usselman and John (n. 8 above), 117.
156. Swain Turbine & Mfg. Co. v. Ladd, 102 U.S. 408, 411 (1880).
157. Tilghman v. Proctor, 102 U.S. 707 (1880)
158. Atlantic Works v. Brady, 107 U.S. at 203
159. "Bell Telephone Patent case in Supreme Court" folder 6, box 13, Joseph Bradley Papers, New Jersey Historical Society, Newark.
160. Webster Loom Co. v. Higgins, 105 U.S. 580, 595 (1881)
161. Atlantic Works v. Brady, 107 U.S. at 203
162. Reiter et al. v. Jones & Laughlin Ltd., 32 F. 421, 423 (1888).
163. Townsend (n. 19 above), 418
164. see also William C. Robinson, The Law of Patents for Useful Inventions, 3 vols. (Boston, 1890), 1:v.
165. Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley, Calif., 1998), chap. 2
166. Robert Mac-Dougall, "Long Lines: AT&T, Long-Distance Telephony, and Corporate Control," Business and Economic History 3 (2005): 1-27.
167. Danielian (n. 77 above), 3-4.
168. Christopher Beauchamp, "The Telephone Patents: Intellectual Property, Business, and the Law in the United States and Britain, 1876-1900" (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 2007), chap. 5.
169. Dan L. Burk and Mark A. Lemley, "Policy Levers in Patent Law," Virginia Law Review 89 (2003): 1575-1696, quote on 1583.