7 Alexander Graham Bell 7parents’ home in Canada to recuperate. In September 1875
he began to write the specifications for the telephone. On
March 7, 1876, the United States Patent Office granted
to Bell Patent Number 174,465 covering “The method of,
and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds
telegraphically... by causing electrical undulations, similar
in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said
vocal or other sounds.”
Within a year followed the commercial application
and, a few months later, the first of hundreds of legal suits.
Ironically, the telephone—until then all too often regarded
as a joke and its creator-prophet as, at best, an eccentric—
was the subject of the most involved patent litigation in
history. The most noteworthy contemporaries of Bell were
Antonio Meucci, who filed a caveat (rather than a full pat-
ent) in 1871 and let it lapse through lack of funds, and
Elisha Gray, who filed a caveat on Feb. 14, 1876, just a few
hours after Bell submitted a patent claim. In recognition
of Meucci’s earlier work, the U.S. House of Representatives
passed a resolution on June 11, 2002, honouring his work.
The two most celebrated of the early actions were the
Dowd and Drawbaugh cases wherein the fledgling Bell
Telephone Company successfully challenged two subsid-
iaries of the giant Western Union Telegraph Company for
patent infringement. The charges and accusations were
especially painful to Bell’s Scottish integrity, but the out-
come of all the litigation, which persisted throughout the
life of his patents, was that Bell’s claims were upheld as the
first to conceive and apply the undulatory current. In 1877
Bell married Mabel Hubbard, 10 years his junior.
Beyond the Telephone
The Bell story does not end with the invention of the tele-
phone; indeed, in many ways it was a beginning. A resident