Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,31

lawyer exclaimed, “It can speak, but it won’t!”

Although Bell deeply resented these accusations and the time and thought the lawsuits demanded, three years after his patent was issued, he entered a courtroom for the first time as a plaintiff rather than a defendant. In late 1876, he had offered to sell his patents to Western Union for $100,000, but had been soundly rejected. Just a few months later, the powerful company, worth an estimated $41 million, realized it had made a disastrous mistake. Instead of approaching Bell, however, and striking a deal, it decided to become his direct competitor. After establishing the American Speaking Telephone Company, Western Union bought the patents of three leading inventors in telephony, one of whom was Thomas Edison.

Bell had little hope of competing with this behemoth. Not only did it have seemingly limitless financial resources to fund experiments and improvements, but it had an existing network of wires that stretched across the country. To add insult to injury, Edison, who was partially deaf, developed a telephone transmitter for Western Union that was better—both louder and clearer—than Bell’s.

In a court of law, however, Bell had two things that Western Union did not: irrefutable evidence that he had developed the first working telephone and, more important, a patent. When the company began to attack Bell personally, suggesting in the press that not only did he not have the skill necessary for such an invention but had stolen the idea, he set aside his hatred of lawsuits and fought back. The legal battle lasted less than a year, beginning in the spring of 1879 and ending in the fall, with Western Union admitting defeat and agreeing to shut down the American Speaking Telephone Company. In the end, it would hand over to Bell everything from its lines and telephones to its patent rights, receiving in return only 20 percent of the telephone rental receipts for just seventeen years.

With Western Union’s defeat, stock in the Bell Telephone Company skyrocketed from $50 a share to nearly $1,000. The fighting, however, continued. In the end, Bell would face more than six hundred lawsuits, ten times as many as Morse. Five of them would reach the U.S. Supreme Court. One rival in particular, a brilliant inventor named Elisha Gray, would insist to his dying day that the telephone had been his invention. Years later, Gray’s own partner would sigh, “Of all the men who didn’t invent the telephone, Gray was the nearest.”

While hundreds of men fought to be recognized as the inventor of the telephone, Bell feared he would never again be anything else. This one invention, he was convinced, would consume his life if he let it. “I am sick of the Telephone,” he had written to his wife in 1878, just two years after the Centennial Exhibition. He yearned for the freedom he had lost, for time to think about other things. “Don’t let me be bound hand and soul to the Telephone,” he pleaded. Not only did Bell chafe under the yoke of his invention, complaining bitterly that the business that had sprung up around it was “hateful to me at all times” and would “fetter me as an inventor,” but he worried that it would prevent him from helping those who needed him most.

His “first incentive to invention,” he would often say, had been a neighbor’s “injunction to do something useful.” Rising to the challenge, Bell, just fourteen years old, had built a contraption that used stiff-bristled brushes mounted to rotating paddles to scrape the husks off wheat. To his delight, the machine had worked, and, in the thump and thwack of his first invention, he had witnessed the potential of his own ideas.

Bell soon realized that, through invention, he could change things, make them better. It was clear to him, moreover, that the world needed to be changed. In a time of widespread illness and early death, he understood grief and suffering as well as any man. Before his twenty-fourth birthday he had lost both his brothers to tuberculosis, leaving him an only child and the sole object of his parents’ dreams and fears. “Our earthly hopes have now their beginning, middle and end in you,” his father had written him after his older, and last, brother’s death. “O, be careful.”

From painful personal experience, Bell also knew how difficult life could be for those fortunate enough to survive disease or injury. His mother, who had homeschooled him and his brothers and had taught him to play the