Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,94

him to this.”

While the president slept, Bell worked quickly in an adjoining room to set up the induction balance. Having sent Tainter to the basement with the interrupter, which was too loud to have nearby as they performed the test, he now arranged the battery, condenser, and balancing coils on a simple wooden table. After everything had been connected, Bell lifted the telephone receiver to his ear. To his horror, what he heard was not the cool silence of a balanced induction, but a strange sputtering sound he had never heard before.

Frantically, Bell tried everything he could think of to get rid of the sound. He sent Tainter back to the basement to check on the interrupter, and he carefully adjusted each of the four coils. No matter what he did, the sputtering remained. Pulling a lead bullet out of his pocket, he quickly ran a test and found, to his tremendous relief, that the invention appeared to work. The sound, however, was distracting, and Bell was concerned that the induction balance’s hearing distance might be affected as well.

Before Tainter could even return from the basement, Bell turned to find Garfield’s doctors standing in the door that separated the two rooms, beckoning him to come in. Gripping the handle of the induction balance’s round, wooden detector in one hand and the telephone receiver in the other, Bell stepped back into the president’s room, wires snaking behind him. Bliss had ordered the screen that surrounded the president’s bed to be removed. Garfield was now awake, his wound had been dressed, and he was looking directly at Bell.

Taking in the long wires that stretched out the door and down the hallway, and were about to be draped over his body, Garfield asked Bell to explain to him how the instrument worked. After listening intently, the president allowed himself to be rolled over onto his left side so that the test could begin. He rested his head on an attendant’s shoulder, supporting the weight of his body by clasping his arms around the man’s neck. “His head was so buried on the gentleman’s shoulder,” Bell would later recall, “that he could not see any person in the room.”

Garfield’s bed was surrounded by doctors, eager to see as much of the procedure as possible. The focus of their attention, however, was not just the president and Bell, but Bliss. After carefully pulling Garfield’s dressing gown to one side so that his back was exposed down to his thighs, the doctor turned expectantly to Bell, who handed him the induction balance’s exploring arm. Although it made more sense for Bell to search for the bullet himself while he listened through the telephone receiver, as he had done many times before, Bliss had made it understood that he would be the one to handle the exploring arm, and to decide which areas would be explored.

As everyone in the room looked on in silence, Bliss took the wooden disk by its handle and slowly began to run the coils along the president’s spine, starting at the wound and traveling downward. Bell stood behind Garfield’s bed, the telephone receiver pressed to his ear. Although he waited to hear the distinctive buzzing sound that he knew would indicate the presence of a bullet, the only sound that reached him was the same faint, maddening sputter that had earlier appeared without warning.

Turning Garfield over onto his back, they tried again, this time passing the coils over his abdomen. At one point, Bell thought he heard a “sharp and sudden reinforcement of sound,” but he was unable to find it again. “That horrid unbalanced spluttering kept coming & going,” Bell would later write in bitter frustration. Finally, with the President quickly tiring, he had no choice but to end the experiment.

Although Bliss asked him to try again at another date, Bell felt the sharp sting of humiliation. “I feel woefully disappointed & disheartened,” he admitted to Mabel that night. The only consolation lay in knowing that he would “go right at the problem again tomorrow.”

Returning to his laboratory early the next morning, Bell was sickened to find that the problem lay not in the induction balance at all, but simply in the way he had set it up. In his haste to improve the invention, Bell had added the condenser at the last minute. While setting up the induction balance at the White House, he had connected the condenser to only one side of the instrument. Had he connected it to