Intellectual Property Law for Engineers, Scientists, and Entrepreneurs. Howard B. Rockman
was used as a spark arrester; i.e., the water acted as a resistance that prevented sparks in the telegraph relay. These liquid experiments led to the famous quote, “Watson, come here. I want you,” which occurred on March 10, 1876. Thus, when Bell obtained his U.S. Patent No. 174,465 on March 7, 1876, it was three days before he finally achieved a working telephone.
Claim 5 of Bell’s patent was rather broad, and reads as follows:
5. The method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically, as herein described, by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound, substantially as set forth.
Subsequently, the basic Bell telephone patent was subject to 600 lawsuits of various kinds, mainly suits filed by Bell to prevent others from infringing on his patent.
The first lawsuit filed under the Bell patents was the so‐called Dowd case, in which Western Union was the alleged primary infringing defendant. This lawsuit was filed on September 12, 1878, in the Circuit Court of the United States for the District of Massachusetts, and there is no published court decision because the case was settled after trial while the judge had the case under advisement. This first lawsuit turned out to be the heart of the ensuing litigation that took place over the next 20 years.
Bell had very little in the way of documents, correspondence, sketches, or drawings to help his memory regarding his work in developing the telephone. In his search for such documentation, Bell even asked his wife, Mabel, for the keys to a bureau where she kept his love letters written to her before they were married, in an attempt to find any statement that he might have made in those letters that would help fix the dates of his telephone experiments. Bell told Mabel that he did not have the remotest intention of publishing any of his love letters.
In the litigation against Western Union, Bell’s attorney did not base his strategy on the concept of undulatory current as something that was new, but on the use of electricity in general for transmitting speech, as exemplified by the instruments described in the Bell patents. This strategy worked, because the Western Union lawyers had built their case around showing that undulatory currents were not new with Bell. Bell’s case, however was predicated on the application of undulatory currents. This led to the Bell Company winning control, with their patents, of the basic principle of telephony, not merely the particular devices used in telephony.
However, Bell still needed to present documentary evidence showing that he had worked on the telephone. During the spring and summer of 1879, Mabel Bell, his wife, and her cousin Mary Bletchford, went through all the old correspondence between Bell and his then fiancé, and also the notebooks that Bell was able to maintain, and found nothing. In the movie The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939), the Hollywood version of the story shows that the entire lawsuit depended upon one love letter submitted to the court by Mabel Bell. Thus, Hollywood used poetic license to turn a patent litigation matter into an interesting love story.
The lawsuit against Western Union was eventually settled before decision, when Western Union assigned its telephone patents to the Bell Company in exchange for Western Union being awarded 20% of rental receipts by Bell for the next 17 years. The Edison carbon transmitter patent, along with additional improvement patents, were obtained by the Bell Company as a result of the settlement, along with the network of agencies and customers of Western Union. Thus, after the settlement, the stock of American Bell Telephone Company nearly doubled in a few days.
The Bell Company’s decision to settle the case was predicated not on the theory that there was any weakness in Bell’s patents, but upon the fact that Western Union had brought other lawsuits against the Bell Company for infringement of later improvement patents, such as the Edison transmitter. As in any litigation, the parties considered that victory by either side is not a certainty, but distraction and the expense of resources are certain. Therefore, Bell and his advisors felt that the settlement was the best business choice.
Two other Bell patent‐related lawsuits are worthy of mention in this treatise. The first is the case of American Bell Telephone Company v. Globe Telephone Company, Antonio Meucci, and others, 31 Fed. 728 (SDNY, 1887). In this case, the defendants were attempting to invalidate broad Claim 5 of the basic telephone patent No. 174,465 obtained by Bell on March 7, 1876. The primary evidence offered in the defendant’s attempt to invalidate the Bell patent was Meucci’s allegation that he had developed a speaking telephone for domestic use as early as 1871, and since he was too poor to obtain a patent, his invention was made public by being published in Eco D’Italia, a local newspaper for Italian immigrants in New York in the latter half of the 19th century. Meucci had filed a caveat in the United States Patent Office on December 28, 1871, describing his device. The Globe Company, at the time of the suit, had never constructed any telephones, but was obtaining money from investors, after telling the investors that Globe had acquired patents that would be used to defeat the Bell patents, and that Globe’s patents would protect the purchasers or licensees against the Bell Company patents. The Globe Company realized that its own patents were worthless unless the Bell patent could be invalidated, and thus did not manufacture any telephones, so that the Bell Company could not accuse them of infringement. At the time of the trial, Mr. Meucci did not have any of his original devices to offer in evidence to show what it was he had developed, since his wife had sold them at a “garage sale” to raise money. The Meucci caveat was originally filed in 1871; it was renewed in December 1882, and again in December 1883. During that time, Mr. Meucci did not make any improvements on the device that was disclosed in his 1871 caveat.
Upon reviewing the evidence, the court in the Globe case held that the Meucci device resulted in nothing beyond conveying speech mechanically by means of a wire telephone. His caveat disclosed a metallic conductor as a sound conveying medium, and he merely supposed that by electrifying the apparatus or the operator, he could obtain a better result. He did not communicate his invention to anyone else who could appreciate it or assist him in perfecting and introducing his invention to the public, but between 1859 and 1871, he did file several patent applications for other inventions. Meucci was also in close association with one William E. Rider, who paid the expenses of his experiments. Therefore, the court in the Bell v. Globe case disregarded Mr. Meucci’s claims of poverty. The relation with Rider continued until 1867, when Mr. Rider became convinced that Meucci’s inventions were not sufficiently practical or profitable.
The court further held that the caveat of Meucci did not describe any elements of an electric speaking telephone, but that Meucci employed the then well‐known physical conducting effect of metallic conductors to convey sound, and enhanced the results by electrically insulating both the conductor and the communicating parties. The caveat filed by Meucci consisted of isolating two persons by placing them upon glass insulators, and putting them in communication by means of a telegraph wire. He then amended this statement by stating that the person sending the message was insulated, with the person receiving the signal in free electrical communication with the ground. These conditions could also be reversed.
The court held that Meucci’s device consisted of a mechanical telephone comprising a mouthpiece and an earpiece connected by a wire, and that beyond this the invention of Meucci was only imagination. The patent attorney who prepared the caveat for Mr. Meucci told Meucci that his idea gave promises of usefulness, but would require many experiments to prove the reality of his concept. This case, as were all of the other cases in which the validity of the original Bell telephone patent was in dispute, was resolved by upholding the validity of the Bell patent.
Despite this court decision, over 100 years later, on June 11, 2002, the United States House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. passed a resolution honoring the achievements of Antonio Meucci. This resolution briefly sets forth the fact that Meucci developed his speaking device in 1871 so he could communicate with his ailing wife on a different floor of his house, that he published a description of his invention in New York’s Italian language newspaper at the time, and that he was too poor to obtain patent protection or commercialization of his invention. The resolution also implies that Meucci submitted his earlier models to Western Union, who then lost them, but that before they were lost, Alexander Graham Bell conducted experiments in the same laboratory at Western Union where Meucci’s earlier