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Who invented the telephone? In the United States, this question has a widely known answer. Alexander Graham Bell routinely ranks among the hundred "greatest" or "most influential"Americans, whether chosen by historians or internet polls.1 His cry of "Mr.Watson-come here-I want to see you," although often misquoted, is one of the best-known exclamations in American history.2 More than one hundred and thirty years after the event, Bell andWatson's first telephone call remains a classroom staple: a standard device for teaching Americans about the nation's inventive past, and even for placing technological change at the center of mainstream history.3
Bell's iconic status requires some explanation. Not every modern technological necessity has a famous origin story; there is no household-name inventor associated with the refrigerator, for example, or the television. Bell's fame, by contrast, rests solidly on two sets of popular historical associations. First, Bell is indelibly identified with a great twentieth-century institution: American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T, or "Ma Bell") and its nationwide "Bell System"-together, the corporate offspring of the inventor's original telephone enterprise;4 and second, the telephone boasts a classic inventive controversy.Many other individuals claimed to have invented the telephone, and some of them protested that Bell had seized the honor fraudulently. These contentions continue to attract attention, most recently in a trio of detective-style historical studies by A. Edward Evenson, Burton Baker, and Seth Shulman.5 An enduring frisson of doubt, combined with the telephone's rich technological and corporate history, ensures continuing interest in the question, "Who invented the telephone?"
The purpose of this article is not to venture a definitive answer; instead, the following pages will explain the importance of the question to the early history of the telephone-and hence ultimately to Bell's place in American memory. At the center of my story is an institution seldom credited with cultural authority: the patent law. During the 1880s, in one of the largest and most controversial litigation campaigns of any kind during the nineteenth century, Bell's attorneys won a string of patent cases that brought the entire telephone industry under a legal monopoly. Courts accepted Bell's claim to have pioneered the technology and responded by granting him broad rights over electrical speech communication. "Who invented the telephone?"-far from being a mere matter of scientific curiosity-became the...