Who invented the Telephone
Mr. Beauchamp’s article recounts how United States patent law ensured Alexander Graham Bell came to be recognized as the sole inventor of the telephone and how the company/corporation he founded took a singular court argument and built it into a monopolistic enterprise, the premiere corporation in the world by mid-20th century. In particular, he claims that the development of U.S. patent law in the 19th century ensured this success while at the same time abetting litigation by numerous parties who wanted to secure the benefits of being recognized as the inventor of the telephone, or to undermine Bell’s claim to the same. His article details how these judicial decisions effected a business/commercial environment where monopoly could take hold. In a word, the author sees the patent law itself as the determinant, decisive factor that shaped these events.
The author details well how successive court cases were ensured to ensue by a U.S. patent law that recognized claims of priority take precedence: inventors/inventions were sponsored by corporate and/or government concerns to lay claim to the invention. Thus, he maintains the claim to invention of the telephone became a question of Graham Bell and his lawyers’ ability to fashion evidence to discredit rival claims in order to gain patentee rights. The strength of his account is its’ attention to detailing how, from an individual/corporate perspective, parties were driven to claim the prize of patent rights for the telephone. In this regard, it is instructive on how law can be a formidable, formative influence in shaping people’s actions.
The shortcoming of the author’s approach is that it is overly legally deterministic. It assumes that law, in part, generates social reality, and not the other way around, social reality being an expression and extension of the cultural values collectively observed and adhered to. In other words, the author does not sufficiently contextualize the larger playing field on which the litigation battles were fought. This failure can be observed by focusing on a key event whose import he does not fully address.
The second Bell court case is illuminating here. The author does not sufficiently elaborate on the connection between two key features in recounting it; namely, Bell’s first lawyer, Chauncey Smith’s championing ‘undulating current’ as original to that device, and Judge John Lowell’s construing Bell’s invention as a ‘new art’. The judge’s pronouncement about the invention ensured the lawyer’s argument would acquire monopolistic status for the invention. By conferring unique status to the patent holder the property rights of others such as farmers, railway companies and urban residents were overlooked. Instructive here is the mindset that informed his decision, for he treated the invention as a work of art in the way people in the 19th century regarded art – something entirely the product of individual genius. The singularity of the technical achievement was equated by the judge with an act of original creation. He treated an invention as unique rather than as a discovery. As such, Lowell’s pronouncement is of greater consequence than the lawyer’s argument, an oversight on Beauchamp’s part, for, by inference, where there is ‘new art’ [creation] there is also a new artist [creator]. His ruling conferred monopolistic status to intellectual property and its creator.
The author concludes that the cog around which events unfolded was a question of control and benefit. He gives a very good account of how these became the scope and focus of the persons/corporations involved. However, he does not explore how the first two trials in particular brought into contradiction the American ethos of free enterprise and property rights. It is difficult to imagine similar events unfolding at this time elsewhere, such as another republic like France. There litigants would not be implicitly perceived as equal before God in rights, the political reality of American society. The ruling by Judge Lowell betrays a Boston Brahmin religious mindset in that it treats a creator, Mr. Bell, as like the Creator, one who is to exclusively enjoy the benefits of his creation (art). However, this further brings into distinction the inherent contradiction between free enterprise (in which all are equal before God to pursue benefit) and those chosen by God to enjoy the benefits of their work(s). In other words, there definitely are overtones of the Protestant work ethic implicit in the ruling, ones that do not square with the spirit of free enterprise and all citizens being equal.
Free enterprise and property right center around the individual (as opposed to the collectivity). When treated equally they are a formula for conflict, as the final U.S. Supreme Court decision and the deliberations involved reveal. In other words, it was these two value systems brought into conflict that generated the heat and smoke of litigation. The United States patent law attempted to address both (unsuccessfully) and in that regard is a cultural construct and not the creation of litigants, lawyers, or judges. When Alexander Graham Bell first spoke to his assistant it was not the voice of God that spoke through that first telephone.
