Shulman was reading Bell's laboratory notebooks when he noticed something odd: Bell had been working on his telephone for months without much success until suddenly, on March 8, 1876, he tried a new contraption that used a needle in a water-and-acid solution to complete an electrical circuit.
Shulman says he did not set out to debunk Bell: 'It was all a total accident.'Īuthor of four other books on science and technology, Shulman, 48, was planning to write his fifth book on the relationship between two of America's most famous inventors - Bell and Thomas Edison - when he stumbled upon evidence for what he calls 'a vexing intrigue at the heart of one of the world's most important inventions.' What we have here, folks, is a full-blown historical brouhaha.
