The Telephone Gambit – Seth Shulman ****

If there’s one thing that common knowledge is particularly poor on, it’s who invented what. Edison, for instance, only shared joint honours on the light bulb, and didn’t invent the gramophone (yes, he did invent the phonograph, using a cylinder, but not the gramophone). But we all know Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone… didn’t he?

Seth Shulman’s book sets out to explore who really did invent it, and why after all these years, Bell still has the laurels. While Bell did win the patent battles (unlike Edison over the light bulb), there was already plenty of evidence back in the nineteenth century that Bell wasn’t the first to the telephone, and wasn’t even the first to submit his patent – but skulduggery and commercial manipulation seems to have triumphed.

It’s a good story, and well told here. It’s something of a meta history – rather than plunge us into Bell’s time, Shulman tells us the story of his own discovery of a key similarity between the diagram in Bell’s notebook and the (at the time supposedly secret) drawings of his competitor, already lodged with the patent office. It’s very much a story of detection and unweaving the tangled record, rather than straight history. I found this very interesting, though there is a slight danger of giving us too much archival content and not enough well-crafted narrative.

If you thought you knew the story of the telephone, think again. Seth Shulman will change you view (reluctantly, I suspect – Bell is something of a hero figure) on what really happened back in the 1870s.

Paperback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...

Search This Blog