The Call
The Call
How the invention of the telephone appeals to the conspiracy theorist in all of us
The road I grew up on is a 35 MPH zone with no sidewalk. It curves slightly uphill (or slightly downhill depending on which direction you’re going), leaving a driver blind to what’s on the other end of the turn. At the base of the curve is a bridge over a little creek with guard rails practically on top of the white barrier line on both sides. It’s one of the least pedestrian-friendly roads I can think of.
My mother, a woman more risk-averse than just about anyone I’ve ever known, emerged from the wooded area just off the road one day. While I spent plenty of time down there – first as a kid doing things kids do in the woods, then as a teenager doing things teenagers do in the woods, the creek wasn’t her usual hangout.
On this particular day, though, she was in the woods searching for any sign of the workshop where a guy who once lived in a house next door may or may not have invented the telephone before Alexander Graham Bell. His name was Daniel Drawbaugh, and chances are you’ve never heard of him.
Daniel Drawbaugh was an inventor who spent most of his time in the 1860s working in an area then-known as Eberly's Mill, Pennsylvania. It's basically just that one street, which snakes along the Cedar Run offshoot of the Yellow Breeches creek.
As the story goes, Drawbaugh whipped up a rudimentary telephone “from a 'flexible membrane' over a teacup that he had connected by a piece of wire to a receiver powered by an electro-magnet."
The story I heard was that Drawbaugh created his "talking machine" with no outside influence, and was on track to secure the patent and earn his place in history, but he was strapped for cash. Alexander Graham Bell, however, was not.
Drawbaugh battled Bell in court for years and years, until it finally reached the Supreme Court and he lost. Drawbaugh blamed a Supreme Court justice of having stock in the Bell Telephone company and therefore rigging the outcome of his case, but that is an absurd idea that a Supreme Court justice could have any outside influence.
In the end, Drawbaugh got nothing. But, the people of Eberly's Mill, now part of Lower Allen Township, remember. At least one did.
Back to her for a minute.
In the late 2000s, maybe 2007 or 2008 when this hunt in the woods took place, my dad worked as a producer for the Harrisburg PBS affiliate (which I mentioned before here), and was working on a show about our town. My mom got involved with some research into Drawbaugh after knowing the story about his claim to the telephone patent. I feel like it’s important to note that she was doing this in something resembling a professional capacity, rather than a loose treasure hunt.
My mother is not a conspiracy theorist. She’s not even a skeptic. She is, if anything, prone to believing everything you tell her, because she inherently trusts people. But, the deeper story of Drawbaugh and the telephone interested her enough that she dug around in the woods trying to find some ruin of his workshop based on geographical clues in historical documents from almost 200 years ago.
There’s something about the invention of the telephone specifically that appeals to people’s conspiracy receptor.
On an early episode of “The Sopranos,” Tony is going on at the dinner table about the historical mistreatment of Italians. Carmella tells Anthony Junior that the inventor of the telephone was actually an Italian person.
“Alexander Graham Bell was Italian?” Anthony Junior asks. Idiot.
Tony angrily corrects him that “Antonio Meucci invented the telephone, and he got robbed! Everybody knows that!”
Meadow jumps in with some snide shit about how the Italians also invented the mafia and derails the whole thing. It would have been interesting to see Tony go further into how Bell and co. also screwed over Meucci, who essentially made a telephone from one part of his Staten Island house to his lab, and when he filed patent paperwork didn’t mention electromagnetic transmission. Bell’s did.
Meucci and Drawbaugh aren’t the only claims to the telephone invention. There’s Johann Philipp Reis, who used his device to transmit the message "Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat" ("The horse does not eat cucumber salad"), thus also inventing the prank telephone call. He’s one of the few notable residents on the Gelnhausen Wikipedia page, so there’s no doubt some people in town there who would happily tell you about how he’s actually the guy.
Why is it the invention of the telephone specifically that awakens this phenomenon? Is it something like a little brother complex, where people need to defend their town or heritage, which they feel hasn’t gotten its due? Is it some form of loser denial where you can’t accept that your guy just might not have been the first to the finish line without crying foul play?
I asked my mom this because, in addition to being trusting in people, she’s also possibly the least competitive person who ever existed. So, it’s not like she has this primal need to be part of whatever she perceives as the “winning team” here. Why all of the effort? Why the connection to this story?
She said she just actually wanted to see that workshop, to know the story was real.
“I fully believed it all.”
There were other stories swirling around about Drawbaugh. To call them urban legends would belie the abundance of cows near my childhood home.
Stories like how someone may or may not have tried to set his house on fire and they used the creek to put it out, or how when he died a mysterious bell-shaped floral arrangement showed up at the funeral.
I have absolutely no sources for these claims, because these are just stories I heard growing up. They’re fun, and it’s cool to look at the house next door and imagine clandestine activity by the guy in your history textbook. (Not that our history books in the U.S. are bereft of guys who did bad things.)
According to Scientific American, nearly a quarter of Americans believe there are conspiracy theories “behind many things in the world.”
“People can assume that if these bad guys weren’t there, then everything would be fine,” Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist wrote. “Whereas if you don’t believe in a conspiracy theory, then you just have to say terrible things happen randomly.”
Bell beating Drawbaugh or Meucci to a patent isn’t a “horrible thing” to most people. It’s just what happened. But the inclination to believe a conspiracy theory explains this phenomenon a little. It’s nicer to believe that there was a single boogeyman that stopped honest inventors from achieving a fortune and putting their town on the map than it is to realize that rich guys have won throughout history, leaving behind a trail of nameless losers.
People, specifically parents in suburban and rural areas like mine, have gotten mixed up in a lot more dangerous conspiracy theories than ones that lead to walks in the woods and stories about a guy inventing a telephone and using it to broadcast nonsense about horses.
The telephone conspiracy is sort of a harmless Q-light. Diet Q. People on my street might not tell you that JFK Jr. is coming back, but if you mention Alexander Graham Bell they might have a good story about how he screwed over a guy named Daniel Drawbaugh. There are surely similar stories in German and Italian about how Bell was the imposter, and their guy got robbed of his rightful glory.
I’m extraordinarily thankful that my own parents never fell into the Q-Anon rabbit hole or even anything remotely close to that.
But it shows that in each of us, there’s something that wants there to be a bigger story. We relish the idea of discovering that the story we were fed our whole lives isn’t actually what happened. There are countless books and podcasts and shows devoted to this idea.
We search for answers in ruins of workshops. We tell stories to our kids and those stories become distorted with each telling.
One big game of telephone.
And for the subjects of those legends, the most they really end up with is a blue historical marker telling part of their story. The only problem is that the little sign is right on the apex of a turn that most cars take well above 35 miles per hour, leaving very little time to read and discouraging pedestrians who otherwise might stop and check it out.
You see it?
Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Cartoon Hearts.