Lives of a Cell

The story of a man who invented the precursor to the cell phone, and suffered greatly because of his invention.

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A century ago Nathan Stubblefield invented the precursor to the cell phone. It brought him nothing but grief

"Kentucky farmer invents wireless telephone" blared the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on January 12, 1902. The full-page feature article described the remarkable natural-conduction device invented by Nathan Stubblefield, a 42-year-old melon farmer who'd devoted every spare hour and penny he had to establishing telephone service in his hometown, Murray, Ky. This time--his third attempt at connecting the widely separated households in the area--Stubblefield was sure he had Ma Bell by the horns.

Stubblefield's primitive cell phone had been a long time in coming. His first foray into phoning had occurred about 17 years earlier, when the self-educated electrician circumvented the behemoth Bell System, which had a lock on patents for electric phones, by inventing a mechanical phone. Called the "sound phone," Stubblefield's contraption was a dead ringer for the tin-cans-and-string devices kids are still building. It was reasonably inexpensive to install, and by the late 1880s Stubblefield had set up franchises for it in Murray and a few other towns nearby. Soon, however, a group of local investors brought in the Bell telephone, and Stubblefield was put out of business.

Having briefly tasted success, the fledgling entrepreneur sought new ways to challenge his nemesis. With a wireless system, he figured, he could not only link up the folks of rural western Kentucky without the expense of putting up poles and stringing cable but also create his own market. He turned to electromagnetic induction, a phenomenon he'd probably stumbled across in Scientific American, for his initial design.

Electromagnetic induction works this way: Current passing through a primary coil of wire establishes a magnetic field of about 15 square feet. When a secondary coil is placed within the magnetic field, the primary coil induces current into the secondary one, even though the two aren't touching. From his reading Stubblefield knew that the current could easily carry sound. He proved it one afternoon in 1892 to a teenager who lived next door.

Stubblefield handed Rainey Wells a telephone receiver attached by a stretch of telephone wire to a small coil of telephone wire (the secondary coil) that he'd mounted in the bottom of a nail keg. The coil was a foot in diameter and had 1,000 turns of wire. He told the boy to go into the orchard and listen. When Wells had moved out of earshot, Stubblefield leaned forward and spoke into a telephone receiver he'd hooked up to a box outfitted with three 6-volt dry-cell batteries for power and attached by a length of wire to a large coil (the primary coil). He'd wrapped the large coil, which had a diameter of 10 feet and 156 turns of wire, around nearby trees to keep it out of sight. With the receiver pressed to his ear, an amazed Wells heard Stubblefield saying, "Hello, Rainey. Can you hear me?"

Stubblefield experimented with his induction phone for several years but never got it to work over distances greater than half a mile. Frustrated, he turned to a new product: a wireless phone based on natural conduction. In place of the wires in an electrical circuit, the system used the earth or a body of water. Everyone knew, for instance, that water conducted electricity (that's why swimmers dash from lakes during lightning storms), but no one had developed a phone that used the medium to transmit voice. Stubblefield took the same battery-powered transmitter he'd used in the induction phone but knocked off the large coil. In its place he ran 50 feet of telephone wire to each of two iron rods sunk into a river or the ground about 100 yards apart. He hooked up the receiver to a second pair of rods sunk about a mile from the first pair. When he turned on the juice, he could send a signal from one set of rods to the other through the water or the earth. Moreover, multiple receivers could pick up the signal.

Stubblefield demonstrated his natural-conduction system in Murray's public square on New Year's Day 1902, broadcasting music (harmonica) and voice (counting to 10) to five receivers simultaneously, one of them five blocks away. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch learned of the proceedings and sent a reporter to interview the inventor. In the article Stubblefield confidently predicted that his natural-conduction device would eventually be used to transmit news all over the world.

A group of entrepreneurs from New York City read the story and offered Stubblefield half a million shares of stock in the newly formed Wireless Telephone Company of America in exchange for the remarkable talking machine. Stubblefield accepted the offer. That spring he and his oldest son, Bernard, conducted public demonstrations, widely covered by both the popular and the scientific press, in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. Then came a fateful exhibition at Battery Park, in New York City: the invention didn't work. One theory blamed the rocky soil, but the cause was more likely the background noise generated by the large number of electrical circuits already grounded in the heavily populated area. After the secretary of Wireless Telephone ordered him to perpetrate a sham by burying wires connecting the transmitter and the receiver, Stubblefield realized that the entire venture was a stock-fraud scheme. The corporation had duped him out of his invention and in the process had swindled many investors from Murray. Despite six months of national acclaim, Stubblefield severed his ties with the company.

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