Calling Joe Johnston: everything is linked to CW

[matthew mckeon]

After visiting the Alexander Graham Bell Museum on Cape Breton Island last summer, I got a biography of this fascinating inventor.

Bell had to defend his valuable patent against men claiming to have beat him in the race to make the first telephone.

One of the less plausible claims was by a man named Drawhaugh, who claimed to have invented the telephone before Bell. He set up a company called Pan Electric, and began to sell pirated phones.

To attract investors and customers, Drawhaugh got, or at least claimed to have gotten, the endorsement of former Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston!

Bell would crush Drawhaugh legally, who was reduced to saying he was sure he had invented the telephone, but couldn't remember how. His frustration with the lawsuit was part of the reason that Bell began spending much of each year in Baddeck, Nova Scotia.

Drawhaugh who surface again, decades later, claiming he had invented the radio before Marconi.

Its ironic, yet fitting considering his own obsession with the date of his commission, that Johnston would be part of a controversy about who was supposed to be first.

[gary]

Now that's something I never learned about Uncle Joe.

[ole]

Wonder how much he was promised for his endorsement?

...who was reduced to saying he was sure he had invented the telephone, but couldn't remember how.

I can see him talking to Dave Letterman now. "I really did. Honest. Without my lab and assistants, I just can't show you how I did. But I did. Really!"

ole