Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [107]
The results, he wrote in his laboratory notebook, barely able to contain his excitement, were “Splendid!” In just four days, he had managed to extend the instrument’s range to more than five inches. The problem was that the only way to balance the induction with just two coils was to overlap them, and they were extraordinarily sensitive to the slightest movement in relation to one another.
By this point the last thing Bell was worried about was aesthetics, but the induction balance had to be portable. Using what he would later describe as “forced exertions,” he and Tainter managed to encase the coils in two rectangular wooden blocks, held together by four pins made of ebonite, a type of hard rubber. The wires now emerged from the sides of the blocks rather than through the top of the handle, but there was no time to make a new handle, so the original one, with an empty hole through the center, would have to do. “In its present form,” Bell admitted to Bliss, the instrument was a “very clumsy affair.”
On July 31, the day before he was scheduled to return to the White House, Bell tested his redesigned invention on a man who lived at the Soldiers’ Home, a veterans’ retirement compound that included the summer cottage where Lincoln had written the final draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. The test subject this time was Private John McGill, who, for nearly twenty years, had lived with a bullet from the Civil War battle of Gaines’ Mill. Bell had “no difficulty,” he wrote to Bliss that night, “in finding a sonorous spot in his back, where undoubtedly the bullet lies imbedded.” After the test Bell found that, in this case, he could actually confirm the results simply by pressing his fingers on the “sonorous spot,” and feeling the bullet beneath McGill’s skin.
At about nine o’clock that night, after sending Mabel a ringingly confident telegram, declaring that there was “no need of further secrecy,” Bell allowed a reporter from the Boston Herald to join him in his laboratory. Welcomed with a hail “Come up and see us” from Bell himself, the reporter made his way to the door of the brick building, which was nearly hidden behind overgrown trees and shrubs. After stopping for a moment to admire the light streaming from the windows, marveling that “every room was in use,” he was led into the laboratory, where Bell, his father, and Tainter stood, surrounded by the detritus of their work.
Every surface, from tables to chairs to cabinets, even the floor they stood on, was covered with “coils of wire, batteries, instruments and electrical apparatus of every sort,” the reporter marveled. “The light from the jets, burning brilliantly in the centre of the room, was reflected from a hundred metallic forms. It was reflected too from the smiling faces of the great electrician and his assistant, who saw success almost within their grasp.”
Bliss was waiting for Bell when he and Tainter arrived at the White House the next morning, carrying between them the induction balance, awkwardly shaped and roughly hewn but working perfectly, and with nearly twice the range it had had just four days earlier. For the first time since he had begun work on this invention, Bell felt calm and confident. “My new form of Induction Balance,” he had written to Bliss the day before, “gives brilliant promise of success.”
Bliss, however, had a very specific definition of success. He expected Bell not only to find the bullet, but to find it where Bliss believed it to be. He would not allow the inventor and his assistant to waste his time or the president’s energy on fruitless efforts. It was understood that they were to search the right side of Garfield’s body, and only the right. Bliss agreed to let Bell and Tainter conduct the test themselves this time, but he would be standing next to the president’s bed, closely watching the examination.
As Bell slowly ran the induction balance over what he referred to as the “suspected spot,” he suddenly