After American President James Garfield was shot, Canadian inventor Alexander Graham Bell tried to save his life with a rudimentary prototype he was working on: the metal detector.
Despite having recently been elected President, Garfield was something of a mystery. He had been drafted against his will during his party’s convention to be their candidate. Even though he campaigned reluctantly, he won the 1880 election.
Less than four months after becoming President, Garfield was shot on January 2nd, 1881, by a mentally unwell supporter named Charles Guitreau. Suffering delusions of grandeur, Guitreau considered himself personally responsible for Garfield’s election (despite not having done anything) and was furious at not being appointed Ambassador to France.
The President was gravely wounded, bedridden and desperately ill. For months, newspapers published daily in-depth reports on his health.
As Alexander Graham Bell read newspaper reports of the President’s chief physician Dr. Willard Bliss’ treatment regimen, he was shocked and appalled. The doctor was repeatedly probing the President’s gunshot wound to try and find the bullet that was still inside of him.
“The search with knife and probe among vital and sensitive tissues could not be otherwise than painful and dangerous,” Bell later wrote in a lengthy and technical paper published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “The thought naturally arose that science should be able to discover a less barbarous method.”
Alexander Graham Bell was only 34 years old at the time, yet was a household name in the United States and Canada. Half a decade earlier, in 1876, he had patented the telephone. Despite that invention that made him wealthy, he was more of an enthusiastic tinkerer than a professional inventor.
However, while working on the telephone, he’d noticed that bringing metal objects toward his contraption made a sound in the receiver.
He and his assistant William Tainter revisited those notes and, within only a couple of days, managed to piece together the rudimentary metal detector.
“A much better balance was obtained than could possibly be anticipated,” Bell wrote. “Upon now bringing a leaden bullet near a small coil, a distinct ticking sound could be heard from the telephone.”
This news attracted widespread media attention. Theoretical experts were summoned from major universities like Harvard, and the enormous battery systems powering the Capitol building were put at his disposal as he tried to refine his device.
By July 22nd, the contraption was considered advanced enough to experiment on humans. Wounded American Civil War veterans who had bullets inside of them were summoned.
While Bell noted that when testing on them, “a feeble sound” was heard as the device passed over bullet wounds, yet he was dissatisfied.
“It is unfortunately the case that … lead gives the poorest effect of all the metals,” he explained, while jokingly adding “If people would only make their bullets out of silver or iron there would be no difficulty in finding them in any part of the body!”
Special new condensers were ordered and rushed across the country to Bell.
“On the evening of the same day (July 26th),” he wrote, “our apparatus was carried to the Executive Mansion, and an experiment made upon the person of the President.”
His first attempt was a failure. He wrote: “To my great distress, a balance could not be found.”
Went home to tinker with his equipment to try and get it to work properly.
Three days later, he tried again. This was even less successful, getting no sound at all. He later discovered a wire had frayed through.
When he returned to the Executive Mansion for a third and final time on August 1st, the results baffled him. He heard the sound everywhere. No matter where he put his metal detector on the President, it went off.
As if that weren’t bad enough, his metal detector seemed to show the loudest sounds on the right side of the President’s body.
Surely this could not be right, because the President’s personal physician Dr. William Bliss, who was during this session in the room as Bell did his work, insisted that the bullet was in the left side of his body.
While the conflict-averse Bell chose not to publicly contradict or argue with Dr. Bliss, that night he was ambushed by a New York Times reporter. Startled, he let slip to the reporter that: “I explored the whole right side and back … an area two inches in diameter was found to be sonorous … located within the rib.”
This suggests that Bell’s experiment yielded more results than he let on publicly, which directly contradicted the chief doctor’s official results.
Officially, Bell wrote, “I was by no means satisfied … no such effects had been observed before.”
He returned to his lab but found that his machine was in perfect working order. Annoyed, he went back to the White House on August 2nd to “ascertain from the surgeons whether they were perfectly sure that all metal had been removed from the neighbourhood of the bed.”
“It was then recollected,” he sourly noted, “that underneath the horse-hair mattress on which the President lay was another mattress composed of steel wires.” This had thrown off his metal detector.
Seemingly exasperated by the uncooperative doctor, publicly, Alexander Graham Bell announced he to a family emergency and departed the American capital. That marked the end of his experiments on the wounded President.
He didn’t stop tinkering with his metal detector, though. He went to Boston, where he, along with other researchers, perfected the invention, can is found today in the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site, located in his old mansion in Baddeck, Cape Breton.
On September 18th, 1881, President James Garfield died from complications from his gunshot wound, becoming the second American President to be killed by an assassin.
His autopsy showed that the bullet that killed him was in fact not lodged in the left side of his body like his doctor had insisted, but on the right side of his body, just like Alexander Graham Bell’s invention had shown.
