Ipswich man demands £1bn, claiming Bell stole bamboo telephone invention idea.
By Our Angling Correspondent: Courtney Pike
The long-established history of the telephone has been thrown into fresh uncertainty after a man from Ipswich launched a £1 billion legal claim insisting the device was actually inspired by a Victorian inventor armed with bamboo, twine and, allegedly, misplaced trust.
Gary Tinkle, 37, says family records prove that his great, great, great, great, great grandfather, Ebeneezer Tinkle, devised a working telephonic communication system decades before Alexander Graham Bell became a household name.
According to Mr Tinkle, the prototype consisted of carefully selected lengths of bamboo connected by a tightly wound ball of garden twine. While historians have questioned whether bamboo telephones function over meaningful distances, Mr Tinkle says that is “missing the point entirely”.
Family lore maintains that Ebeneezer demonstrated the principles of the invention to Bell during an evening in a Glasgow public house. Mr Tinkle alleges Bell listened carefully, bought another round, asked several innocent-looking questions, then departed with what would later become one of history’s most celebrated inventions.
“History supports our claim,” Mr Tinkle explained. “People are always saying ‘give me a tinkle’, meaning call me on the phone.”
Bell End
He has now lodged a High Court claim against the Bell estate, seeking £1 billion in damages for what he describes as “We want to bring to an end the largest unresolved intellectual property dispute since Ford Motors copied the wheel.”
Legal experts say the case faces several practical difficulties, including the passage of more than a century, the absence of surviving bamboo evidence and uncertainty over whether nineteenth-century pub conversations constituted enforceable non-disclosure agreements.
The Bell estate has declined to comment publicly.
Meanwhile, members of the Tinkle family say recognition matters more than money, although they acknowledge that £1 billion would also be “a comforting gesture”.
Museum curators are reportedly reviewing whether a reconstructed bamboo-and-twine telephone should stand beside Bell’s exhibits, provided somebody can first work out how to plug it in.
Meanwhile: First mobile phone sold in Norfolk