Alexander Graham Bell Tried to Save a Dying James Garfield—But a Doctor’s Ego Stopped Him

Key takeaways:

• The new Netflix series Death by Lightning reveals that Alexander Graham Bell invented an early metal detector to try and save the life of President James A. Garfield.
• When Garfield was shot, doctors tried to find the bullet lodged in him, but their own missteps may have ultimately killed the president.
• The arrogance of the publicity-hungry doctor attending Garfield, as well as a metal box spring, ultimately foiled Bell’s attempts to save the president’s life.

When President James A. Garfield was shot by deranged office seeker Charles Guiteau in 1881, he didn’t have to die. One of the world’s most famous inventors, Alexander Graham Bell, built a device that could have saved the 20th president—but hubris and human error got in the way.

Netflix’s new series Death by Lightning revisits the fateful chain of events that followed as Bell and Garfield’s doctors raced to find Guiteau’s bullet. Here’s how innovation, ego, and outdated medical practices collided in a tragedy that should have been avoided.

Part of Biography.com’s special coverage of Netflix’s Death by Lightning, exploring the true story behind the assassination of President James A. Garfield.

How Alexander Graham Bell Tried to Save James A. Garfield—The Real Story Behind Death by Lightning

In the days following Garfield’s assassination attempt on July 2, 1881, the president lay in bed, slowly suffering from a bullet lodged in his body that could not be located. In an attempt to locate it, the doctors in attendance ultimately left Garfield in a worse state than if they had done nothing at all, as they prodded at the wound with unclean medical instruments and their own dirty hands.

Garfield lays in bed after being shot in 1881.

But don’t forgive these bygone doctors with a sentiment of “well, they didn’t know better” just yet. By 1881, Joseph Lister’s research on germs and antiseptic measures been published for decades, first appearing in The Lancet in 1867. As Candice Millard writes in Destiny of the Republic (the inspiration for Netflix’s Death by Lightning), “By 1876, Lister’s steady and astonishing success had silenced nearly all of his detractors at home and in Europe. The United States, however, remained inexplicably resistant.”

Doctor Willard Bliss

One of those still resistant in 1881 was Doctor Willard Bliss, whose career as an Army surgeon brought him into contact with luminaries like Zachary Taylor (just five years before he was elected president) and poet Walt Whitman. Summoned to the president’s bedside by Robert Todd Lincoln (Garfield’s shooting was one of three assassinations he was connected to), Bliss swiftly took control of the situation, an intervention which proved detrimental to Garfield’s well-being.

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Bliss, as Millard’s book points out, was a glory-hound whose medical career was riddled with scandals involving bribes, fake cancer cures, and even an expulsion from the District of Columbia Medical Society for his endorsement of homeopathy. That last factor may have played a large role in why Bliss ultimately allowed Garfield’s wound to become infected by his own unclean hands.

“The experience of being humiliated for embracing homeopathy, a fairly new medical field, made Bliss hesitant to embrace another new medical field, anti-septic medicine, when it emerged in the 1870s,” according to PBS.

Bliss wasn’t about to risk his comeback in the 1880s celebrity doctor scene by sharing the spotlight with the theories of Lister. He was more willing, however, to share with one of the world’s most famous inventors, who believed he’d built a device that could locate the elusive bullet.

What Did Alexander Graham Bell Invent to Save James A. Garfield?

Bell was at work in a Washington lab when reports came in about President Garfield’s shooting, and the subsequent search for the bullet lost in his body. Recognizing that locating the bullet was a matter of life and death for Garfield, Bell recalled that during his earlier work on the telephone, he had potentially stumbled on the elements of a metal detecting device, which, in theory, could help doctors find the bullet lodged in the president.

“Originally designed to balance the induction field of his telephone to clear up static interference, he noted that bringing metal objects toward the device caused a sound in the telephone receiver,” according to the National Parks Service (NPS).

What Bell supposedly stumbled across during his telephone experimentation was a four-coil induction balance, though Bell was not the first to make this discovery. Just before the 1880s began, Professor David Edward Hughes (inventor of the microphone) published his own research on four-coil induction balance.

Nor was Bell even the first to attempt to use a metal detecting device to find a bullet lodged in a prominent political figure: that credit goes Professor Favre of Marseilles, who, in 1862, used a rudimentary metal probe attached to a battery and bell to located a bullet lodged in the foot of Italian general and revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Why Didn’t Alexander Graham Bell’s Invention Work?

It only took Bell and his team a few days to assemble their device, which they first tested on a wooden board with bullets fired into it, then on animal carcasses, and finally on Civil War veterans. Bell’s device worked every time.

It should have worked on Garfield.

A sketch of Bell’s induction-balance for finding the location of a bullet in a human body.

But Bell’s machine encountered two obstacles: the bed on which Garfield lay, and the doctor standing beside it. An initial scan of the president failed due to static, a result of a condenser Bell had added to his device that interfered with the receiver. After he corrected the issue, he was prepared to scan Garfield again, but Bliss was certain the bullet was on right side of Garfield’s torso and didn’t permit Bell to search anywhere else on the president’s body.

As Bell scanned the spot on Garfield that Bliss had already (mistakenly) determined was the bullet’s location, he heard a “faint pulsating sound.” Bell wasn’t convinced this meant the bullet was there, but Bliss was in a rush to tell the newspapers he had correctly guessed its location, and thereby earn even more acclaim. In the absence of an alternative answer, Bell initially acquiesced.

A newspaper illustration depicting Bell using his device to try and locate Garfield’s bullet.

The inventor was not convinced, particularly because the bullet itself still had not been found and extracted. Millard writes:

“The next day, he returned to the White House and asked urgently to speak to Garfield’s surgeons. Were they ‘perfectly sure,’ he asked, ‘that all metal had been removed from the neighborhood of the bed.’”

Bell was informed that beneath the horsehair mattress Garfield laid upon was a second mattress made of steel wires, or what we now call a box spring. This likely created the pulsating sound Bell heard, which accidentally lent credence to Bliss’ false conclusion that the bullet was on Garfield’s right side.

Before Bell could correct the error, Garfield died from his ailments on September 19, 1881, an excruciating 79 days after the bullet first entered his body. The autopsy revealed the bullet was nowhere near the spot Bliss insisted—it had actually lodged on the left side of Garfield’s chest.

Michael Natale

News Editor

Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.