Today marks the 127th anniversary of the gunning down of the 20th President of the United States, James Garfield. This week, the D.C. Police found the cuffs used to restrain Garfield’s killer, Charles J. Guiteau while workers were cleaning out a closet at headquarters (no word on why Guiteau didn’t go by all three names, as assassins are wont).
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The handcuffs had been part of an old display that unceremoniously had been shoved into a dark corner to collect dust during the 1990s, Breul said. The artifacts were kept in such poor condition that Breul threatened to haul the items over to the Washington Historical Society. Breul was locked out of the room and eventually the boxes of items were hauled to other points. That was more than 10 years ago.
Last week, workers found a box full of metal knuckles, old handcuffs and pen guns used to fire .22-caliber bullets. One of the handcuffs had a tag identifying it as those used to restrain Guiteau, Garfield’s deranged and colorful killer.
Guiteau attacked Garfield in a train station situated where the National Gallery of Art now sits. Garfield was on his way to give a speech when Guiteau bounded from the crowd, shooting the President twice– once in the arm and once in the back. Garfield lived through the attack, but doctors were unable to find and remove the bullet to Garfield’s back.
Press coverage of the assassination and treatment of the President led to a national conversation (via letters to the editor and the White House from laymen and doctors alike) about how best to find the bullet in the body. The result was a very “Army of Davids” moment in 1881, what could have been a triumph of the wisdom of crowds had the solution not been foiled unexpectedly. I was struck by how similar the problem-solving process in Garfield’s treatment was to the distributed investigative reporting and research made possible (and much quicker) by the Internet and blogs in today’s news cycle.
Some suggested home remedies and herbs, but Simon Newcomb of Baltimore, who was interviewed by a Washington, D.C. newspaper, had a different idea:
Luckily, an expert in the field read the article in which Newcomb was quoted– Alexander Graham Bell:
Newcomb accepted Bell’s offer. Bell immediately went to Baltimore to work with Newcomb. White House surgeons spent a lot of time at the Baltimore lab witnessing the experiments. The invention consisted of two coils of insulated wire, a battery, a circuit breaker, and Bells’ telephone. The ends of the primary coil were connected to a battery and those of the secondary coil were fastened to posts of the telephone. When a piece of metal was placed in the spot where the circuit breaker was, a hum could be heard in the telephone receiver. As the metal was moved further away, the hum became more faint. Five inches away was the maximum distance that a hum could still be heard.
Bell and Newcomb developed a metal detector to hunt for the bullet inside Garfield’s body. They performed experiments on themselves, by detecting bullets hidden inside each other’s clothing. They performed further experiments on Civil War veterans who were known to have bullets lodged in their bodies from old wounds, and were consistently successful in finding their locations.
When they tried the new tool on Garfield, however, they got a hum from everywhere on the President’s body. Despite repeating successful experiments on veterans and visiting the White House to try again, Bell could not get his metal detector to work on Garfield.
Why? Bell’s telephone was not the only modern convenience that had been invented recently. Metal-coil mattresses had just been introduced, and were sufficiently expensive as to be rare outside of the White House. It never occured to Bell, Newcomb, or White House surgeons that it was the President’s bed that made the metal detector malfunction.
Garfield died of his injuries several weeks after Bell’s last attempt, on September 19, 1881. Even if the detector had worked, however, there is evidence that Garfield would likely have succumbed infection, as the attending physicians, among other things, probed his open wound with unprotected fingers to find the bullet.
Guiteau was hanged for his crime on June 30, 1882 after being apprehended at the scene. He was reportedly angry about being rejected repeatedly in his attempts to become United States consul in Paris.
