Book excerpt: The Tangled Web of Patent #174,465 is a story that involves an individual who has been called one of America's inventive geniuses. He has been held in the highest regard as the inventor of the telephone. However, careful scrutiny of hundreds of documents that include thousands of pages of sworn testimony before a Congressional investigations committee beginning in April of 1886, show that A.G. Bell was a party to what might be considered one of America's most far-reaching historical deceptions. With all due respect to A.G. Bell, he was not the actual perpetrator of this historic fraud. The culprit in this historical subterfuge was A.G. Bell's father-in-law: Gardiner Greene Hubbard.