EXIT JAMES MORIARTY—ENTER THE TELEPHONE COMPANY – PAGE Three by ROBERT E. ROBINSON Moriarty-Bell had quickly recognised the inventive genius which lay in his distant cousin. From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara. It took only a cursory look at the components which were to go into the ingenious “Mama”-speaking machine for Moriarty-Bell to infer the possibility of much greater developments to come. When Alexander fled to Canada and later to the United States to escape the influence of that evil man, he was soon joined by a man named Thomas Watson, ostensibly from Salem, Mass., but, judging from his Scottish-sounding name, undoubtedly one of Moriarty-Bell’s Edinburgh gang, who diligently dogged Alexander, posing as his assistant, throughout the most productive years of his life. As a student, Conan Doyle fell completely under the influence of Moriarty-Bell, and he remained so as long as that wicked individual lived. Doyle’s chief value to the organisation lay in his efforts to protect the name of Dr. Bell and to discredit that of Sherlock Holmes. It was he who promoted the hoax that the Master never lived at all, hut was merely a fictional detective patterned after this same Dr. Bell. The effectiveness of this campaign is demonstrated by the fact that even in this day of enlightenment it is still possible to encounter an occasional malinformed individual who entertains the myth that there never has been a real Sherlock Holmes. Under the guise of wishing to avoid discrediting the medical profession, Doyle persuaded Dr. Watson to describe Moriarty—Bell’s calling as mathematics rather than medicine, even going as far as to have him report the absurdity that Moriarty had written a paper on the Binomial Theorem "which has had a European vogue.” With his limited knowledge of mathematics, Watson could not have known that the Binomial Theorem had been disclosed so fully two hundred years earlier by Sir Isaac Newton that very little which was new could have been written about it since. Moreover, if such a treatise were to be written, it would hardly enjoy a vogue in Europe or anywhere else, Moriarty-Bell did, however, write such works as Manual of the Operations of Surgery and Votes on Surgery for Nurses, both of which were successful and went through many editions, Dr. Watson was further induced to refer to the villain as Moriarty so as to make the latter appear more Irish than Scotch, although the good doctor compensated somewhat for this change by assigning the Scottish-sounding given name of James to every member of the Moriarty family. Judging from his own surname, plus the facts that he had neither ‘kith nor kin in England” (STUD) and that his Edinburgh-raised wife (SIGN) occasionally addressed him as James (TWIS), Watson himself probably was Scottish and hence was happy enough to depict the master criminal as Irish. Doyle contributed much to the utter confusion that Watson raised in portraying Holmes’s and Moriarty's deaths in 1891, when in reality both of them long survived that year. It may never be possible to untangle those hopelessly twisted events. Joseph Bell was born in 1837, Alexander in 1847, and Sherlock Holmes in 1854. At the time of the cat episode, Moriarty-Bell was 26, Alexander 16 and Holmes 9. By the tune of the events recorded in The Valley of Fear, the detective was about 35 and his adversary 52. In 1897, Moriarty-Bell reached the age of 60 and apparently entered into some form of retirement. Holmes then finally allowed the installation of a telephone in his Baker Street rooms. Moriarty-Bell died for certain in 1911. Alexander Graham Bell died in 1922. Sherlock Holmes has now been keeping bees for 75 years. With the principal actors removed from the stage, has the drama ended? Probably not. Although Moriarty himself is dead, his organisation lives on, and in fact has been able now to replace him with an awesome bank of computers. When Sherlock Holmes warned us to be wary of the gentler sex, he may well have anticipated that someday there would exist a vast organisation known as Ma Bell, whose contrivances would insinuate themselves into every home, and into every nerve centre of every major organisation. The web which Holmes pictured as extending across London now reaches to the most remote corners of the world. To know is to be prepared. Let us all resolve to remove Moriarty's infernal instruments from our premises, never to let them be installed again! Let us endeavour to convey messages only by telegrams and letters, if not in person. And if to do the latter must entail travelling by cab, let us be certain never to take the first one, and not always the second, since either may well have been bugged by the Telephone Company.