Guiteau decided he wanted to be ambassador to France. He approached the President and the Secretary of State, James G. Blaine, several times with his request and was eventually banned from the White House waiting room. Guiteau was almost certainly mentally ill, and the repeated rejections left him increasingly unhinged. In his delirium, he convinced himself that God wanted him to kill President Garfield. For Guiteau, the assassination of President Garfield would satisfy his misplaced desire for revenge and unite the party that Guiteau had chosen to support.
While investigators pieced together Guiteau’s motive, his victim was lying in anguish back at the White House. Garfield’s doctors tried several times to remove the bullet they knew was still inside his body, but they misjudged its trajectory and repeatedly came up empty-handed. Though his doctors initially predicted the President wouldn’t make it through the night, Garfield managed to cling to life. Across the nation, the public waited anxiously for updates on Garfield’s condition. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, was in Boston when he heard about the President’s predicament.
The fact that the doctors couldn’t find the bullet sparked an idea. While working on the telephone, Bell discovered a way to detect metal with electricity. Bell wrote to the President’s doctors, suggesting that he could invent a machine to help them find the missing bullet. Garfield’s chief physician, Dr. Doctor- actually his first name, oddly enough- Bliss, agreed to meet Bell and discuss his machine before declining Bell’s offer. Bell returned home and began developing the machine anyway, testing it on Civil War veterans who still had bullets lodged in their own bodies.
Meanwhile, Garfield’s doctors continued their search, probing the president’s wounds with unsterilized instruments and even their fingers. Though the concept of surgical infection was understood, many American doctors- including Bliss- rejected the idea. Likely due to the efforts of his doctors, Garfield spent the next few weeks fighting off repeated infections. With the President’s condition getting worse, Doctor Bliss wrote to Bell and agreed to let him try his hand with his machine. On July 26, Bell arrived at the White House and was brought in to meet the President.
Graham assembled his machine and waved the condenser over the President’s back. Rather than the clear sound the detector usually produced when it was waved over metal, all Bell could hear was dull static. Unable to locate the bullet, Bell went home. Once again, he improved his device and returned a few days later to try again. This time, Bliss told Bell that he was certain the bullet was located on the right side of Garfield’s body and insisted that Bell concentrate his efforts only in that area. Bell managed to pick up the faint trace of metal, but he couldn’t find the bullet.