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Zeile 102: |
Zeile 102: |
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| ==CHAPTER I - THE BIRTH OF THE TELEPHONE==
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|
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|
| In that somewhat distant year 1875, when the
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| telegraph and the Atlantic cable were the
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| most wonderful things in the world, a tall young
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| professor of elocution was desperately busy in a
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| noisy machine-shop that stood in one of the narrow
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| streets of Boston, not far from Scollay
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| Square. It was a very hot afternoon in June,
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| but the young professor had forgotten the heat
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| and the grime of the workshop. He was wholly
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| absorbed in the making of a nondescript machine,
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| a sort of crude harmonica with a clock-spring
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| reed, a magnet, and a wire. It was a most
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| absurd toy in appearance. It was unlike any
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| other thing that had ever been made in any country.
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| The young professor had been toiling over
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| it for three years and it had constantly baffled
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| him, until, on this hot afternoon in June, 1875,
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| he heard an almost inaudible sound--a faint
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| TWANG--come from the machine itself.
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|
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| For an instant he was stunned. He had been
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| expecting just such a sound for several months,
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| but it came so suddenly as to give him the sensation
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| of surprise. His eyes blazed with delight,
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| and he sprang in a passion of eagerness to an
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| adjoining room in which stood a young mechanic
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| who was assisting him.
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|
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| "Snap that reed again, Watson," cried the
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| apparently irrational young professor. There
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| was one of the odd-looking machines in each
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| room, so it appears, and the two were connected
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| by an electric wire. Watson had snapped the
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| reed on one of the machines and the professor
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| had heard from the other machine exactly the
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| same sound. It was no more than the gentle
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| TWANG of a clock-spring; but it was the first time
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| in the history of the world that a complete sound
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| had been carried along a wire, reproduced perfectly
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| at the other end, and heard by an expert
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| in acoustics.
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|
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| That twang of the clock-spring was the first
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| tiny cry of the newborn telephone, uttered in the
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| clanging din of a machine-shop and happily
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| heard by a man whose ear had been trained to
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| recognize the strange voice of the little newcomer.
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| There, amidst flying belts and jarring
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| wheels, the baby telephone was born, as feeble
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| and helpless as any other baby, and "with no
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| language but a cry."
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|
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| The professor-inventor, who had thus rescued
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| the tiny foundling of science, was a young Scottish
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| American. His name, now known as widely
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| as the telephone itself, was Alexander Graham
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| Bell. He was a teacher of acoustics and a student
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| of electricity, possibly the only man in his
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| generation who was able to focus a knowledge
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| of both subjects upon the problem of the telephone.
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| To other men that exceedingly faint
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| sound would have been as inaudible as silence
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| itself; but to Bell it was a thunder-clap. It was
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| a dream come true. It was an impossible thing
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| which had in a flash become so easy that he could
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| scarcely believe it. Here, without the use of a
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| battery, with no more electric current than that
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| made by a couple of magnets, all the waves of
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| a sound had been carried along a wire and
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| changed back to sound at the farther end. It
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| was absurd. It was incredible. It was something
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| which neither wire nor electricity had been
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| known to do before. But it was true.
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|
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| No discovery has ever been less accidental.
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| It was the last link of a long chain of discoveries.
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| It was the result of a persistent and
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| deliberate search. Already, for half a year
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| or longer, Bell had known the correct theory of
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| the telephone; but he had not realized that the
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| feeble undulatory current generated by a magnet
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| was strong enough for the transmission of speech.
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| He had been taught to undervalue the incredible
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| efficiency of electricity.
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|
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| Not only was Bell himself a teacher of the
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| laws of speech, so highly skilled that he was
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| an instructor in Boston University. His father,
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| also, his two brothers, his uncle, and his
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| grandfather had taught the laws of speech in the
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| universities of Edinburgh, Dublin, and London.
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| For three generations the Bells had been professors
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| of the science of talking. They had even
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| helped to create that science by several inven-
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| tions. The first of them, Alexander Bell, had
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| invented a system for the correction of stammering
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| and similar defects of speech. The second,
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| Alexander Melville Bell, was the dean of British
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| elocutionists, a man of creative brain and a most
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| impressive facility of rhetoric. He was the author
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| of a dozen text-books on the art of speaking
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| correctly, and also of a most ingenious
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| sign-language which he called "Visible Speech."
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| Every letter in the alphabet of this language
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| represented a certain action of the lips and
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| tongue; so that a new method was provided for
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| those who wished to learn foreign languages or
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| to speak their own language more correctly.
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| And the third of these speech-improving Bells,
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| the inventor of the telephone, inherited the
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| peculiar genius of his fathers, both inventive and
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| rhetorical, to such a degree that as a boy he had
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| constructed an artificial skull, from gutta-percha
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| and India rubber, which, when enlivened by a
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| blast of air from a hand-bellows, would actually
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| pronounce several words in an almost human
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| manner.
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|
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| The third Bell, the only one of this remarkable
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| family who concerns us at this time, was a young
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| man, barely twenty-eight, at the time when his
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| ear caught the first cry of the telephone. But he
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| was already a man of some note on his own account.
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| He had been educated in Edinburgh, the
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| city of his birth, and in London; and had in one
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| way and another picked up a smattering of
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| anatomy, music, electricity, and telegraphy.
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| Until he was sixteen years of age, he had read
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| nothing but novels and poetry and romantic tales
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| of Scottish heroes. Then he left home to become
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| a teacher of elocution in various British
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| schools, and by the time he was of age he had
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| made several slight discoveries as to the nature
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| of vowel-sounds. Shortly afterwards, he met in
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| London two distinguished men, Alexander J.
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| Ellis and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who did far
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| more than they ever knew to forward Bell in
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| the direction of the telephone.
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|
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| Ellis was the president of the London Philological
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| Society. Also, he was the translator
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| of the famous book on "The Sensations of Tone,"
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| written by Helmholtz, who, in the period from
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| 1871 to 1894 made Berlin the world-centre for
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| the study of the physical sciences. So it happened
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| that when Bell ran to Ellis as a young
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| enthusiast and told his experiments, Ellis informed
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| him that Helmholtz had done the same
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| things several years before and done them more
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| completely. He brought Bell to his house and
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| showed him what Helmholtz had done--how he
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| had kept tuning-forks in vibration by the power
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| of electro-magnets, and blended the tones of several
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| tuning-forks together to produce the complex
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| quality of the human voice.
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|
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| Now, Helmholtz had not been trying to invent
| |
| a telephone, nor any sort of message-carrier.
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| His aim was to point out the physical basis of
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| music, and nothing more. But this fact that
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| an electro-magnet would set a tuning-fork humming
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| was new to Bell and very attractive. It
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| appealed at once to him as a student of speech.
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| If a tuning-fork could be made to sing by a
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| magnet or an electrified wire, why would it not
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| be possible to make a musical telegraph--a telegraph
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| with a piano key-board, so that many messages
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| could be sent at once over a single wire?
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| Unknown to Bell, there were several dozen inven-
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| tors then at work upon this problem, which
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| proved in the end to be very elusive. But it gave
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| him at least a starting-point, and he forthwith
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| commenced his quest of the telephone.
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|
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| As he was then in England, his first step was
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| naturally to visit Sir Charles Wheatstone, the
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| best known English expert on telegraphy.
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| Sir Charles had earned his title by many inventions.
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| He was a simple-natured scientist, and
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| treated Bell with the utmost kindness. He
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| showed him an ingenious talking-machine that
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| had been made by Baron de Kempelin. At this
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| time Bell was twenty-two and unknown; Wheatstone
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| was sixty-seven and famous. And the
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| personality of the veteran scientist made so vivid
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| a picture upon the mind of the impressionable
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| young Bell that the grand passion of science became
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| henceforth the master-motif of his life.
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|
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| From this summit of glorious ambition he was
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| thrown, several months later, into the depths of
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| grief and despondency. The White Plague had
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| come to the home in Edinburgh and taken away
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| his two brothers. More, it had put its mark
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| upon the young inventor himself. Nothing but
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| a change of climate, said his doctor, would put
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| him out of danger. And so, to save his life, he
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| and his father and mother set sail from Glasgow
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| and came to the small Canadian town of Brantford,
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| where for a year he fought down his
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| tendency to consumption, and satisfied his nervous
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| energy by teaching "Visible Speech" to a
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| tribe of Mohawk Indians.
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|
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| By this time it had become evident, both to
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| his parents and to his friends, that young Graham
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| was destined to become some sort of a creative
| |
| genius. He was tall and supple, with a pale
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| complexion, large nose, full lips, jet-black eyes,
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| and jet-black hair, brushed high and usually
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| rumpled into a curly tangle. In temperament
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| he was a true scientific Bohemian, with the ideals
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| of a savant and the disposition of an artist. He
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| was wholly a man of enthusiasms, more devoted
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| to ideas than to people; and less likely to master
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| his own thoughts than to be mastered by them.
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| He had no shrewdness, in any commercial sense,
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| and very little knowledge of the small practical
| |
| details of ordinary living. He was always intense,
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| always absorbed. When he applied his
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| mind to a problem, it became at once an enthralling
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| arena, in which there went whirling a chariot-
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| race of ideas and inventive fancies.
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|
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| He had been fascinated from boyhood by his
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| father's system of "Visible Speech." He knew
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| it so well that he once astonished a professor of
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| Oriental languages by repeating correctly a sentence
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| of Sanscrit that had been written in "Visible
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| Speech" characters. While he was living in
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| London his most absorbing enthusiasm was the
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| instruction of a class of deaf-mutes, who could
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| be trained to talk, he believed, by means of the
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| "Visible Speech" alphabet. He was so deeply
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| impressed by the progress made by these pupils,
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| and by the pathos of their dumbness, that when
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| he arrived in Canada he was in doubt as to which
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| of these two tasks was the more important--the
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| teaching of deaf-mutes or the invention of a
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| musical telegraph.
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|
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| At this point, and before Bell had begun to
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| experiment with his telegraph, the scene of the
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| story shifts from Canada to Massachusetts. It
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| appears that his father, while lecturing in Boston,
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| had mentioned Graham's exploits with a
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| class of deaf-mutes; and soon afterward the Boston
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| Board of Education wrote to Graham, offering
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| him five hundred dollars if he would come to
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| Boston and introduce his system of teaching in a
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| school for deaf-mutes that had been opened recently.
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| The young man joyfully agreed, and on
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| the first of April, 1871, crossed the line and became
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| for the remainder of his life an American.
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|
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| For the next two years his telegraphic work
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| was laid aside, if not forgotten. His success as
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| a teacher of deaf-mutes was sudden and overwhelming.
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| It was the educational sensation of
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| 1871. It won him a professorship in Boston
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| University; and brought so many pupils around
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| him that he ventured to open an ambitious
| |
| "School of Vocal Physiology," which became at
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| once a profitable enterprise. For a time there
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| seemed to be little hope of his escaping from the
| |
| burden of this success and becoming an inventor,
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| when, by a most happy coincidence, two of his
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| pupils brought to him exactly the sort of stimulation
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| and practical help that he needed and had
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| not up to this time received.
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|
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| One of these pupils was a little deaf-mute
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| tot, five years of age, named Georgie Sanders.
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| Bell had agreed to give him a series of private
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| lessons for $350 a year; and as the child lived
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| with his grandmother in the city of Salem, sixteen
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| miles from Boston, it was agreed that Bell should
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| make his home with the Sanders family. Here
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| he not only found the keenest interest and sympathy
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| in his air-castles of invention, but also was
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| given permission to use the cellar of the house as
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| his workshop.
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|
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| For the next three years this cellar was his
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| favorite retreat. He littered it with tuning-
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| forks, magnets, batteries, coils of wire, tin
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| trumpets, and cigar-boxes. No one outside of
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| the Sanders family was allowed to enter it, as
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| Bell was nervously afraid of having his ideas
| |
| stolen. He would even go to five or six stores
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| to buy his supplies, for fear that his intentions
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| should be discovered. Almost with the secrecy
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| of a conspirator, he worked alone in this cellar,
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| usually at night, and quite oblivious of the fact
| |
| that sleep was a necessity to him and to the
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| Sanders family.
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|
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| "Often in the middle of the night Bell would
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| wake me up," said Thomas Sanders, the father
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| of Georgie. "His black eyes would be blazing
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| with excitement. Leaving me to go down to
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| the cellar, he would rush wildly to the barn and
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| begin to send me signals along his experimental
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| wires. If I noticed any improvement in his
| |
| machine, he would be delighted. He would leap
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| and whirl around in one of his `war-dances' and
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| then go contentedly to bed. But if the experiment
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| was a failure, he would go back to his workbench
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| and try some different plan."
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|
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| The second pupil who became a factor--a
| |
| very considerable factor--in Bell's career was a
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| fifteen-year-old girl named Mabel Hubbard, who
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| had lost her hearing, and consequently her speech,
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| through an attack of scarlet-fever when a baby.
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| She was a gentle and lovable girl, and Bell, in his
| |
| ardent and headlong way, lost his heart to her
| |
| completely; and four years later, he had the
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| happiness of making her his wife. Mabel Hubbard
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| did much to encourage Bell. She followed each
| |
| step of his progress with the keenest interest.
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| She wrote his letters and copied his patents. She
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| cheered him on when he felt himself beaten.
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| And through her sympathy with Bell and his ambitions,
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| she led her father--a widely known Boston
| |
| lawyer named Gardiner G. Hubbard--to
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| become Bell's chief spokesman and defender, a
| |
| true apostle of the telephone.
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|
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| Hubbard first became aware of Bell's inventive
| |
| efforts one evening when Bell was visiting
| |
| at his home in Cambridge. Bell was illustrating
| |
| some of the mysteries of acoustics by the aid of
| |
| a piano. "Do you know," he said to Hubbard,
| |
| "that if I sing the note G close to the strings of
| |
| the piano, that the G-string will answer me?"
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| "Well, what then?" asked Hubbard. "It is
| |
| a fact of tremendous importance," replied Bell.
| |
| "It is an evidence that we may some day have
| |
| a musical telegraph, which will send as many
| |
| messages simultaneously over one wire as there
| |
| are notes on that piano."
| |
|
| |
| Later, Bell ventured to confide to Hubbard
| |
| his wild dream of sending speech over an electric
| |
| wire, but Hubbard laughed him to scorn. "Now
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| you are talking nonsense," he said. "Such a
| |
| thing never could be more than a scientific toy.
| |
| You had better throw that idea out of your mind
| |
| and go ahead with your musical telegraph, which
| |
| if it is successful will make you a millionaire."
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|
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| But the longer Bell toiled at his musical telegraph,
| |
| the more he dreamed of replacing the telegraph
| |
| and its cumbrous sign-language by a new
| |
| machine that would carry, not dots and dashes,
| |
| but the human voice. "If I can make a deaf-
| |
| mute talk," he said, "I can make iron talk." For
| |
| months he wavered between the two ideas. He
| |
| had no more than the most hazy conception of
| |
| what this voice-carrying machine would be like.
| |
| At first he conceived of having a harp at one end
| |
| of the wire, and a speaking-trumpet at the other,
| |
| so that the tones of the voice would be reproduced
| |
| by the strings of the harp.
| |
|
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| Then, in the early Summer of 1874, while he
| |
| was puzzling over this harp apparatus, the dim
| |
| outline of a new path suddenly glinted in front
| |
| of him. He had not been forgetful of "Visible
| |
| Speech" all this while, but had been making
| |
| experiments with two remarkable machines--the
| |
| phonautograph and the manometric capsule, by
| |
| means of which the vibrations of sound were
| |
| made plainly visible. If these could be im-
| |
| proved, he thought, then the deaf might be taught
| |
| to speak by SIGHT--by learning an alphabet of
| |
| vibrations. He mentioned these experiments to
| |
| a Boston friend, Dr. Clarence J. Blake, and he,
| |
| being a surgeon and an aurist, naturally said,
| |
| "Why don't you use a REAL EAR?"
| |
|
| |
| Such an idea never had, and probably never
| |
| could have, occurred to Bell; but he accepted it
| |
| with eagerness. Dr. Blake cut an ear from a dead
| |
| man's head, together with the ear-drum and the
| |
| associated bones. Bell took this fragment of
| |
| a skull and arranged it so that a straw touched
| |
| the ear-drum at one end and a piece of moving
| |
| smoked glass at the other. Thus, when Bell
| |
| spoke loudly into the ear, the vibrations of the
| |
| drum made tiny markings upon the glass.
| |
|
| |
| It was one of the most extraordinary incidents
| |
| in the whole history of the telephone. To an
| |
| uninitiated onlooker, nothing could have been
| |
| more ghastly or absurd. How could any one
| |
| have interpreted the gruesome joy of this young
| |
| professor with the pale face and the black
| |
| eyes, who stood earnestly singing, whispering,
| |
| and shouting into a dead man's ear? What
| |
| sort of a wizard must he be, or ghoul, or madman?
| |
| And in Salem, too, the home of the
| |
| witchcraft superstition! Certainly it would
| |
| not have gone well with Bell had he lived
| |
| two centuries earlier and been caught at such
| |
| black magic.
| |
|
| |
| What had this dead man's ear to do with the
| |
| invention of the telephone? Much. Bell noticed
| |
| how small and thin was the ear-drum, and
| |
| yet how effectively it could send thrills and
| |
| vibrations through heavy bones. "If this tiny disc
| |
| can vibrate a bone," he thought, "then an iron
| |
| disc might vibrate an iron rod, or at least, an iron
| |
| wire." In a flash the conception of a membrane
| |
| telephone was pictured in his mind. He saw in
| |
| imagination two iron discs, or ear-drums, far
| |
| apart and connected by an electrified wire, catching
| |
| the vibrations of sound at one end, and reproducing
| |
| them at the other. At last he was on the
| |
| right path, and had a theoretical knowledge of
| |
| what a speaking telephone ought to be. What
| |
| remained to be done was to construct such a machine
| |
| and find out how the electric current could
| |
| best be brought into harness.
| |
|
| |
| Then, as though Fortune suddenly felt that he
| |
| was winning this stupendous success too easily,
| |
| Bell was flung back by an avalanche of troubles.
| |
| Sanders and Hubbard, who had been paying the
| |
| cost of his experiments, abruptly announced that
| |
| they would pay no more unless he confined his
| |
| attention to the musical telegraph, and stopped
| |
| wasting his time on ear-toys that never could be
| |
| of any financial value. What these two men
| |
| asked could scarcely be denied, as one of them
| |
| was his best-paying patron and the other was the
| |
| father of the girl whom he hoped to marry. "If
| |
| you wish my daughter," said Hubbard, "you must
| |
| abandon your foolish telephone." Bell's "School
| |
| of Vocal Physiology," too, from which he had
| |
| hoped so much, had come to an inglorious end.
| |
| He had been too much absorbed in his experiments
| |
| to sustain it. His professorship had been
| |
| given up, and he had no pupils except Georgie
| |
| Sanders and Mabel Hubbard. He was poor,
| |
| much poorer than his associates knew. And his
| |
| mind was torn and distracted by the contrary
| |
| calls of science, poverty, business, and affection.
| |
| Pouring out his sorrows in a letter to his mother,
| |
| he said: "I am now beginning to realize the
| |
| cares and anxieties of being an inventor. I have
| |
| had to put off all pupils and classes, for flesh and
| |
| blood could not stand much longer such a strain
| |
| as I have had upon me."
| |
|
| |
| While stumbling through this Slough of Despond,
| |
| he was called to Washington by his patent
| |
| lawyer. Not having enough money to pay the
| |
| cost of such a journey, he borrowed the price of a
| |
| return ticket from Sanders and arranged to stay
| |
| with a friend in Washington, to save a hotel bill
| |
| that he could not afford. At that time Professor
| |
| Joseph Henry, who knew more of the theory of
| |
| electrical science than any other American, was
| |
| the Grand Old Man of Washington; and poor
| |
| Bell, in his doubt and desperation, resolved to
| |
| run to him for advice.
| |
|
| |
| Then came a meeting which deserves to be
| |
| historic. For an entire afternoon the two men
| |
| worked together over the apparatus that Bell had
| |
| brought from Boston, just as Henry had worked
| |
| over the telegraph before Bell was born. Henry
| |
| was now a veteran of seventy-eight, with only
| |
| three years remaining to his credit in the bank
| |
| of Time, while Bell was twenty-eight. There
| |
| was a long half-century between them; but the
| |
| youth had discovered a New Fact that the sage,
| |
| in all his wisdom, had never known.
| |
|
| |
| "You are in possession of the germ of a great
| |
| invention," said Henry, "and I would advise you
| |
| to work at it until you have made it complete."
| |
|
| |
| "But," replied Bell, "I have not got the
| |
| electrical knowledge that is necessary."
| |
|
| |
| "Get it," responded the aged scientist.
| |
|
| |
| "I cannot tell you how much these two words
| |
| have encouraged me," said Bell afterwards, in
| |
| describing this interview to his parents. "I live
| |
| too much in an atmosphere of discouragement for
| |
| scientific pursuits; and such a chimerical idea as
| |
| telegraphing VOCAL SOUNDS would indeed seem to
| |
| most minds scarcely feasible enough to spend
| |
| time in working over."
| |
|
| |
| By this time Bell had moved his workshop from
| |
| the cellar in Salem to 109 Court Street, Boston,
| |
| where he had rented a room from Charles
| |
| Williams, a manufacturer of electrical supplies.
| |
| Thomas A. Watson was his assistant, and both
| |
| Bell and Watson lived nearby, in two cheap little
| |
| bedrooms. The rent of the workshop and bedrooms,
| |
| and Watson's wages of nine dollars a
| |
| week, were being paid by Sanders and Hubbard.
| |
| Consequently, when Bell returned from Washington,
| |
| he was compelled by his agreement to
| |
| devote himself mainly to the musical telegraph,
| |
| although his heart was now with the telephone.
| |
| For exactly three months after his interview with
| |
| Professor Henry, he continued to plod ahead,
| |
| along both lines, until, on that memorable hot
| |
| afternoon in June, 1875, the full TWANG of the
| |
| clock-spring came over the wire, and the telephone
| |
| was born.
| |
|
| |
| From this moment, Bell was a man of one purpose.
| |
| He won over Sanders and Hubbard. He
| |
| converted Watson into an enthusiast. He forgot
| |
| his musical telegraph, his "Visible Speech,"
| |
| his classes, his poverty. He threw aside a profession
| |
| in which he was already locally famous.
| |
| And he grappled with this new mystery of electricity,
| |
| as Henry had advised him to do, encouraging
| |
| himself with the fact that Morse, who was
| |
| only a painter, had mastered his electrical
| |
| difficulties, and there was no reason why a professor
| |
| of acoustics should not do as much.
| |
|
| |
| The telephone was now in existence, but it was
| |
| the youngest and feeblest thing in the nation. It
| |
| had not yet spoken a word. It had to be taught,
| |
| developed, and made fit for the service of the
| |
| irritable business world. All manner of discs
| |
| had to be tried, some smaller and thinner than a
| |
| dime and others of steel boiler-plate as heavy as
| |
| the shield of Achilles. In all the books of electrical
| |
| science, there was nothing to help Bell and
| |
| Watson in this journey they were making
| |
| through an unknown country. They were as
| |
| chartless as Columbus was in 1492. Neither
| |
| they nor any one else had acquired any experience
| |
| in the rearing of a young telephone. No
| |
| one knew what to do next. There was nothing
| |
| to know.
| |
|
| |
| For forty weeks--long exasperating weeks--
| |
| the telephone could do no more than gasp and
| |
| make strange inarticulate noises. Its educators
| |
| had not learned how to manage it. Then, on
| |
| March 10, 1876, IT TALKED. It said distinctly--
| |
|
| |
| "MR. WATSON, COME HERE, I WANT YOU." Watson,
| |
| who was at the lower end of the wire, in the
| |
| basement, dropped the receiver and rushed with
| |
| wild joy up three flights of stairs to tell the glad
| |
| tidings to Bell. "I can hear you!" he shouted
| |
| breathlessly. "I can hear the WORDS."
| |
|
| |
| It was not easy, of course, for the weak young
| |
| telephone to make itself heard in that noisy workshop.
| |
| No one, not even Bell and Watson, was
| |
| familiar with its odd little voice. Usually Watson,
| |
| who had a remarkably keen sense of hearing,
| |
| did the listening; and Bell, who was a professional
| |
| elocutionist, did the talking. And day by day
| |
| the tone of the baby instrument grew clearer--a
| |
| new note in the orchestra of civilization.
| |
|
| |
| On his twenty-ninth birthday, Bell received
| |
| his patent, No. 174,465--"the most valuable
| |
| single patent ever issued" in any country. He
| |
| had created something so entirely new that there
| |
| was no name for it in any of the world's languages.
| |
| In describing it to the officials of the
| |
| Patent Office, he was obliged to call it "an
| |
| improvement in telegraphy," when, in truth, it was
| |
| nothing of the kind. It was as different from the
| |
| telegraph as the eloquence of a great orator is
| |
| from the sign-language of a deaf-mute.
| |
|
| |
| Other inventors had worked from the standpoint
| |
| of the telegraph; and they never did, and
| |
| never could, get any better results than signs
| |
| and symbols. But Bell worked from the standpoint
| |
| of the human voice. He cross-fertilized
| |
| the two sciences of acoustics and electricity. His
| |
| study of "Visible Speech" had trained his mind
| |
| so that he could mentally SEE the shape of a word
| |
| as he spoke it. He knew what a spoken word
| |
| was, and how it acted upon the air, or the ether,
| |
| that carried its vibrations from the lips to the ear.
| |
| He was a third-generation specialist in the
| |
| nature of speech, and he knew that for the transmission
| |
| of spoken words there must be "a pulsatory
| |
| action of the electric current which is the
| |
| exact equivalent of the aerial impulses."
| |
|
| |
| Bell knew just enough about electricity, and
| |
| not too much. He did not know the possible
| |
| from the impossible. "Had I known more about
| |
| electricity, and less about sound," he said, "I
| |
| would never have invented the telephone."
| |
| What he had done was so amazing, so foolhardy,
| |
| that no trained electrician could have thought
| |
| of it. It was "the very hardihood of invention,"
| |
| and yet it was not in any sense a chance discovery.
| |
| It was the natural output of a mind that
| |
| had been led to assemble just the right materials
| |
| for such a product.
| |
|
| |
| As though the very stars in their courses were
| |
| working for this young wizard with the
| |
| talking wire, the Centennial Exposition in
| |
| Philadelphia opened its doors exactly two
| |
| months after the telephone had learned to
| |
| talk. Here was a superb opportunity to
| |
| let the wide world know what had been
| |
| done, and fortunately Hubbard was one of the
| |
| Centennial Commissioners. By his influence a
| |
| small table was placed in the Department of
| |
| Education, in a narrow space between a stairway
| |
| and a wall, and on this table was deposited the
| |
| first of the telephones.
| |
|
| |
| Bell had no intention of going to the
| |
| Centennial himself. He was too poor. Sanders
| |
| and Hubbard had never done more than pay his
| |
| room-rent and the expense of his experiments.
| |
| For his three or four years of inventing he had re-
| |
| ceived nothing as yet--nothing but his patent.
| |
| In order to live, he had been compelled to
| |
| reorganize his classes in "Visible Speech," and
| |
| to pick up the ravelled ends of his neglected
| |
| profession.
| |
|
| |
| But one Friday afternoon, toward the end of
| |
| June, his sweetheart, Mabel Hubbard, was taking
| |
| the train for the Centennial; and he went to the
| |
| depot to say good-bye. Here Miss Hubbard
| |
| learned for the first time that Bell was not to
| |
| go. She coaxed and pleaded, without effect.
| |
| Then, as the train was starting, leaving Bell on
| |
| the platform, the affectionate young girl could
| |
| no longer control her feelings and was overcome
| |
| by a passion of tears. At this the susceptible
| |
| Bell, like a true Sir Galahad, dashed after the
| |
| moving train and sprang aboard, without ticket
| |
| or baggage, oblivious of his classes and his poverty
| |
| and of all else except this one maiden's
| |
| distress. "I never saw a man," said Watson, "so
| |
| much in love as Bell was."
| |
|
| |
| As it happened, this impromptu trip to the
| |
| Centennial proved to be one of the most timely
| |
| acts of his life. On the following Sunday after-
| |
| noon the judges were to make a special tour of
| |
| inspection, and Mr. Hubbard, after much trouble,
| |
| had obtained a promise that they would spend a
| |
| few minutes examining Bell's telephone. By
| |
| this time it had been on exhibition for more
| |
| than six weeks, without attracting the serious
| |
| attention of anybody.
| |
|
| |
| When Sunday afternoon arrived, Bell was at
| |
| his little table, nervous, yet confident. But hour
| |
| after hour went by, and the judges did not arrive.
| |
| The day was intensely hot, and they had many
| |
| wonders to examine. There was the first electric
| |
| light, and the first grain-binder, and the
| |
| musical telegraph of Elisha Gray, and the marvellous
| |
| exhibit of printing telegraphs shown by
| |
| the Western Union Company. By the time they
| |
| came to Bell's table, through a litter of school-
| |
| desks and blackboards, the hour was seven
| |
| o'clock, and every man in the party was hot, tired,
| |
| and hungry. Several announced their intention
| |
| of returning to their hotels. One took up a telephone
| |
| receiver, looked at it blankly, and put it
| |
| down again. He did not even place it to his ear.
| |
| Another judge made a slighting remark which
| |
| raised a laugh at Bell's expense. Then a most
| |
| marvellous thing happened--such an incident as
| |
| would make a chapter in "The Arabian Nights
| |
| Entertainments."
| |
|
| |
| Accompanied by his wife, the Empress
| |
| Theresa, and by a bevy of courtiers, the Emperor
| |
| of Brazil, Dom Pedro de Alcantara, walked
| |
| into the room, advanced with both hands outstretched
| |
| to the bewildered Bell, and exclaimed:
| |
| "Professor Bell, I am delighted to see you
| |
| again." The judges at once forgot the heat
| |
| and the fatigue and the hunger. Who was
| |
| this young inventor, with the pale complexion
| |
| and black eyes, that he should be the friend
| |
| of Emperors? They did not know, and for
| |
| the moment even Bell himself had forgotten,
| |
| that Dom Pedro had once visited Bell's class
| |
| of deaf-mutes at Boston University. He was
| |
| especially interested in such humanitarian work,
| |
| and had recently helped to organize the first
| |
| Brazilian school for deaf-mutes at Rio de
| |
| Janeiro. And so, with the tall, blond-bearded
| |
| Dom Pedro in the centre, the assembled judges,
| |
| and scientists--there were fully fifty in all--
| |
| entered with unusual zest into the proceedings of
| |
| this first telephone exhibition.
| |
|
| |
| A wire had been strung from one end of the
| |
| room to the other, and while Bell went to the
| |
| transmitter, Dom Pedro took up the receiver and
| |
| placed it to his ear. It was a moment of tense
| |
| expectancy. No one knew clearly what was
| |
| about to happen, when the Emperor, with a
| |
| dramatic gesture, raised his head from the receiver
| |
| and exclaimed with a look of utter amazement:
| |
| "MY GOD--IT TALKS!"
| |
|
| |
| Next came to the receiver the oldest scientist
| |
| in the group, the venerable Joseph Henry, whose
| |
| encouragement to Bell had been so timely. He
| |
| stopped to listen, and, as one of the bystanders
| |
| afterwards said, no one could forget the look of
| |
| awe that came into his face as he heard that iron
| |
| disc talking with a human voice. "This," said
| |
| he, "comes nearer to overthrowing the doctrine
| |
| of the conservation of energy than anything I
| |
| ever saw."
| |
|
| |
| Then came Sir William Thomson, latterly
| |
| known as Lord Kelvin. It was fitting that he
| |
| should be there, for he was the foremost elec-
| |
| trical scientist at that time in the world, and had
| |
| been the engineer of the first Atlantic Cable.
| |
| He listened and learned what even he had not
| |
| known before, that a solid metallic body could
| |
| take up from the air all the countless varieties of
| |
| vibrations produced by speech, and that these
| |
| vibrations could be carried along a wire and
| |
| reproduced exactly by a second metallic body. He
| |
| nodded his head solemnly as he rose from the
| |
| receiver. "It DOES speak," he said emphatically.
| |
| "It is the most wonderful thing I have seen in
| |
| America."
| |
|
| |
| So, one after another, this notable company
| |
| of men listened to the voice of the first telephone,
| |
| and the more they knew of science, the less they
| |
| were inclined to believe their ears. The wiser
| |
| they were, the more they wondered. To Henry
| |
| and Thomson, the masters of electrical magic, this
| |
| instrument was as surprising as it was to the man
| |
| in the street. And both were noble enough to
| |
| admit frankly their astonishment in the reports
| |
| which they made as judges, when they gave Bell
| |
| a Certificate of Award. "Mr. Bell has achieved
| |
| a result of transcendent scientific interest,"
| |
| wrote Sir William Thomson. "I heard it speak
| |
| distinctly several sentences. . . . I was
| |
| astonished and delighted. . . . It is the
| |
| greatest marvel hitherto achieved by the electric
| |
| telegraph."
| |
|
| |
| Until nearly ten o'clock that night the judges
| |
| talked and listened by turns at the telephone.
| |
| Then, next morning, they brought the apparatus
| |
| to the judges' pavilion, where for the remainder
| |
| of the summer it was mobbed by judges and scientists.
| |
| Sir William Thomson and his wife ran
| |
| back and forth between the two ends of the wire
| |
| like a pair of delighted children. And thus it
| |
| happened that the crude little instrument that
| |
| had been tossed into an out-of-the-way corner
| |
| became the star of the Centennial. It had been
| |
| given no more than eighteen words in the official
| |
| catalogue, and here it was acclaimed as the wonder
| |
| of wonders. It had been conceived in a cellar
| |
| and born in a machine-shop; and now, of all the
| |
| gifts that our young American Republic had
| |
| received on its one-hundredth birthday, the telephone
| |
| was honored as the rarest and most welcome
| |
| of them all.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| ==CHAPTER II - THE BUILDING OF THE BUSINESS==
| |
|
| |
| After the telephone had been born in Boston,
| |
| baptized in the Patent Office, and
| |
| given a royal reception at the Philadelphia Centennial,
| |
| it might be supposed that its life thenceforth
| |
| would be one of peace and pleasantness.
| |
| But as this is history, and not fancy, there must
| |
| be set down the very surprising fact that the
| |
| young newcomer received no welcome and no
| |
| notice from the great business world. "It is a
| |
| scientific toy," said the men of trade and
| |
| commerce. "It is an interesting instrument, of
| |
| course, for professors of electricity and acoustics;
| |
| but it can never be a practical necessity. As
| |
| well might you propose to put a telescope into
| |
| a steel-mill or to hitch a balloon to a shoe-
| |
| factory."
| |
|
| |
| Poor Bell, instead of being applauded, was
| |
| pelted with a hailstorm of ridicule. He was an
| |
| "impostor," a "ventriloquist," a "crank who says
| |
| he can talk through a wire." The London Times
| |
| alluded pompously to the telephone as the latest
| |
| American humbug, and gave many profound
| |
| reasons why speech could not be sent over a wire,
| |
| because of the intermittent nature of the electric
| |
| current. Almost all electricians--the men who
| |
| were supposed to know--pronounced the telephone
| |
| an impossible thing; and those who did
| |
| not openly declare it to be a hoax, believed that
| |
| Bell had stumbled upon some freakish use of
| |
| electricity, which could never be of any practical
| |
| value.
| |
|
| |
| Even though he came late in the succession of
| |
| inventors, Bell had to run the gantlet of scoffing
| |
| and adversity. By the reception that the public
| |
| gave to his telephone, he learned to sympathize
| |
| with Howe, whose first sewing-machine was
| |
| smashed by a Boston mob; with McCormick,
| |
| whose first reaper was called "a cross between an
| |
| Astley chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a flying-
| |
| machine"; with Morse, whom ten Congresses regarded
| |
| as a nuisance; with Cyrus Field, whose
| |
| Atlantic Cable was denounced as "a mad freak
| |
| of stubborn ignorance"; and with Westinghouse,
| |
| who was called a fool for proposing "to stop a
| |
| railroad train with wind."
| |
|
| |
| The very idea of talking at a piece of sheet-
| |
| iron was so new and extraordinary that the normal
| |
| mind repulsed it. Alike to the laborer and
| |
| the scientist, it was incomprehensible. It was
| |
| too freakish, too bizarre, to be used outside of
| |
| the laboratory and the museum. No one, literally,
| |
| could understand how it worked; and the
| |
| only man who offered a clear solution of the
| |
| mystery was a Boston mechanic, who maintained
| |
| that there was "a hole through the middle
| |
| of the wire."
| |
|
| |
| People who talked for the first time into a
| |
| telephone box had a sort of stage fright. They
| |
| felt foolish. To do so seemed an absurd performance,
| |
| especially when they had to shout at
| |
| the top of their voices. Plainly, whatever of
| |
| convenience there might be in this new contrivance
| |
| was far outweighed by the loss of personal
| |
| dignity; and very few men had sufficient imagination
| |
| to picture the telephone as a part of the
| |
| machinery of their daily work. The banker said
| |
| it might do well enough for grocers, but that it
| |
| would never be of any value to banking; and the
| |
| grocer said it might do well enough for bankers,
| |
| but that it would never be of any value to grocers.
| |
|
| |
| As Bell had worked out his invention in Salem,
| |
| one editor displayed the headline, "Salem
| |
| Witchcraft." The New York Herald said: "The
| |
| effect is weird and almost supernatural." The
| |
| Providence Press said: "It is hard to resist
| |
| the notion that the powers of darkness are somehow
| |
| in league with it." And The Boston Times
| |
| said, in an editorial of bantering ridicule: "A
| |
| fellow can now court his girl in China as well
| |
| as in East Boston; but the most serious aspect
| |
| of this invention is the awful and irresponsible
| |
| power it will give to the average mother-in-
| |
| law, who will be able to send her voice around
| |
| the habitable globe."
| |
|
| |
| There were hundreds of shrewd capitalists in
| |
| American cities in 1876, looking with sharp eyes
| |
| in all directions for business chances; but not one
| |
| of them came to Bell with an offer to buy his
| |
| patent. Not one came running for a State contract.
| |
| And neither did any legislature, or
| |
| city council, come forward to the task of giving
| |
| the people a cheap and efficient telephone service.
| |
| As for Bell himself, he was not a man of affairs.
| |
| In all practical business matters, he was as
| |
| incompetent as a Byron or a Shelley. He had
| |
| done his part, and it now remained for men of
| |
| different abilities to take up his telephone and
| |
| adapt it to the uses and conditions of the business
| |
| world.
| |
|
| |
| The first man to undertake this work was Gardiner
| |
| G. Hubbard, who became soon afterwards
| |
| the father-in-law of Bell. He, too, was a man
| |
| of enthusiasm rather than of efficiency. He was
| |
| not a man of wealth or business experience, but
| |
| he was admirably suited to introduce the telephone
| |
| to a hostile public. His father had been
| |
| a judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Court;
| |
| and he himself was a lawyer whose practice had
| |
| been mainly in matters of legislation. He was,
| |
| in 1876, a man of venerable appearance, with
| |
| white hair, worn long, and a patriarchal beard.
| |
| He was a familiar figure in Washington, and well
| |
| known among the public men of his day. A versatile
| |
| and entertaining companion, by turns
| |
| prosperous and impecunious, and an optimist
| |
| always, Gardiner Hubbard became a really
| |
| indispensable factor as the first advance agent of
| |
| the telephone business.
| |
|
| |
| No other citizen had done more for the city of
| |
| Cambridge than Hubbard. It was he who secured
| |
| gas for Cambridge in 1853, and pure
| |
| water, and a street-railway to Boston. He had
| |
| gone through the South in 1860 in the patriotic
| |
| hope that he might avert the impending Civil
| |
| War. He had induced the legislature to establish
| |
| the first public school for deaf-mutes, the
| |
| school that drew Bell to Boston in 1871. And he
| |
| had been for years a most restless agitator for
| |
| improvements in telegraphy and the post office.
| |
| So, as a promoter of schemes for the public good,
| |
| Hubbard was by no means a novice. His first
| |
| step toward capturing the attention of an indifferent
| |
| nation was to beat the big drum of publicity.
| |
| He saw that this new idea of telephoning
| |
| must be made familiar to the public mind. He
| |
| talked telephone by day and by night. Whenever
| |
| he travelled, he carried a pair of the magical
| |
| instruments in his valise, and gave demonstra-
| |
| tions on trains and in hotels. He buttonholed
| |
| every influential man who crossed his path.
| |
| He was a veritable "Ancient Mariner" of the
| |
| telephone. No possible listener was allowed to
| |
| escape.
| |
|
| |
| Further to promote this campaign of publicity,
| |
| Hubbard encouraged Bell and Watson to perform
| |
| a series of sensational feats with the telephone.
| |
| A telegraph wire between New York
| |
| and Boston was borrowed for half an hour, and
| |
| in the presence of Sir William Thomson, Bell
| |
| sent a tune over the two-hundred-and-fifty-mile
| |
| line. "Can you hear?" he asked the operator
| |
| at the New York end. "Elegantly," responded
| |
| the operator. "What tune?" asked Bell.
| |
| "Yankee Doodle," came the answer. Shortly
| |
| afterwards, while Bell was visiting at his
| |
| father's house in Canada, he bought up all the
| |
| stove-pipe wire in the town, and tacked it to
| |
| a rail fence between the house and a telegraph
| |
| office. Then he went to a village eight miles
| |
| distant and sent scraps of songs and Shakespearean
| |
| quotations over the wire.
| |
|
| |
| There was still a large percentage of people
| |
| who denied that spoken words could be transmitted
| |
| by a wire. When Watson talked to Bell
| |
| at public demonstrations, there were newspaper
| |
| editors who referred sceptically to "the
| |
| supposititious Watson." So, to silence these doubters,
| |
| Bell and Watson planned a most severe test
| |
| of the telephone. They borrowed the telegraph
| |
| line between Boston and the Cambridge Observatory,
| |
| and attached a telephone to each end.
| |
| Then they maintained, for three hours or longer,
| |
| the FIRST SUSTAINED conversation by telephone,
| |
| each one taking careful notes of what he said
| |
| and of what he heard. These notes were published
| |
| in parallel columns in The Boston Advertiser,
| |
| October 19, 1876, and proved beyond
| |
| question that the telephone was now a practical
| |
| success.
| |
|
| |
| After this, one event crowded quickly on the
| |
| heels of another. A series of ten lectures was
| |
| arranged for Bell, at a hundred dollars a lecture,
| |
| which was the first money payment he
| |
| had received for his invention. His opening
| |
| night was in Salem, before an audience
| |
| of five hundred people, and with Mrs. Sand-
| |
| ers, the motherly old lady who had sheltered
| |
| Bell in the days of his experiment, sitting
| |
| proudly in one of the front seats. A pole
| |
| was set up at the front of the hall, supporting
| |
| the end of a telegraph wire that ran from Salem
| |
| to Boston. And Watson, who became the first
| |
| public talker by telephone, sent messages from
| |
| Boston to various members of the audience. An
| |
| account of this lecture was sent by telephone to
| |
| The Boston Globe, which announced the next
| |
| morning--
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| "This special despatch of the Globe has been
| |
| transmitted by telephone in the presence of twenty people,
| |
| who have thus been witnesses to a feat never before
| |
| attempted--the sending of news over the space of sixteen
| |
| miles by the human voice."
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| This Globe despatch awoke the newspaper
| |
| editors with an unexpected jolt. For the first
| |
| time they began to notice that there was
| |
| a new word in the language, and a new
| |
| idea in the scientific world. No newspaper
| |
| had made any mention whatever of the
| |
| telephone for seventy-five days after Bell
| |
| received his patent. Not one of the swarm
| |
| of reporters who thronged the Philadelphia
| |
| Centennial had regarded the telephone as a
| |
| matter of any public interest. But when a column
| |
| of news was sent by telephone to The Boston
| |
| Globe, the whole newspaper world was agog
| |
| with excitement. A thousand pens wrote the
| |
| name of Bell. Requests to repeat his lecture
| |
| came to Bell from Cyrus W. Field, the veteran
| |
| of the Atlantic Cable, from the poet Longfellow,
| |
| and from many others.
| |
|
| |
| As he was by profession an elocutionist, Bell
| |
| was able to make the most of these opportunities.
| |
| His lectures became popular entertainments.
| |
| They were given in the largest halls. At one
| |
| lecture two Japanese gentlemen were induced to
| |
| talk to one another in their own language, via
| |
| the telephone. At a second lecture a band
| |
| played "The Star-Spangled Banner," in Boston,
| |
| and was heard by an audience of two thousand
| |
| people in Providence. At a third, Signor Ferranti,
| |
| who was in Providence, sang a selection
| |
| from "The Marriage of Figaro" to an audience
| |
| in Boston. At a fourth, an exhortation from
| |
| Moody and a song from Sankey came over the
| |
| vibrating wire. And at a fifth, in New Haven,
| |
| Bell stood sixteen Yale professors in line, hand
| |
| in hand, and talked through their bodies--a
| |
| feat which was then, and is to-day, almost too
| |
| wonderful to believe.
| |
|
| |
| Very slowly these lectures, and the tireless
| |
| activity of Hubbard, pushed back the ridicule
| |
| and the incredulity; and in the merry month of
| |
| May, 1877, a man named Emery drifted into
| |
| Hubbard's office from the near-by city of Charlestown,
| |
| and leased two telephones for twenty
| |
| actual dollars--the first money ever paid for a
| |
| telephone. This was the first feeble sign that
| |
| such a novelty as the telephone business could be
| |
| established; and no money ever looked handsomer
| |
| than this twenty dollars did to Bell,
| |
| Sanders, Hubbard, and Watson. It was the
| |
| tiny first-fruit of fortune.
| |
|
| |
| Greatly encouraged, they prepared a little circular
| |
| which was the first advertisement of the
| |
| telephone business. It is an oddly simple little
| |
| document to-day, but to the 1877 brain it was
| |
| startling. It modestly claimed that a telephone
| |
| was superior to a telegraph for three reasons:
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| "(1) No skilled operator is required, but direct
| |
| communication may be had by speech without the intervention
| |
| of a third person.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| "(2) The communication is much more rapid, the
| |
| average number of words transmitted in a minute by the
| |
| Morse sounder being from fifteen to twenty, by telephone
| |
| from one to two hundred.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| "(3) No expense is required, either for its operation
| |
| or repair. It needs no battery and has no complicated
| |
| machinery. It is unsurpassed for economy and simplicity."
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| The only telephone line in the world at this
| |
| time was between the Williams' workshop in
| |
| Boston and the home of Mr. Williams in Somerville.
| |
| But in May, 1877, a young man named
| |
| E. T. Holmes, who was running a burglar-alarm
| |
| business in Boston, proposed that a few telephones
| |
| be linked to his wires. He was a friend
| |
| and customer of Williams, and suggested this
| |
| plan half in jest and half in earnest. Hubbard
| |
| was quick to seize this opportunity, and at once
| |
| lent Holmes a dozen telephones. Without asking
| |
| permission, Holmes went into six banks and
| |
| nailed up a telephone in each. Five bankers
| |
| made no protest, but the sixth indignantly
| |
| ordered "that playtoy" to be taken out. The
| |
| other five telephones could be connected by a
| |
| switch in Holmes's office, and thus was born the
| |
| first tiny and crude Telephone Exchange. Here
| |
| it ran for several weeks as a telephone system
| |
| by day and a burglar-alarm by night. No
| |
| money was paid by the bankers. The service
| |
| was given to them as an exhibition and an advertisement.
| |
| The little shelf with its five telephones
| |
| was no more like the marvellous exchanges of
| |
| to-day than a canoe is like a Cunarder, but it was
| |
| unquestionably the first place where several telephone
| |
| wires came together and could be united.
| |
|
| |
| Soon afterwards, Holmes took his telephones
| |
| out of the banks, and started a real telephone
| |
| business among the express companies of Boston.
| |
| But by this time several exchanges had been
| |
| opened for ordinary business, in New Haven,
| |
| Bridgeport, New York, and Philadelphia.
| |
| Also, a man from Michigan had arrived, with the
| |
| hardihood to ask for a State agency--George
| |
| W. Balch, of Detroit. He was so welcome that
| |
| Hubbard joyfully gave him everything he asked
| |
| --a perpetual right to the whole State of Michigan.
| |
| Balch was not required to pay a cent in
| |
| advance, except his railway fare, and before he
| |
| was many years older he had sold his lease for
| |
| a handsome fortune of a quarter of a million
| |
| dollars, honestly earned by his initiative and
| |
| enterprise.
| |
|
| |
| By August, when Bell's patent was sixteen
| |
| months old, there were 778 telephones in use.
| |
| This looked like success to the optimistic Hubbard.
| |
| He decided that the time had come to
| |
| organize the business, so he created a simple
| |
| agreement which he called the "Bell Telephone
| |
| Association." This agreement gave Bell, Hubbard
| |
| and Sanders a three-tenths interest apiece
| |
| in the patents, and Watson one-tenth. THERE WAS
| |
| NO CAPITAL. There was none to be had.
| |
| The four men had at this time an absolute
| |
| monopoly of the telephone business; and everybody
| |
| else was quite willing that they should
| |
| have it.
| |
|
| |
| The only man who had money and dared to
| |
| stake it on the future of the telephone was
| |
| Thomas Sanders, and he did this not mainly for
| |
| business reasons. Both he and Hubbard were
| |
| attached to Bell primarily by sentiment, as Bell
| |
| had removed the blight of dumbness from
| |
| Sanders's little son, and was soon to marry
| |
| Hubbard's daughter.
| |
|
| |
| Also, Sanders had no expectation, at first, that
| |
| so much money would be needed. He was not
| |
| rich. His entire business, which was that of cutting
| |
| out soles for shoe manufacturers, was not at
| |
| any time worth more than thirty-five thousand
| |
| dollars. Yet, from 1874 to 1878, he had
| |
| advanced nine-tenths of the money that was spent
| |
| on the telephone. He had paid Bell's room-rent,
| |
| and Watson's wages, and Williams's expenses,
| |
| and the cost of the exhibit at the Centennial.
| |
| The first five thousand telephones, and more,
| |
| were made with his money. And so many long,
| |
| expensive months dragged by before any
| |
| relief came to Sanders, that he was compelled,
| |
| much against his will and his business
| |
| judgment, to stretch his credit within an inch
| |
| of the breaking-point to help Bell and the telephone.
| |
| Desperately he signed note after note
| |
| until he faced a total of one hundred and ten
| |
| thousand dollars. If the new "scientific toy"
| |
| succeeded, which he often doubted, he would
| |
| be the richest citizen in Haverhill; and if it
| |
| failed, which he sorely feared, he would be a
| |
| bankrupt.
| |
|
| |
| A disheartening series of rebuffs slowly forced
| |
| the truth in upon Sanders's mind that the business
| |
| world refused to accept the telephone as an
| |
| article of commerce. It was a toy, a plaything,
| |
| a scientific wonder, but not a necessity to be
| |
| bought and used for ordinary purposes by ordinary
| |
| people. Capitalists treated it exactly as
| |
| they treated the Atlantic Cable project when
| |
| Cyrus Field visited Boston in 1862. They
| |
| admired and marvelled; but not a man subscribed
| |
| a dollar. Also, Sanders very soon learned that it
| |
| was a most unpropitious time for the setting
| |
| afloat of a new enterprise. It was a period of
| |
| turmoil and suspicion. What with the Jay
| |
| Cooke failure, the Hayes-Tilden deadlock, and
| |
| the bursting of a hundred railroad bubbles,
| |
| there was very little in the news of the day to
| |
| encourage investors.
| |
|
| |
| It was impossible for Sanders, or Bell, or Hubbard,
| |
| to prepare any definite plan. No matter
| |
| what the plan might have been, they had no
| |
| money to put it through. They believed that
| |
| they had something new and marvellous, which
| |
| some one, somewhere, would be willing to buy.
| |
| Until this good genie should arrive, they could do
| |
| no more than flounder ahead, and take whatever
| |
| business was the nearest and the cheapest. So
| |
| while Bell, in eloquent rhapsodies, painted word-
| |
| pictures of a universal telephone service to
| |
| applauding audiences, Sanders and Hubbard were
| |
| leasing telephones two by two, to business men
| |
| who previously had been using the private lines
| |
| of the Western Union Telegraph Company.
| |
|
| |
| This great corporation was at the time their
| |
| natural and inevitable enemy. It had swallowed
| |
| most of its competitors, and was reaching out to
| |
| monopolize all methods of communication by
| |
| wire. The rosiest hope that shone in front of
| |
| Sanders and Hubbard was that the Western
| |
| Union might conclude to buy the Bell patents,
| |
| just as it had already bought many others. In
| |
| one moment of discouragement they had offered
| |
| the telephone to President Orton, of the Western
| |
| Union, for $100,000; and Orton had refused it.
| |
| "What use," he asked pleasantly, "could this
| |
| company make of an electrical toy?"
| |
|
| |
| But besides the operation of its own wires, the
| |
| Western Union was supplying customers with
| |
| various kinds of printing-telegraphs and dial
| |
| telegraphs, some of which could transmit sixty
| |
| words a minute. These accurate instruments, it
| |
| believed, could never be displaced by such a scientific
| |
| oddity as the telephone. And it continued
| |
| to believe this until one of its subsidiary
| |
| companies--the Gold and Stock--reported that
| |
| several of its machines had been superseded by
| |
| telephones.
| |
|
| |
| At once the Western Union awoke from its
| |
| indifference. Even this tiny nibbling at its business
| |
| must be stopped. It took action quickly
| |
| and organized the "American Speaking-Telephone
| |
| Company," with $300,000 capital, and
| |
| with three electrical inventors, Edison, Gray, and
| |
| Dolbear, on its staff. With all the bulk of its
| |
| great wealth and prestige, it swept down upon
| |
| Bell and his little bodyguard. It trampled upon
| |
| Bell's patent with as little concern as an elephant
| |
| can have when he tramples upon an ant's nest.
| |
| To the complete bewilderment of Bell, it coolly
| |
| announced that it had "the only original telephone,"
| |
| and that it was ready to supply "superior
| |
| telephones with all the latest improvements
| |
| made by the original inventors--Dolbear, Gray,
| |
| and Edison."
| |
|
| |
| The result was strange and unexpected. The
| |
| Bell group, instead of being driven from the
| |
| field, were at once lifted to a higher level in the
| |
| business world. The effect was as if the Standard
| |
| Oil Company were to commence the manufacture
| |
| of aeroplanes. In a flash, the telephone
| |
| ceased to be a "scientific toy," and became an
| |
| article of commerce. It began for the first time
| |
| to be taken seriously. And the Western Union,
| |
| in the endeavor to protect its private lines, became
| |
| involuntarily a bell-wether to lead capitalists
| |
| in the direction of the telephone.
| |
|
| |
| Sanders's relatives, who were many and rich,
| |
| came to his rescue. Most of them were well-
| |
| known business men--the Bradleys, the Saltonstalls,
| |
| Fay, Silsbee, and Carlton. These men,
| |
| together with Colonel William H. Forbes, who
| |
| came in as a friend of the Bradleys, were the first
| |
| capitalists who, for purely business reasons,
| |
| invested money in the Bell patents. Two months
| |
| after the Western Union had given its weighty
| |
| endorsement to the telephone, these men organized
| |
| a company to do business in New England
| |
| only, and put fifty thousand dollars in its
| |
| treasury.
| |
|
| |
| In a short time the delighted Hubbard found
| |
| himself leasing telephones at the rate of a thousand
| |
| a month. He was no longer a promoter,
| |
| but a general manager. Men were standing in
| |
| line to ask for agencies. Crude little telephone
| |
| exchanges were being started in a dozen or more
| |
| cities. There was a spirit of confidence and enterprise;
| |
| and the next step, clearly, was to create
| |
| a business organization. None of the partners
| |
| were competent to undertake such a work.
| |
| Hubbard had little aptitude as an organizer; Bell
| |
| had none; and Sanders was held fast by his
| |
| leather interests. Here, at last, after four years
| |
| of the most heroic effort, were the raw materials
| |
| out of which a telephone business could be
| |
| constructed. But who was to be the builder, and
| |
| where was he to be found?
| |
|
| |
| One morning the indefatigable Hubbard
| |
| solved the problem. "Watson," he said, "there's
| |
| a young man in Washington who can handle
| |
| this situation, and I want you to run down
| |
| and see what you think of him." Watson
| |
| went, reported favorably, and in a day or
| |
| so the young man received a letter from
| |
| Hubbard, offering him the position of General
| |
| Manager, at a salary of thirty-five hundred
| |
| dollars a year. "We rely," Hubbard said,
| |
| "upon your executive ability, your fidelity, and
| |
| unremitting zeal." The young man replied, in
| |
| one of those dignified letters more usual in
| |
| the nineteenth than in the twentieth century.
| |
| "My faith in the success of the enterprise is such
| |
| that I am willing to trust to it," he wrote, "and I
| |
| have confidence that we shall establish the harmony
| |
| and cooperation that is essential to the
| |
| success of an enterprise of this kind." One week
| |
| later the young man, Theodore N. Vail, took
| |
| his seat as General Manager in a tiny office in
| |
| Reade Street, New York, and the building of the
| |
| business began.
| |
|
| |
| This arrival of Vail at the critical moment
| |
| emphasized the fact that Bell was one of the most
| |
| fortunate of inventors. He was not robbed of
| |
| his invention, as might easily have happened.
| |
| One by one there arrived to help him a number of
| |
| able men, with all the various abilities that the
| |
| changing situation required. There was such a
| |
| focussing of factors that the whole matter
| |
| appeared to have been previously rehearsed. No
| |
| sooner had Bell appeared on the stage than his
| |
| supporting players, each in his turn, received his
| |
| cue and took part in the action of the drama.
| |
| There was not one of these men who could have
| |
| done the work of any other. Each was distinctive
| |
| and indispensable. Bell invented the telephone;
| |
| Watson constructed it; Sanders financed
| |
| it; Hubbard introduced it; and Vail put it on a
| |
| business basis.
| |
|
| |
| The new General Manager had, of course, no
| |
| experience in the telephone business. Neither
| |
| had any one else. But he, like Bell, came to his
| |
| task with a most surprising fitness. He was a
| |
| member of the historic Vail family of Morristown,
| |
| New Jersey, which had operated the
| |
| Speedwell Iron Works for four or five generations.
| |
| His grand-uncle Stephen had built the
| |
| engines for the Savannah, the first American
| |
| steamship to cross the Atlantic Ocean; and his
| |
| cousin Alfred was the friend and co-worker of
| |
| Morse, the inventor of the telegraph. Morse
| |
| had lived for several years at the Vail homestead
| |
| in Morristown; and it was here that he
| |
| erected his first telegraph line, a three-mile circle
| |
| around the Iron Works, in 1838. He and
| |
| Alfred Vail experimented side by side in the
| |
| making of the telegraph, and Vail eventually received
| |
| a fortune for his share of the Morse patent.
| |
|
| |
| Thus it happened that young Theodore Vail
| |
| learned the dramatic story of Morse at his
| |
| mother's knee. As a boy, he played around the
| |
| first telegraph line, and learned to put messages
| |
| on the wire. His favorite toy was a little
| |
| telegraph that he constructed for himself. At
| |
| twenty-two he went West, in the vague hope of
| |
| possessing a bonanza farm; then he swung back
| |
| into telegraphy, and in a few years found
| |
| himself in the Government Mail Service at Washington.
| |
| By 1876, he was at the head of this Department,
| |
| which he completely reorganized. He
| |
| introduced the bag system in postal cars, and
| |
| made war on waste and clumsiness. By virtue
| |
| of this position he was the one man in the United
| |
| States who had a comprehensive view of all railways
| |
| and telegraphs. He was much more apt,
| |
| consequently, than other men to develop the idea
| |
| of a national telephone system.
| |
|
| |
| While in the midst of this bureaucratic house-
| |
| cleaning he met Hubbard, who had just been
| |
| appointed by President Hayes as the head of a
| |
| commission on mail transportation. He and
| |
| Hubbard were constantly thrown together, on
| |
| trains and in hotels; and as Hubbard invariably
| |
| had a pair of telephones in his valise, the two men
| |
| soon became co-enthusiasts. Vail found himself
| |
| painting brain-pictures of the future of the
| |
| telephone, and by the time that he was asked to
| |
| become its General Manager, he had become so
| |
| confident that, as he said afterwards, he "was
| |
| willing to leave a Government job with a small
| |
| salary for a telephone job with no salary."
| |
|
| |
| So, just as Amos Kendall had left the post
| |
| office service thirty years before to establish the
| |
| telegraph business, Theodore N. Vail left the
| |
| post office service to establish the telephone business.
| |
| He had been in authority over thirty-five
| |
| hundred postal employees, and was the developer
| |
| of a system that covered every inhabited portion
| |
| of the country. Consequently, he had a quality of
| |
| experience that was immensely valuable in
| |
| straightening out the tangled affairs of the telephone.
| |
| Line by line, he mapped out a method, a
| |
| policy, a system. He introduced a larger view
| |
| of the telephone business, and swept off the table
| |
| all schemes for selling out. He persuaded half
| |
| a dozen of his post office friends to buy stock, so
| |
| that in less than two months the first "Bell
| |
| Telephone Company" was organized, with $450,000
| |
| capital and a service of twelve thousand
| |
| telephones.
| |
|
| |
| Vail's first step, naturally, was to stiffen up the
| |
| backbone of this little company, and to prevent
| |
| the Western Union from frightening it into a
| |
| surrender. He immediately sent a copy of Bell's
| |
| patent to every agent, with orders to hold the
| |
| fort against all opposition. "We have the only
| |
| original telephone patents," he wrote; "we have
| |
| organized and introduced the business, and we do
| |
| not propose to have it taken from us by any
| |
| corporation." To one agent, who was showing the
| |
| white feather, he wrote:
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| "You have too great an idea of the Western Union.
| |
| If it was all massed in your one city you might well
| |
| fear it; but it is represented there by one man only,
| |
| and he has probably as much as he can attend to outside
| |
| of the telephone. For you to acknowledge that
| |
| you cannot compete with his influence when you make
| |
| it your special business, is hardly the thing. There
| |
| may be a dozen concerns that will all go to the Western
| |
| Union, but they will not take with them all their friends.
| |
| I would advise that you go ahead and keep your present
| |
| advantage. We must organize companies with sufficient
| |
| vitality to carry on a fight, as it is simply useless
| |
| to get a company started that will succumb to the first
| |
| bit of opposition it may encounter."
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| Next, having encouraged his thoroughly
| |
| alarmed agents, Vail proceeded to build up a
| |
| definite business policy. He stiffened up the
| |
| contracts and made them good for five years only.
| |
| He confined each agent to one place, and reserved
| |
| all rights to connect one city with another.
| |
| He established a department to collect and pro-
| |
| tect any new inventions that concerned the telephone.
| |
| He agreed to take part of the royalties
| |
| in stock, when any local company preferred to
| |
| pay its debts in this way. And he took steps
| |
| toward standardizing all telephonic apparatus by
| |
| controlling the factories that made it.
| |
|
| |
| These various measures were part of Vail's
| |
| plan to create a national telephone system. His
| |
| central idea, from the first, was not the mere
| |
| leasing of telephones, but rather the creation
| |
| of a Federal company that would be a permanent
| |
| partner in the entire telephone business. Even
| |
| in that day of small things, and amidst the
| |
| confusion and rough-and-tumble of pioneering, he
| |
| worked out the broad policy that prevails to-day;
| |
| and this goes far to explain the fact that
| |
| there are in the United States twice as many
| |
| telephones as there are in all other countries
| |
| combined.
| |
|
| |
| Vail arrived very much as Blucher did at the
| |
| battle of Waterloo--a trifle late, but in time to
| |
| prevent the telephone forces from being routed
| |
| by the Old Guard of the Western Union. He
| |
| was scarcely seated in his managerial chair, when
| |
| the Western Union threw the entire Bell army
| |
| into confusion by launching the Edison transmitter.
| |
| Edison, who was at that time fairly
| |
| started in his career of wizardry, had made an
| |
| instrument of marvellous alertness. It was beyond
| |
| all argument superior to the telephones then in
| |
| use and the lessees of Bell telephones clamored
| |
| with one voice for "a transmitter as good as
| |
| Edison's." This, of course, could not be had in a
| |
| moment, and the five months that followed were
| |
| the darkest days in the childhood of the telephone.
| |
|
| |
| How to compete with the Western Union,
| |
| which had this superior transmitter, a host of
| |
| agents, a network of wires, forty millions of
| |
| capital, and a first claim upon all newspapers,
| |
| hotels, railroads, and rights of way--that was
| |
| the immediate problem that confronted the new
| |
| General Manager. Every inch of progress had
| |
| to be fought for. Several of his captains
| |
| deserted, and he was compelled to take control
| |
| of their unprofitable exchanges. There was
| |
| scarcely a mail that did not bring him some
| |
| bulletin of discouragement or defeat.
| |
|
| |
| In the effort to conciliate a hostile public, the
| |
| telephone rates had everywhere been made too
| |
| low. Hubbard had set a price of twenty dollars
| |
| a year, for the use of two telephones on a private
| |
| line; and when exchanges were started, the rate
| |
| was seldom more than three dollars a month.
| |
| There were deadheads in abundance, mostly officials
| |
| and politicians. In St. Louis, one of the
| |
| few cities that charged a sufficient price, nine-
| |
| tenths of the merchants refused to become
| |
| subscribers. In Boston, the first pay-station ran
| |
| three months before it earned a dollar. Even as
| |
| late as 1880, when the first National Telephone
| |
| Convention was held at Niagara Falls, one of the
| |
| delegates expressed the general situation very
| |
| correctly when he said: "We were all in a state
| |
| of enthusiastic uncertainty. We were full of
| |
| hope, yet when we analyzed those hopes they were
| |
| very airy indeed. There was probably not one
| |
| company that could say it was making a cent, nor
| |
| even that it EXPECTED to make a cent."
| |
|
| |
| Especially in the largest cities, where the
| |
| Western Union had most power, the lives of the
| |
| telephone pioneers were packed with hardships
| |
| and adventures. In Philadelphia, for instance, a
| |
| resolute young man named Thomas E. Cornish
| |
| was attacked as though he had suddenly become a
| |
| public enemy, when he set out to establish the
| |
| first telephone service. No official would grant
| |
| him a permit to string wires. His workmen were
| |
| arrested. The printing-telegraph men warned
| |
| him that he must either quit or be driven out.
| |
| When he asked capitalists for money, they replied
| |
| that he might as well expect to lease jew's-
| |
| harps as telephones. Finally, he was compelled
| |
| to resort to strategy where argument had failed.
| |
| He had received an order from Colonel Thomas
| |
| Scott, who wanted a wire between his house and
| |
| his office. Colonel Scott was the President of the
| |
| Pennsylvania Railroad, and therefore a man of
| |
| the highest prestige in the city. So as soon as
| |
| Cornish had put this line in place, he kept his men
| |
| at work stringing other lines. When the police
| |
| interfered, he showed them Colonel Scott's signature
| |
| and was let alone. In this way he put
| |
| fifteen wires up before the trick was discovered;
| |
| and soon afterwards, with eight subscribers, he
| |
| founded the first Philadelphia exchange.
| |
|
| |
| As may be imagined, such battling as this did
| |
| not put much money into the treasury of the
| |
| parent company; and the letters written by
| |
| Sanders at this time prove that it was in a hard
| |
| plight.
| |
|
| |
| The following was one of the queries put to
| |
| Hubbard by the overburdened Sanders:
| |
|
| |
| "How on earth do you expect me to meet a
| |
| draft of two hundred and seventy-five dollars
| |
| without a dollar in the treasury, and with a debt
| |
| of thirty thousand dollars staring us in the face?"
| |
| "Vail's salary is small enough," he continued
| |
| in a second letter, "but as to where it is coming
| |
| from I am not so clear. Bradley is awfully blue
| |
| and discouraged. Williams is tormenting me
| |
| for money and my personal credit will not stand
| |
| everything. I have advanced the Company two
| |
| thousand dollars to-day, and Williams must have
| |
| three thousand dollars more this month. His
| |
| pay-day has come and his capital will not carry
| |
| him another inch. If Bradley throws up his
| |
| hand, I will unfold to you my last desperate
| |
| plan."
| |
|
| |
| And if the company had little money, it had
| |
| less credit. Once when Vail had ordered a small
| |
| bill of goods from a merchant named Tillotson, of
| |
| 15 Dey Street, New York, the merchant replied
| |
| that the goods were ready, and so was the bill,
| |
| which was seven dollars. By a strange coincidence,
| |
| the magnificent building of the New
| |
| York Telephone Company stands to-day on the
| |
| site of Tillotson's store.
| |
|
| |
| Month after month, the little Bell Company
| |
| lived from hand to mouth. No salaries were paid
| |
| in full. Often, for weeks, they were not paid
| |
| at all. In Watson's note-book there are such
| |
| entries during this period as "Lent Bell fifty
| |
| cents," "Lent Hubbard twenty cents," "Bought
| |
| one bottle beer--too bad can't have beer every
| |
| day." More than once Hubbard would have
| |
| gone hungry had not Devonshire, the only clerk,
| |
| shared with him the contents of a dinner-pail.
| |
| Each one of the little group was beset by taunts
| |
| and temptations. Watson was offered ten thousand
| |
| dollars for his one-tenth interest, and hesitated
| |
| three days before refusing it. Railroad
| |
| companies offered Vail a salary that was higher
| |
| and sure, if he would superintend their mail business.
| |
| And as for Sanders, his folly was the talk
| |
| of Haverhill. One Haverhill capitalist, E. J. M.
| |
| Hale, stopped him on the street and asked,
| |
| "Have n't you got a good leather business, Mr.
| |
| Sanders?" "Yes," replied Sanders. "Well,"
| |
| said Hale, "you had better attend to it and quit
| |
| playing on wind instruments." Sanders's
| |
| banker, too, became uneasy on one occasion and
| |
| requested him to call at the bank. "Mr.
| |
| Sanders," he said, "I will be obliged if you will
| |
| take that telephone stock out of the bank, and
| |
| give me in its place your note for thirty thousand
| |
| dollars. I am expecting the examiner here in a
| |
| few days, and I don't want to get caught with
| |
| that stuff in the bank."
| |
|
| |
| Then, in the very midnight of this depression,
| |
| poor Bell returned from England, whither he and
| |
| his bride had gone on their honeymoon, and
| |
| announced that he had no money; that he had
| |
| failed to establish a telephone business in England;
| |
| and that he must have a thousand dollars
| |
| at once to pay his urgent debts. He was
| |
| thoroughly discouraged and sick. As he lay in
| |
| the Massachusetts General Hospital, he wrote a
| |
| cry for help to the embattled little company that
| |
| was making its desperate fight to protect his
| |
| patents. "Thousands of telephones are now in
| |
| operation in all parts of the country," he said,
| |
| "yet I have not yet received one cent from my
| |
| invention. On the contrary, I am largely out of
| |
| pocket by my researches, as the mere value of the
| |
| profession that I have sacrificed during my three
| |
| years' work, amounts to twelve thousand dollars."
| |
|
| |
| Fortunately, there came, in almost the same
| |
| mail with Bell's letter, another letter from a
| |
| young Bostonian named Francis Blake, with the
| |
| good news that he had invented a transmitter as
| |
| satisfactory as Edison's, and that he would prefer
| |
| to sell it for stock instead of cash. If ever a man
| |
| came as an angel of light, that man was Francis
| |
| Blake. The possession of his transmitter instantly
| |
| put the Bell Company on an even footing
| |
| with the Western Union, in the matter of
| |
| apparatus. It encouraged the few capitalists
| |
| who had invested money, and it stirred others to
| |
| come forward. The general business situation
| |
| had by this time become more settled, and in four
| |
| months the company had twenty-two thousand
| |
| telephones in use, and had reorganized into the
| |
| National Bell Telephone Company, with $850,
| |
| 000 capital and with Colonel Forbes as its first
| |
| President. Forbes now picked up the load that
| |
| had been carried so long by Sanders. As the son
| |
| of an East India merchant and the son-in-law
| |
| of Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was a Bostonian
| |
| of the Brahmin caste. He was a big, four-
| |
| square man who was both popular and efficient;
| |
| and his leadership at this crisis was of immense
| |
| value.
| |
|
| |
| This reorganization put the telephone business
| |
| into the hands of competent business men at every
| |
| point. It brought the heroic and experimental
| |
| period to an end. From this time onwards the
| |
| telephone had strong friends in the financial
| |
| world. It was being attacked by the Western
| |
| Union and by rival inventors who were jealous
| |
| of Bell's achievement. It was being half-starved
| |
| by cheap rates and crippled by clumsy apparatus.
| |
| It was being abused and grumbled at by an
| |
| impatient public. But the art of making and
| |
| marketing it had at last been built up into a
| |
| commercial enterprise. It was now a business,
| |
| fighting for its life.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| ==CHAPTER III - THE HOLDING OF THE BUSINESS==
| |
|
| |
| For seventeen months no one disputed Bell's
| |
| claim to be the original inventor of the
| |
| telephone. All the honor, such as it was, had
| |
| been given to him freely, and no one came forward
| |
| to say that it was not rightfully his. No
| |
| one, so far as we know, had any strong desire to
| |
| do so. No one conceived that the telephone
| |
| would ever be any more than a whimsical oddity
| |
| of science. It was so new, so unexpected, that
| |
| from Lord Kelvin down to the messenger boys
| |
| in the telegraph offices, it was an incomprehensible
| |
| surprise. But after Bell had explained his
| |
| invention in public lectures before more than
| |
| twenty thousand people, after it had been on exhibition
| |
| for months at the Philadelphia Centennial,
| |
| after several hundred articles on it had appeared
| |
| in newspapers and scientific magazines, and after
| |
| actual sales of telephones had been made in
| |
| various parts of the country, there began to
| |
| appear such a succession of claimants and infringers
| |
| that the forgetful public came to believe
| |
| that the telephone, like most inventions, was the
| |
| product of many minds.
| |
|
| |
| Just as Morse, who was the sole inventor of the
| |
| American telegraph in 1837, was confronted by
| |
| sixty-two rivals in 1838, so Bell, who was the sole
| |
| inventor in 1876, found himself two years later
| |
| almost mobbed by the "Tichborne claimants" of
| |
| the telephone. The inventors who had been his
| |
| competitors in the attempt to produce a musical
| |
| telegraph, persuaded themselves that they had
| |
| unconsciously done as much as he. Any possessor
| |
| of a telegraphic patent, who had used
| |
| the common phrase "talking wire," had a chance
| |
| to build up a plausible story of prior invention.
| |
| And others came forward with claims so vague
| |
| and elusive that Bell would scarcely have been
| |
| more surprised if the heirs of Goethe had
| |
| demanded a share of the telephone royalties on
| |
| the ground that Faust had spoken of "making
| |
| a bridge through the moving air."
| |
|
| |
| This babel of inventors and pretenders amazed
| |
| Bell and disconcerted his backers. But it was no
| |
| more than might have been expected. Here was
| |
| a patent--"the most valuable single patent ever
| |
| issued"--and yet the invention itself was so
| |
| simple that it could be duplicated easily by any
| |
| smart boy or any ordinary mechanic. The making
| |
| of a telephone was like the trick of Columbus
| |
| standing an egg on end. Nothing was easier to
| |
| those who knew how. And so it happened that,
| |
| as the crude little model of Bell's original telephone
| |
| lay in the Patent Office open and unprotected
| |
| except by a few phrases that clever lawyers
| |
| might evade, there sprang up inevitably around
| |
| it the most costly and persistent Patent War that
| |
| any country has ever known, continuing for
| |
| eleven years and comprising SIX HUNDRED LAWSUITS.
| |
|
| |
| The first attack upon the young telephone business
| |
| was made by the Western Union Telegraph
| |
| Company. It came charging full tilt upon Bell,
| |
| driving three inventors abreast--Edison, Gray,
| |
| and Dolbear. It expected an easy victory; in
| |
| fact, the disparity between the two opponents
| |
| was so evident, that there seemed little chance of
| |
| a contest of any kind. "The Western Union will
| |
| swallow up the telephone people," said public
| |
| opinion, "just as it has already swallowed up all
| |
| improvements in telegraphy."
| |
|
| |
| At that time, it should be remembered, the
| |
| Western Union was the only corporation that was
| |
| national in its extent. It was the most powerful
| |
| electrical company in the world, and, as Bell
| |
| wrote to his parents, "probably the largest
| |
| corporation that ever existed." It had behind it
| |
| not only forty millions of capital, but the prestige
| |
| of the Vanderbilts, and the favor of financiers
| |
| everywhere. Also, it met the telephone pioneers
| |
| at every point because it, too, was a WIRE company.
| |
| It owned rights-of-way along roads and
| |
| on house-tops. It had a monopoly of hotels and
| |
| railroad offices. No matter in what direction the
| |
| Bell Company turned, the live wire of the Western
| |
| Union lay across its path.
| |
|
| |
| From the first, the Western Union relied more
| |
| upon its strength than upon the merits of its case.
| |
| Its chief electrical expert, Frank L. Pope, had
| |
| made a six months' examination of the Bell
| |
| patents. He had bought every book in the
| |
| United States and Europe that was likely to
| |
| have any reference to the transmission of speech,
| |
| and employed a professor who knew eight
| |
| languages to translate them. He and his men
| |
| ransacked libraries and patent offices; they
| |
| rummaged and sleuthed and interviewed; and
| |
| found nothing of any value. In his final report
| |
| to the Western Union, Mr. Pope announced that
| |
| there was no way to make a telephone except
| |
| Bell's way, and advised the purchase of the Bell
| |
| patents. "I am entirely unable to discover any
| |
| apparatus or method anticipating the invention of
| |
| Bell as a whole," he said; "and I conclude that
| |
| his patent is valid." But the officials of the great
| |
| corporation refused to take this report seriously.
| |
| They threw it aside and employed Edison, Gray,
| |
| and Dolbear to devise a telephone that could be
| |
| put into competition with Bell's.
| |
|
| |
| As we have seen in the previous chapter, there
| |
| now came a period of violent competition which
| |
| is remembered as the Dark Ages of the telephone
| |
| business. The Western Union bought out
| |
| several of the Bell exchanges and opened up a
| |
| lively war on the others. As befitting its size, it
| |
| claimed everything. It introduced Gray as the
| |
| original inventor of the telephone, and ordered
| |
| its lawyers to take action at once against the Bell
| |
| Company for infringement of the Gray patent.
| |
| This high-handed action, it hoped, would most
| |
| quickly bring the little Bell group into a humble
| |
| and submissive frame of mind. Every morning
| |
| the Western Union looked to see the white flag
| |
| flying over the Bell headquarters. But no white
| |
| flag appeared. On the contrary, the news came
| |
| that the Bell Company had secured two eminent
| |
| lawyers and were ready to give battle.
| |
|
| |
| The case began in the Autumn of 1878 and
| |
| lasted for a year. Then it came to a sudden and
| |
| most unexpected ending. The lawyer-in-chief of
| |
| the Western Union was George Gifford, who was
| |
| perhaps the ablest patent attorney of his day.
| |
| He was versed in patent lore from Alpha to
| |
| Omega; and as the trial proceeded, he became
| |
| convinced that the Bell patent was valid. He
| |
| notified the Western Union confidentially, of
| |
| course, that its case could not be proven, and that
| |
| "Bell was the original inventor of the telephone."
| |
| The best policy, he suggested, was to withdraw
| |
| their claims and make a settlement. This wise advice
| |
| was accepted, and the next day the white flag
| |
| was hauled up, not by the little group of Bell
| |
| fighters, who were huddled together in a tiny,
| |
| two-room office, but by the mighty Western
| |
| Union itself, which had been so arrogant when
| |
| the encounter began.
| |
|
| |
| A committee of three from each side was appointed,
| |
| and after months of disputation, a
| |
| treaty of peace was drawn up and signed. By
| |
| the terms of this treaty the Western Union
| |
| agreed--
| |
|
| |
| (1) To admit that Bell was the original inventor.
| |
|
| |
| (2) To admit that his patents were valid.
| |
|
| |
| (3) To retire from the telephone business.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| The Bell Company, in return for this surrender,
| |
| agreed--
| |
|
| |
| (1) To buy the Western Union telephone system.
| |
|
| |
| (2) To pay the Western Union a royalty of twenty
| |
| per cent on all telephone rentals.
| |
|
| |
| (3) To keep out of the telegraph business.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| This agreement, which was to remain in force
| |
| for seventeen years, was a master-stroke of
| |
| diplomacy on the part of the Bell Company.
| |
| It was the Magna Charta of the telephone. It
| |
| transformed a giant competitor into a friend. It
| |
| added to the Bell System fifty-six thousand telephones
| |
| in fifty-five cities. And it swung the
| |
| valiant little company up to such a pinnacle of
| |
| prosperity that its stock went skyrocketing until
| |
| it touched one thousand dollars a share.
| |
|
| |
| The Western Union had lost its case, for several
| |
| very simple reasons: It had tried to operate
| |
| a telephone system on telegraphic lines, a plan
| |
| that has invariably been unsuccessful, it had a
| |
| low idea of the possibilities of the telephone business;
| |
| and its already busy agents had little time or
| |
| knowledge or enthusiasm to give to the new enterprise.
| |
| With all its power, it found itself outfought
| |
| by this compact body of picked men, who
| |
| were young, zealous, well-handled, and protected
| |
| by a most invulnerable patent.
| |
|
| |
| The Bell Telephone now took its place with the
| |
| Telegraph, the Railroad, the Steamboat, the
| |
| Harvester, and the other necessities of a civilized
| |
| country. Its pioneer days were over. There
| |
| was no more ridicule and incredulity. Every one
| |
| knew that the Bell people had whipped the West-
| |
| ern Union, and hastened to join in the grand Te
| |
| Deum of applause. Within five months from
| |
| the signing of the agreement, there had to be a
| |
| reorganization; and the American Bell Telephone
| |
| Company was created, with six million dollars
| |
| capital. In the following year, 1881, twelve hundred
| |
| new towns and cities were marked on the
| |
| telephone map, and the first dividends were paid
| |
| --$178,500. And in 1882 there came such a telephone
| |
| boom that the Bell System was multiplied
| |
| by two, with more than a million dollars of gross
| |
| earnings.
| |
|
| |
| At this point all the earliest pioneers of the
| |
| telephone, except Vail, pass out of its history.
| |
| Thomas Sanders sold his stock for somewhat less
| |
| than a million dollars, and presently lost most of
| |
| it in a Colorado gold mine. His mother, who had
| |
| been so good a friend to Bell, had her fortune
| |
| doubled. Gardiner G. Hubbard withdrew from
| |
| business life, and as it was impossible for a man
| |
| of his ardent temperament to be idle, he plunged
| |
| into the National Geographical Society. He was
| |
| a Colonel Sellers whose dream of millions (for
| |
| the telephone) had come true; and when he died,
| |
| in 1897, he was rich both in money and in the
| |
| affection of his friends. Charles Williams, in
| |
| whose workshop the first telephones were made,
| |
| sold his factory to the Bell Company in 1881 for
| |
| more money than he had ever expected to possess.
| |
| Thomas A. Watson resigned at the same time,
| |
| finding himself no longer a wage-worker but a
| |
| millionaire. Several years later he established a
| |
| shipbuilding plant near Boston, which grew
| |
| until it employed four thousand workmen and
| |
| had built half a dozen warships for the United
| |
| States Navy.
| |
|
| |
| As for Bell, the first cause of the telephone
| |
| business, he did what a true scientific Bohemian
| |
| might have been expected to do; he gave all his
| |
| stock to his bride on their marriage-day and
| |
| resumed his work as an instructor of deaf-mutes.
| |
| Few kings, if any, had ever given so rich a wedding
| |
| present; and certainly no one in any country
| |
| ever obtained and tossed aside an immense
| |
| fortune as incidentally as did Bell. When the
| |
| Bell Company offered him a salary of ten thousand
| |
| dollars a year to remain its chief inventor,
| |
| he refused the offer cheerfully on the ground that
| |
| he could not "invent to order." In 1880, the
| |
| French Government gave him the Volta Prize of
| |
| fifty thousand francs and the Cross of the Legion
| |
| of Honor. He has had many honors since then,
| |
| and many interests. He has been for thirty
| |
| years one of the most brilliant and picturesque
| |
| personalities in American public life. But none
| |
| of his later achievements can in any degree compare
| |
| with what he did in a cellar in Salem, at
| |
| twenty-eight years of age.
| |
|
| |
| They had all become rich, these first friends
| |
| of the telephone, but not fabulously so. There
| |
| was not at that time, nor has there been since,
| |
| any one who became a multimillionaire by the sale
| |
| of telephone service. If the Bell Company had
| |
| sold its stock at the highest price reached, in 1880,
| |
| it would have received less than nine million
| |
| dollars--a huge sum, but not too much to pay
| |
| for the invention of the telephone and the building
| |
| up of a new art and a new industry. It
| |
| was not as much as the value of the eggs laid
| |
| during the last twelve months by the hens of
| |
| Iowa.
| |
|
| |
| But, as may be imagined, when the news of the
| |
| Western Union agreement became known, the
| |
| story of the telephone became a fairy tale of success.
| |
| Theodore Vail was given a banquet by his
| |
| old-time friends in the Washington postal service,
| |
| and toasted as "the Monte Cristo of the Telephone."
| |
| It was said that the actual cost of the
| |
| Bell plant was only one-twenty-fifth of its capital,
| |
| and that every four cents of investment had thus
| |
| become a dollar. Even Jay Gould, carried beyond
| |
| his usual caution by these stories, ran up to
| |
| New Haven and bought its telephone company,
| |
| only to find out later that its earnings were less
| |
| than its expenses.
| |
|
| |
| Much to the bewilderment of the Bell Company,
| |
| it soon learned that the troubles of wealth
| |
| are as numerous as those of poverty. It was
| |
| beset by a throng of promoters and stock-jobbers,
| |
| who fell upon it and upon the public like a swarm
| |
| of seventeen-year locusts. In three years, one
| |
| hundred and twenty-five competing companies
| |
| were started, in open defiance of the Bell patents.
| |
| The main object of these companies was not, like
| |
| that of the Western Union, to do a legitimate
| |
| telephone business, but to sell stock to the public.
| |
| The face value of their stock was $225,000,000,
| |
| although few of them ever sent a message. One
| |
| company of unusual impertinence, without money
| |
| or patents, had capitalized its audacity at
| |
| $15,000,000.
| |
|
| |
| How to HOLD the business that had been established
| |
| --that was now the problem. None of the
| |
| Bell partners had been mere stock-jobbers. At
| |
| one time they had even taken a pledge not to sell
| |
| any of their stock to outsiders. They had
| |
| financed their company in a most honest and
| |
| simple way; and they were desperately opposed
| |
| to the financial banditti whose purpose was to
| |
| transform the telephone business into a cheat and
| |
| a gamble. At first, having held their own against
| |
| the Western Union, they expected to make short
| |
| work of the stock-jobbers. But it was a vain
| |
| hope. These bogus companies, they found, did
| |
| not fight in the open, as the Western Union had
| |
| done.
| |
|
| |
| All manner of injurious rumors were presently
| |
| set afloat concerning the Bell patent. Other
| |
| inventors--some of them honest men, and some
| |
| shameless pretenders--were brought forward
| |
| with strangely concocted tales of prior invention.
| |
| The Granger movement was at that time a strong
| |
| political factor in the Middle West, and its blind
| |
| fear of patents and "monopolies" was turned
| |
| aggressively against the Bell Company. A few
| |
| Senators and legitimate capitalists were lifted up
| |
| as the figureheads of the crusade. And a loud
| |
| hue-and-cry was raised in the newspapers against
| |
| "high rates and monopoly" to distract the minds
| |
| of the people from the real issue of legitimate
| |
| business versus stock-company bubbles.
| |
|
| |
| The most plausible and persistent of all the
| |
| various inventors who snatched at Bell's laurels,
| |
| was Elisha Gray. He refused to abide by the
| |
| adverse decision of the court. Several years
| |
| after his defeat, he came forward with new
| |
| weapons and new methods of attack. He became
| |
| more hostile and irreconcilable; and until his
| |
| death, in 1901, never renounced his claim to be the
| |
| original inventor of the telephone.
| |
|
| |
| The reason for this persistence is very evident.
| |
| Gray was a professional inventor, a highly competent
| |
| man who had begun his career as a blacksmith's
| |
| apprentice, and risen to be a professor of
| |
| Oberlin. He made, during his lifetime, over five
| |
| million dollars by his patents. In 1874, he and
| |
| Bell were running a neck-and-neck race to see
| |
| who could first invent a musical telegraph--
| |
| when, presto! Bell suddenly turned aside, because
| |
| of his acoustical knowledge, and invented
| |
| the telephone, while Gray kept straight ahead.
| |
| Like all others who were in quest of a better
| |
| telegraph instrument, Gray had glimmerings of
| |
| the possibility of sending speech by wire, and by
| |
| one of the strangest of coincidences he filed a
| |
| caveat on the subject on the SAME DAY that Bell
| |
| filed the application for a patent. Bell had
| |
| arrived first. As the record book shows, the
| |
| fifth entry on that day was: "A. G. Bell, $15";
| |
| and the thirty-ninth entry was "E. Gray, $10."
| |
|
| |
| There was a vast difference between Gray's
| |
| caveat and Bell's application. A caveat is a
| |
| declaration that the writer has NOT invented a
| |
| thing, but believes that he is about to do so; while
| |
| an APPLICATION is a declaration that the writer has
| |
| already perfected the invention. But Gray
| |
| could never forget that he had seemed to be, for
| |
| a time, so close to the golden prize; and seven
| |
| years after he had been set aside by the Western
| |
| Union agreement, he reappeared with claims
| |
| that had grown larger and more definite.
| |
|
| |
| When all the evidence in the various Gray
| |
| lawsuits is sifted out, there appear to have been
| |
| three distinctly different Grays: first, Gray the
| |
| SCOFFER, who examined Bell's telephone at the
| |
| Centennial and said it was "nothing but the old
| |
| lover's telegraph. It is impossible to make a
| |
| practical speaking telephone on the principle
| |
| shown by Professor Bell. . . . The currents
| |
| are too feeble"; second, Gray the CONVERT, who
| |
| wrote frankly to Bell in 1877, "I do not claim
| |
| the credit of inventing it"; and third, Gray the
| |
| CLAIMANT, who endeavored to prove in 1886 that
| |
| he was the original inventor. His real position
| |
| in the matter was once well and wittily described
| |
| by his partner, Enos M. Barton, who said: "Of
| |
| all the men who DIDN'T invent the telephone,
| |
| Gray was the nearest."
| |
|
| |
| It is now clearly seen that the telephone owes
| |
| nothing to Gray. There are no Gray telephones
| |
| in use in any country. Even Gray himself,
| |
| as he admitted in court, failed when he tried
| |
| to make a telephone on the lines laid down in his
| |
| caveat. The final word on the whole matter was
| |
| recently spoken by George C. Maynard, who
| |
| established the telephone business in the city of
| |
| Washington. Said Mr. Maynard:
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| "Mr. Gray was an intimate and valued friend of
| |
| mine, but it is no disrespect to his memory to say
| |
| that on some points involved in the telephone matter,
| |
| he was mistaken. No subject was ever so thoroughly
| |
| investigated as the invention of the speaking telephone.
| |
| No patent has ever been submitted to such determined
| |
| assault from every direction as Bell's; and no inventor
| |
| has ever been more completely vindicated. Bell was the
| |
| first inventor, and Gray was not."
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| After Gray, the weightiest challenger who
| |
| came against Bell was Professor Amos E.
| |
| Dolbear, of Tufts College. He, like Gray, had
| |
| written a letter of applause to Bell in 1877. "I
| |
| congratulate you, sir," he said, "upon your very
| |
| great invention, and I hope to see it supplant all
| |
| forms of existing telegraphs, and that you will be
| |
| successful in obtaining the wealth and honor
| |
| which is your due." But one year later, Dolbear
| |
| came to view with an opposition telephone. It
| |
| was not an imitation of Bell's, he insisted, but an
| |
| improvement upon an electrical device made by a
| |
| German named Philip Reis, in 1861.
| |
|
| |
| Thus there appeared upon the scene the so-
| |
| called "Reis telephone," which was not a telephone
| |
| at all, in any practical sense, but which
| |
| served well enough for nine years or more as a
| |
| weapon to use against the Bell patents. Poor
| |
| Philip Reis himself, the son of a baker in Frankfort,
| |
| Germany, had hoped to make a telephone,
| |
| but he had failed. His machine was operated by
| |
| a "make-and-break" current, and so could not
| |
| carry the infinitely delicate vibrations made by
| |
| the human voice. It could transmit the pitch of
| |
| a sound, but not the QUALITY. At its best, it
| |
| could carry a tune, but never at any time a
| |
| spoken sentence. Reis, in his later years, realized
| |
| that his machine could never be used for the
| |
| transmission of conversation; and in a letter to a
| |
| friend he tells of a code of signals that he has
| |
| invented.
| |
|
| |
| Bell had once, during his three years of
| |
| experimenting, made a Reis machine, although at
| |
| that time he had not seen one. But he soon
| |
| threw it aside, as of no practical value. As a
| |
| teacher of acoustics, Bell knew that the one
| |
| indispensable requirement of a telephone is that it
| |
| shall transmit the WHOLE of a sound, and not
| |
| merely the pitch of it. Such scientists as Lord
| |
| Kelvin, Joseph Henry, and Edison had seen the
| |
| little Reis instrument years before Bell invented
| |
| the telephone; but they regarded it as a mere
| |
| musical toy. It was "not in any sense a speaking
| |
| telephone," said Lord Kelvin. And Edison,
| |
| when trying to put the Reis machine in the most
| |
| favorable light, admitted humorously that when
| |
| he used a Reis transmitter he generally "knew
| |
| what was coming; and knowing what was coming,
| |
| even a Reis transmitter, pure and simple,
| |
| reproduces sounds which seem almost like that
| |
| which was being transmitted; but when the man
| |
| at the other end did not know what was coming,
| |
| it was very seldom that any word was recognized."
| |
|
| |
| In the course of the Dolbear lawsuit, a Reis
| |
| machine was brought into court, and created
| |
| much amusement. It was able to squeak, but
| |
| not to speak. Experts and professors wrestled
| |
| with it in vain. It refused to transmit one intel-
| |
| ligible sentence. "It CAN speak, but it WON'T,"
| |
| explained one of Dolbear's lawyers. It is now
| |
| generally known that while a Reis machine, when
| |
| clogged and out of order, would transmit a word
| |
| or two in an imperfect way, it was built on wrong
| |
| lines. It was no more a telephone than a wagon
| |
| is a sleigh, even though it is possible to chain the
| |
| wheels and make them slide for a foot or two.
| |
| Said Judge Lowell, in rendering his famous
| |
| decision:
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| "A century of Reis would never have produced a
| |
| speaking telephone by mere improvement of construction.
| |
| It was left for Bell to discover that the failure
| |
| was due not to workmanship but to the principle which
| |
| was adopted as the basis of what had to be done.
| |
| . . . Bell discovered a new art--that of transmitting
| |
| speech by electricity, and his claim is not as broad
| |
| as his invention. . . . To follow Reis is to fail;
| |
| but to follow Bell is to succeed."
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| After the victory over Dolbear, the Bell stock
| |
| went soaring skywards; and the higher it went,
| |
| the greater were the number of infringers and
| |
| blowers of stock bubbles. To bait the Bell Company
| |
| became almost a national sport. Any sort
| |
| of claimant, with any sort of wild tale of prior
| |
| invention, could find a speculator to support him.
| |
| On they came, a motley array, "some in rags,
| |
| some on nags, and some in velvet gowns." One
| |
| of them claimed to have done wonders with an
| |
| iron hoop and a file in 1867; a second had a
| |
| marvellous table with glass legs; a third swore
| |
| that he had made a telephone in 1860, but did not
| |
| know what it was until he saw Bell's patent; and
| |
| a fourth told a vivid story of having heard a bullfrog
| |
| croak via a telegraph wire which was strung
| |
| into a certain cellar in Racine, in 1851.
| |
|
| |
| This comic opera phase came to a head in the
| |
| famous Drawbaugh case, which lasted for nearly
| |
| four years, and filled ten thousand pages with
| |
| its evidence. Having failed on Reis, the German,
| |
| the opponents of Bell now brought forward
| |
| an American inventor named Daniel Drawbaugh,
| |
| and opened up a noisy newspaper
| |
| campaign. To secure public sympathy for
| |
| Drawbaugh, it was said that he had invented a
| |
| complete telephone and switchboard before 1876,
| |
| but was in such "utter and abject poverty" that
| |
| he could not get himself a patent. Five hundred
| |
| witnesses were examined; and such a
| |
| general turmoil was aroused that the Bell lawyers
| |
| were compelled to take the attack seriously, and
| |
| to fight back with every pound of ammunition
| |
| they possessed.
| |
|
| |
| The fact about Drawbaugh is that he was a
| |
| mechanic in a country village near Harrisburg,
| |
| Pennsylvania. He was ingenious but not inventive;
| |
| and loved to display his mechanical skill
| |
| before the farmers and villagers. He was a subscriber
| |
| to The Scientific American; and it had
| |
| become the fixed habit of his life to copy other
| |
| people's inventions and exhibit them as his own.
| |
| He was a trailer of inventors. More than forty
| |
| instances of this imitative habit were shown at
| |
| the trial, and he was severely scored by the judge,
| |
| who accused him of "deliberately falsifying the
| |
| facts." His ruling passion of imitation, apparently,
| |
| was not diminished by the loss of his telephone
| |
| claims, as he came to public view again in
| |
| 1903 as a trailer of Marconi.
| |
|
| |
| Drawbaugh's defeat sent the Bell stock up
| |
| once more, and brought on a Xerxes' army of
| |
| opposition which called itself the "Overland
| |
| Company." Having learned that no one claim-
| |
| ant could beat Bell in the courts, this company
| |
| massed the losers together and came forward
| |
| with a scrap-basket full of patents. Several
| |
| powerful capitalists undertook to pay the
| |
| expenses of this adventure. Wires were strung;
| |
| stock was sold; and the enterprise looked for a
| |
| time so genuine that when the Bell lawyers asked
| |
| for an injunction against it, they were refused.
| |
| This was as hard a blow as the Bell people
| |
| received in their eleven years of litigation; and
| |
| the Bell stock tumbled thirty-five points in a few
| |
| days. Infringing companies sprang up like
| |
| gourds in the night. And all went merrily with
| |
| the promoters until the Overland Company was
| |
| thrown out of court, as having no evidence,
| |
| except "the refuse and dregs of former cases--
| |
| the heel-taps found in the glasses at the end of
| |
| the frolic."
| |
|
| |
| But even after this defeat for the claimants,
| |
| the frolic was not wholly ended. They next
| |
| planned to get through politics what they could
| |
| not get through law; they induced the Government
| |
| to bring suit for the annulment of
| |
| the Bell patents. It was a bold and desperate
| |
| move, and enabled the promoters of paper companies
| |
| to sell stock for several years longer.
| |
| The whole dispute was re-opened, from Gray to
| |
| Drawbaugh. Every battle was re-fought; and
| |
| in the end, of course, the Government officials
| |
| learned that they were being used to pull telephone
| |
| chestnuts out of the fire. The case was
| |
| allowed to die a natural death, and was informally
| |
| dropped in 1896.
| |
|
| |
| In all, the Bell Company fought out thirteen
| |
| lawsuits that were of national interest, and five
| |
| that were carried to the Supreme Court in Washington.
| |
| It fought out five hundred and eighty-
| |
| seven other lawsuits of various natures; and with
| |
| the exception of two trivial contract suits, IT
| |
| NEVER LOST A CASE.
| |
|
| |
| Its experience is an unanswerable indictment
| |
| of our system of protecting inventors. No
| |
| inventor had ever a clearer title than Bell. The
| |
| Patent Office itself, in 1884, made an eighteen-
| |
| months' investigation of all telephone patents,
| |
| and reported: "It is to Bell that the world owes
| |
| the possession of the speaking telephone." Yet
| |
| his patent was continuously under fire, and never
| |
| at any time secure. Stock companies whose
| |
| paper capital totalled more than $500,000,000
| |
| were organized to break it down; and from first
| |
| to last the success of the telephone was based
| |
| much less upon the monopoly of patents than
| |
| upon the building up of a well organized
| |
| business.
| |
|
| |
| Fortunately for Bell and the men who upheld
| |
| him, they were defended by two master-lawyers
| |
| who have seldom, if ever, had an equal for team
| |
| work and efficiency--Chauncy Smith and James
| |
| J. Storrow. These two men were marvellously
| |
| well mated. Smith was an old-fashioned attorney
| |
| of the Websterian sort, dignified, ponderous,
| |
| and impressive. By 1878, when he came
| |
| in to defend the little Bell Company against
| |
| the towering Western Union, Smith had become
| |
| the most noted patent lawyer in Boston.
| |
| He was a large, thick-set man, a reminder of
| |
| Benjamin Franklin, with clean-shaven face, long
| |
| hair curling at the ends, frock coat, high collar,
| |
| and beaver hat.
| |
|
| |
| Storrow, on the contrary, was a small man,
| |
| quiet in manner, conversational in argument, and
| |
| an encyclopedia of definite information. He
| |
| was so thorough that, when he became a Bell
| |
| lawyer, he first spent an entire summer at his
| |
| country home in Petersham, studying the laws
| |
| of physics and electricity. He was never in the
| |
| slightest degree spectacular. Once only, during
| |
| the eleven years of litigation, did he lose control
| |
| of his temper. He was attacking the credibility
| |
| of a witness whom he had put on the stand, but
| |
| who had been tampered with by the opposition
| |
| lawyers. "But this man is your own witness,"
| |
| protested the lawyers. "Yes," shouted the
| |
| usually soft-speaking Storrow; "he WAS my witness,
| |
| but now he is YOUR LIAR."
| |
|
| |
| The efficiency of these two men was greatly
| |
| increased by a third--Thomas D. Lockwood,
| |
| who was chosen by Vail in 1879 to establish a
| |
| Patent Department. Two years before, Lockwood
| |
| had heard Bell lecture in Chickering Hall,
| |
| New York, and was a "doubting Thomas." But
| |
| a closer study of the telephone transformed him
| |
| into an enthusiast. Having a memory like a
| |
| filing system, and a knack for invention, Lockwood
| |
| was well fitted to create such a depart-
| |
| ment. He was a man born for the place. And
| |
| he has seen the number of electrical patents grow
| |
| from a few hundred in 1878 to eighty thousand
| |
| in 1910.
| |
|
| |
| These three men were the defenders of the Bell
| |
| patents. As Vail built up the young telephone
| |
| business, they held it from being torn to shreds
| |
| in an orgy of speculative competition. Smith
| |
| prepared the comprehensive plan of defence.
| |
| By his sagacity and experience he was enabled to
| |
| mark out the general principles upon which Bell
| |
| had a right to stand. Usually, he closed the
| |
| case, and he was immensely effective as he would
| |
| declaim, in his deep voice: "I submit, Your
| |
| Honor, that the literature of the world does not
| |
| afford a passage which states how the human
| |
| voice can be electrically transmitted, previous to
| |
| the patent of Mr. Bell." His death, like his life,
| |
| was dramatic. He was on his feet in the courtroom,
| |
| battling against an infringer, when, in the
| |
| middle of a sentence, he fell to the floor, overcome
| |
| by sickness and the responsibilities he had
| |
| carried for twelve years. Storrow, in a different
| |
| way, was fully as indispensable as Smith. It
| |
| was he who built up the superstructure of the
| |
| Bell defence. He was a master of details. His
| |
| brain was keen and incisive; and some of his
| |
| briefs will be studied as long as the art of
| |
| telephony exists. He might fairly have been
| |
| compared, in action, to a rapid-firing Gatling gun;
| |
| while Smith was a hundred-ton cannon, and
| |
| Lockwood was the maker of the ammunition.
| |
|
| |
| Smith and Storrow had three main arguments
| |
| that never were, and never could be, answered.
| |
| Fifty or more of the most eminent lawyers of
| |
| that day tried to demolish these arguments, and
| |
| failed. The first was Bell's clear, straightforward
| |
| story of HOW HE DID IT, which rebuked and
| |
| confounded the mob of pretenders. The second
| |
| was the historical fact that the most eminent
| |
| electrical scientists of Europe and America had seen
| |
| Bell's telephone at the Centennial and had
| |
| declared it to be NEW--"not only new but
| |
| marvellous," said Tyndall. And the third was
| |
| the very significant fact that no one challenged
| |
| Bell's claim to be the original inventor of the
| |
| telephone until his patent was seventeen
| |
| months old.
| |
|
| |
| The patent itself, too, was a remarkable document.
| |
| It was a Gibraltar of security to the Bell
| |
| Company. For eleven years it was attacked
| |
| from all sides, and never dented. It covered an
| |
| entire art, yet it was sustained during its whole
| |
| lifetime. Printed in full, it would make ten
| |
| pages of this book; but the core of it is in the last
| |
| sentence: "The method of, and apparatus for,
| |
| transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically,
| |
| by causing electrical undulations, similar in
| |
| form to the vibrations of the air accompanying
| |
| the said vocal or other sounds." These words
| |
| expressed an idea that had never been written
| |
| before. It could not be evaded or overcome.
| |
| There were only thirty-two words, but in six
| |
| years these words represented an investment of a
| |
| million dollars apiece.
| |
|
| |
| Now that the clamor of this great patent war
| |
| has died away, it is evident that Bell received no
| |
| more credit and no more reward than he
| |
| deserved. There was no telephone until he
| |
| made one, and since he made one, no one
| |
| has found out any other way. Hundreds of
| |
| clever men have been trying for more than
| |
| thirty years to outrival Bell, and yet every
| |
| telephone in the world is still made on the plan
| |
| that Bell discovered.
| |
|
| |
| No inventor who preceded Bell did more, in
| |
| the invention of the telephone, than to help Bell
| |
| indirectly, in the same way that Fra Mauro and
| |
| Toscanelli helped in the discovery of America
| |
| by making the map and chart that were used by
| |
| Columbus. Bell was helped by his father, who
| |
| taught him the laws of acoustics; by Helmholtz,
| |
| who taught him the influence of magnets upon
| |
| sound vibrations; by Koenig and Leon Scott,
| |
| who taught him the infinite variety of these
| |
| vibrations; by Dr. Clarence J. Blake, who gave him a
| |
| human ear for his experiments; and by Joseph
| |
| Henry and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who encouraged
| |
| him to persevere. In a still more
| |
| indirect way, he was helped by Morse's invention
| |
| of the telegraph; by Faraday's discovery of the
| |
| phenomena of magnetic induction; by Sturgeon's
| |
| first electro-magnet; and by Volta's electric battery.
| |
| All that scientists had achieved, from
| |
| Galileo and Newton to Franklin and Simon
| |
| Newcomb, helped Bell in a general way, by creat-
| |
| ing a scientific atmosphere and habit of thought.
| |
| But in the actual making of the telephone, there
| |
| was no one with Bell nor before him. He
| |
| invented it first, and alone.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| ==CHAPTER IV - THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ART==
| |
|
| |
| Four wire-using businesses were already in
| |
| the field when the telephone was born: the
| |
| fire-alarm, burglar-alarm, telegraph, and messenger-
| |
| boy service; and at first, as might have
| |
| been expected, the humble little telephone was
| |
| huddled in with these businesses as a sort of poor
| |
| relation. To the general public, it was a mere
| |
| scientific toy; but there were a few men, not
| |
| many, in these wire-stringing trades, who saw a
| |
| glimmering chance of creating a telephone business.
| |
| They put telephones on the wires that
| |
| were then in use. As these became popular, they
| |
| added others. Each of their customers wished
| |
| to be able to talk to every one else. And so, having
| |
| undertaken to give telephone service, they
| |
| presently found themselves battling with the most
| |
| intricate and baffling engineering problem of
| |
| modern times--the construction around the tele-
| |
| phone of such a mechanism as would bring it into
| |
| universal service.
| |
|
| |
| The first of these men was Thomas A. Watson,
| |
| the young mechanic who had been hired as Bell's
| |
| helper. He began a work that to-day requires
| |
| an army of twenty-six thousand people. He
| |
| was for a couple of years the total engineering
| |
| and manufacturing department of the telephone
| |
| business, and by 1880 had taken out sixty patents
| |
| for his own suggestions. It was Watson
| |
| who took the telephone as Bell had made it, really
| |
| a toy, with its diaphragm so delicate that a warm
| |
| breath would put it out of order, and toughened
| |
| it into a more rugged machine. Bell had used a
| |
| disc of fragile gold-beaters' skin with a patch of
| |
| sheet-iron glued to the centre. He could not believe,
| |
| for a time, that a disc of all-iron would vibrate
| |
| under the slight influence of a spoken word.
| |
| But he and Watson noticed that when the patch
| |
| was bigger the talking was better, and presently
| |
| they threw away the gold-beaters' skin and used
| |
| the iron alone.
| |
|
| |
| Also, it was Watson who spent months experimenting
| |
| with all sorts and sizes of iron discs,
| |
| so as to get the one that would best convey the
| |
| sound. If the iron was too thick, he discovered,
| |
| the voice was shrilled into a Punch-and-Judy
| |
| squeal; and if it was too thin, the voice became
| |
| a hollow and sepulchral groan, as if the speaker
| |
| had his head in a barrel. Other months, too,
| |
| were spent in finding out the proper size and
| |
| shape for the air cavity in front of the disc.
| |
| And so, after the telephone had been perfected,
| |
| IN PRINCIPLE, a full year was required to lift
| |
| it out of the class of scientific toys, and another
| |
| year or two to present it properly to the business
| |
| world.
| |
|
| |
| Until 1878 all Bell telephone apparatus was
| |
| made by Watson in Charles Williams's little
| |
| shop in Court Street, Boston--a building long
| |
| since transformed into a five-cent theatre. But
| |
| the business soon grew too big for the shop.
| |
| Orders fell five weeks behind. Agents stormed
| |
| and fretted. Some action had to be taken
| |
| quickly, so licenses were given to four other
| |
| manufacturers to make bells, switchboards, and
| |
| so forth. By this time the Western Electric
| |
| Company of Chicago had begun to make the
| |
| infringing Gray-Edison telephones for the Western
| |
| Union, so that there were soon six groups
| |
| of mechanics puzzling their wits over the new
| |
| talk-machinery.
| |
|
| |
| By 1880 there was plenty of telephonic apparatus
| |
| being made, but in too many different
| |
| varieties. Not all the summer gowns of that
| |
| year presented more styles and fancies. The
| |
| next step, if there was to be any degree of
| |
| uniformity, was plainly to buy and consolidate these
| |
| six companies; and by 1881 Vail had done this.
| |
| It was the first merger in telephone history.
| |
| It was a step of immense importance. Had it
| |
| not been taken, the telephone business would
| |
| have been torn into fragments by the civil wars
| |
| between rival inventors.
| |
|
| |
| From this time the Western Electric became
| |
| the headquarters of telephonic apparatus. It
| |
| was the Big Shop, all roads led to it. No matter
| |
| where a new idea was born, sooner or later
| |
| it came knocking at the door of the Western
| |
| Electric to receive a material body. Here were
| |
| the skilled workmen who became the hands of
| |
| the telephone business. And here, too, were
| |
| many of the ablest inventors and engineers, who
| |
| did most to develop the cables and switchboards
| |
| of to-day.
| |
|
| |
| In Boston, Watson had resigned in 1882, and
| |
| in his place, a year or two later stood a timely
| |
| new arrival named E. T. Gilliland. This really
| |
| notable man was a friend in need to the telephone.
| |
| He had been a manufacturer of electrical
| |
| apparatus in Indianapolis, until Vail's
| |
| policy of consolidation drew him into the central
| |
| group of pioneers and pathfinders. For five
| |
| years Gilliland led the way as a developer of
| |
| better and cheaper equipment. He made the
| |
| best of a most difficult situation. He was so
| |
| handy, so resourceful, that he invariably found
| |
| a way to unravel the mechanical tangles that perplexed
| |
| the first telephone agents, and this, too,
| |
| without compelling them to spend large sums
| |
| of capital. He took the ideas and apparatus
| |
| that were then in existence, and used them to
| |
| carry the telephone business through the most
| |
| critical period of its life, when there was little
| |
| time or money to risk on experiments. He took
| |
| the peg switchboard of the telegraph, for in-
| |
| stance, and developed it to its highest point, to
| |
| a point that was not even imagined possible by
| |
| any one else. It was the most practical and
| |
| complete switchboard of its day, and held the
| |
| field against all comers until it was superseded
| |
| by the modern type of board, vastly more elaborate
| |
| and expensive.
| |
|
| |
| By 1884, gathered around Gilliland in Boston
| |
| and the Western Electric in Chicago, there
| |
| came to be a group of mechanics and high-school
| |
| graduates, very young men, mostly, who had no
| |
| reputations to lose; and who, partly for a living
| |
| and mainly for a lark, plunged into the difficulties
| |
| of this new business that had at that time little
| |
| history and less prestige. These young adventurers,
| |
| most of whom are still alive, became the
| |
| makers of industrial history. They were
| |
| unquestionably the founders of the present science
| |
| of telephone engineering.
| |
|
| |
| The problem that they dashed at so lightheartedly
| |
| was much larger than any of them imagined.
| |
| It was a Gibraltar of impossibilities.
| |
| It was on the face of it a fantastic nightmare
| |
| of a task--to weave such a web of wires, with in-
| |
| terlocking centres, as would put any one telephone
| |
| in touch with every other. There was no
| |
| help for them in books or colleges. Watson, who
| |
| had acquired a little knowledge, had become a
| |
| shipbuilder. Electrical engineering, as a profession,
| |
| was unborn. And as for their telegraphic
| |
| experience, while it certainly helped them
| |
| for a time, it started them in the wrong direction
| |
| and led them to do many things which had afterwards
| |
| to be undone.
| |
|
| |
| The peculiar electric current that these young
| |
| pathfinders had to deal with is perhaps the quickest,
| |
| feeblest, and most elusive force in the world.
| |
| It is so amazing a thing that any description
| |
| of it seems irrational. It is as gentle as a touch
| |
| of a baby sunbeam, and as swift as the lightning
| |
| flash. It is so small that the electric current
| |
| of a single incandescent lamp is greater 500,000,000
| |
| times. Cool a spoonful of hot water just
| |
| one degree, and the energy set free by the cooling
| |
| will operate a telephone for ten thousand years.
| |
| Catch the falling tear-drop of a child, and there
| |
| will be sufficient water-power to carry a spoken
| |
| message from one city to another.
| |
|
| |
| Such is the tiny Genie of the Wire that had
| |
| to be protected and trained into obedience. It
| |
| was the most defenceless of all electric sprites,
| |
| and it had so many enemies. Enemies! The
| |
| world was populous with its enemies. There
| |
| was the lightning, its elder brother, striking at
| |
| it with murderous blows. There were the telegraphic
| |
| and light-and-power currents, its strong
| |
| and malicious cousins, chasing and assaulting it
| |
| whenever it ventured too near. There were rain
| |
| and sleet and snow and every sort of moisture,
| |
| lying in wait to abduct it. There were rivers
| |
| and trees and flecks of dust. It seemed as if all
| |
| the known and unknown agencies of nature were
| |
| in conspiracy to thwart or annihilate this gentle
| |
| little messenger who had been conjured into life
| |
| by the wizardry of Alexander Graham Bell.
| |
|
| |
| All that these young men had received from
| |
| Bell and Watson was that part of the telephone
| |
| that we call the receiver. This was practically
| |
| the sum total of Bell's invention, and remains
| |
| to-day as he made it. It was then, and is yet,
| |
| the most sensitive instrument that has ever been
| |
| put to general use in any country. It opened
| |
| up a new world of sound. It would echo the
| |
| tramp of a fly that walked across a table, or repeat
| |
| in New Orleans the prattle of a child in
| |
| New York. This was what the young men received,
| |
| and this was all. There were no switchboards
| |
| of any account, no cables of any value, no
| |
| wires that were in any sense adequate, no theory
| |
| of tests or signals, no exchanges, NO TELEPHONE
| |
| SYSTEM OF ANY SORT WHATEVER.
| |
|
| |
| As for Bell's first telephone lines, they were
| |
| as simple as clothes-lines. Each short little wire
| |
| stood by itself, with one instrument at each end.
| |
| There were no operators, switchboards, or exchanges.
| |
| But there had now come a time when
| |
| more than two persons wanted to be in the same
| |
| conversational group. This was a larger use of
| |
| the telephone; and while Bell himself had foreseen
| |
| it, he had not worked out a plan whereby
| |
| it could be carried out. Here was the new problem,
| |
| and a most stupendous one--how to link
| |
| together three telephones, or three hundred, or
| |
| three thousand, or three million, so that any two
| |
| of them could be joined at a moment's notice.
| |
|
| |
| And that was not all. These young men had
| |
| not only to battle against mystery and "the
| |
| powers of the air"; they had not only to protect
| |
| their tiny electric messenger, and to create a
| |
| system of wire highways along which he could
| |
| run up and down safely; they had to do more.
| |
| They had to make this system so simple and
| |
| fool-proof that every one--every one except the
| |
| deaf and dumb--could use it without any previous
| |
| experience. They had to educate Bell's
| |
| Genie of the Wire so that he would not only obey
| |
| his masters, but anybody--anybody who could
| |
| speak to him in any language.
| |
|
| |
| No doubt, if the young men had stopped to
| |
| consider their life-work as a whole, some of them
| |
| might have turned back. But they had no time
| |
| to philosophize. They were like the boy who
| |
| learns how to swim by being pushed into deep
| |
| water. Once the telephone business was started,
| |
| it had to be kept going; and as it grew, there
| |
| came one after another a series of congestions.
| |
| Two courses were open; either the business had
| |
| to be kept down to suit the apparatus, or the
| |
| apparatus had to be developed to keep pace with
| |
| the business. The telephone men, most of them,
| |
| at least, chose development; and the brilliant
| |
| inventions that afterwards made some of them
| |
| famous were compelled by sheer necessity and
| |
| desperation.
| |
|
| |
| The first notable improvement upon Bell's
| |
| invention was the making of the transmitter,
| |
| in 1877, by Emile Berliner. This, too, was a
| |
| romance. Berliner, as a poor German youth of
| |
| nineteen, had landed in Castle Garden in 1870
| |
| to seek his fortune. He got a job as "a sort
| |
| of bottle-washer at six dollars a week," he says,
| |
| in a chemical shop in New York. At nights he
| |
| studied science in the free classes of Cooper
| |
| Union. Then a druggist named Engel gave
| |
| him a copy of Muller's book on physics, which
| |
| was precisely the stimulus needed by his creative
| |
| brain. In 1876 he was fascinated by the
| |
| telephone, and set out to construct one on a different
| |
| plan. Several months later he had succeeded
| |
| and was overjoyed to receive his first
| |
| patent for a telephone transmitter. He had by
| |
| this time climbed up from his bottle-washing to
| |
| be a clerk in a drygoods store in Washington; but
| |
| he was still poor and as unpractical as most in-
| |
| ventors. Joseph Henry, the Sage of the American
| |
| scientific world, was his friend, though too
| |
| old to give him any help. Consequently, when
| |
| Edison, two weeks later, also invented a transmitter,
| |
| the prior claim of Berliner was for a
| |
| time wholly ignored. Later the Bell Company
| |
| bought Berliner's patent and took up his side
| |
| of the case. There was a seemingly endless succession
| |
| of delays--fourteen years of the most
| |
| vexatious delays--until finally the Supreme
| |
| Court of the United States ruled that Berliner,
| |
| and not Edison, was the original inventor of the
| |
| transmitter.
| |
|
| |
| From first to last, the transmitter has been
| |
| the product of several minds. Its basic idea is
| |
| the varying of the electric current by varying the
| |
| pressure between two points. Bell unquestionably
| |
| suggested it in his famous patent, when
| |
| he wrote of "increasing and diminishing the resistance."
| |
| Berliner was the first actually to construct
| |
| one. Edison greatly improved it by
| |
| using soft carbon instead of a steel point. A
| |
| Kentucky professor, David E. Hughes, started
| |
| a new line of development by adapting a Bell
| |
| telephone into a "microphone," a fantastic little
| |
| instrument that would detect the noise made by
| |
| a fly in walking across a table. Francis Blake,
| |
| of Boston, changed a microphone into a practical
| |
| transmitter. The Rev. Henry Hunnings,
| |
| an English clergyman, hit upon the happy idea
| |
| of using carbon in the form of small granules.
| |
| And one of the Bell experts, named White, improved
| |
| the Hunnings transmitter into its present
| |
| shape. Both transmitter and receiver seem
| |
| now to be as complete an artificial tongue and
| |
| ear as human ingenuity can make them. They
| |
| have persistently grown more elaborate, until today
| |
| a telephone set, as it stands on a desk, contains
| |
| as many as one hundred and thirty separate
| |
| pieces, as well as a saltspoonful of glistening
| |
| granules of carbon.
| |
|
| |
| Next after the transmitter came the problem
| |
| of the MYSTERIOUS NOISES. This was, perhaps, the
| |
| most weird and mystifying of all the telephone
| |
| problems. The fact was that the telephone had
| |
| brought within hearing distance a new wonder-
| |
| world of sound. All wires at that time were
| |
| single, and ran into the earth at each end, making
| |
| what was called a "grounded circuit." And
| |
| this connection with the earth, which is really a
| |
| big magnet, caused all manner of strange and
| |
| uncouth noises on the telephone wires.
| |
|
| |
| Noises! Such a jangle of meaningless noises
| |
| had never been heard by human ears. There
| |
| were spluttering and bubbling, jerking and rasping,
| |
| whistling and screaming. There were the
| |
| rustling of leaves, the croaking of frogs, the hissing
| |
| of steam, and the flapping of birds' wings.
| |
| There were clicks from telegraph wires, scraps
| |
| of talk from other telephones, and curious little
| |
| squeals that were unlike any known sound. The
| |
| lines running east and west were noisier than the
| |
| lines running north and south. The night was
| |
| noisier than the day, and at the ghostly hour of
| |
| midnight, for what strange reason no one knows,
| |
| the babel was at its height. Watson, who had
| |
| a fanciful mind, suggested that perhaps these
| |
| sounds were signals from the inhabitants of Mars
| |
| or some other sociable planet. But the matter-
| |
| of-fact young telephonists agreed to lay the
| |
| blame on "induction"--a hazy word which usually
| |
| meant the natural meddlesomeness of electricity.
| |
|
| |
| Whatever else the mysterious noises were, they
| |
| were a nuisance. The poor little telephone business
| |
| was plagued almost out of its senses. It
| |
| was like a dog with a tin can tied to its tail.
| |
| No matter where it went, it was pursued by this
| |
| unearthly clatter. "We were ashamed to
| |
| present our bills," said A. A. Adee, one of the
| |
| first agents; "for no matter how plainly a man
| |
| talked into his telephone, his language was apt to
| |
| sound like Choctaw at the other end of the line."
| |
|
| |
| All manner of devices were solemnly tried to
| |
| hush the wires, and each one usually proved to
| |
| be as futile as an incantation. What was to be
| |
| done? Step by step the telephone men were
| |
| driven back. They were beaten. There was no
| |
| way to silence these noises. Reluctantly, they
| |
| agreed that the only way was to pull up the ends
| |
| of each wire from the tainted earth, and join
| |
| them by a second wire. This was the "metallic
| |
| circuit" idea. It meant an appalling increase
| |
| in the use of wire. It would compel the rebuild-
| |
| ing of the switchboards and the invention of new
| |
| signal systems. But it was inevitable; and in
| |
| 1883, while the dispute about it was in full blast,
| |
| one of the young men quietly slipped it into use
| |
| on a new line between Boston and Providence.
| |
| The effect was magical. "At last," said the
| |
| delighted manager, "we have a perfectly quiet
| |
| line."
| |
|
| |
| This young man, a small, slim youth who was
| |
| twenty-two years old and looked younger, was
| |
| no other than J. J. Carty, now the first of telephone
| |
| engineers and almost the creator of his
| |
| profession. Three years earlier he had timidly
| |
| asked for a job as operator in the Boston exchange,
| |
| at five dollars a week, and had shown
| |
| such an aptitude for the work that he was soon
| |
| made one of the captains. At thirty years of age
| |
| he became a central figure in the development of
| |
| the art of telephony.
| |
|
| |
| What Carty has done is known by telephone
| |
| men in all countries; but the story of Carty himself
| |
| --who he is, and why--is new. First of all,
| |
| he is Irish, pure Irish. His father had left Ireland
| |
| as a boy in 1825. During the Civil War
| |
| his father made guns in the city of Cambridge,
| |
| where young John Joseph was born; and afterwards
| |
| he made bells for church steeples. He
| |
| was instinctively a mechanic and proud of his
| |
| calling. He could tell the weight of a bell from
| |
| the sound of it. Moses G. Farmer, the electrical
| |
| inventor, and Howe, the creator of the
| |
| sewing-machine, were his friends.
| |
|
| |
| At five years of age, little John J. Carty was
| |
| taken by his father to the shop where the bells
| |
| were made, and he was profoundly impressed by
| |
| the magical strength of a big magnet, that picked
| |
| up heavy weights as though they were feathers.
| |
| At the high school his favorite study was
| |
| physics; and for a time he and another boy
| |
| named Rolfe--now a distinguished man of
| |
| science--carried on electrical experiments of
| |
| their own in the cellar of the Rolfe house. Here
| |
| they had a "Tom Thumb" telegraph, a telephone
| |
| which they had ventured to improve, and a hopeless
| |
| tangle of wires. Whenever they could afford
| |
| to buy more wires and batteries, they went
| |
| to a near-by store which supplied electrical
| |
| apparatus to the professors and students of
| |
| Harvard. This store, with its workshop in the
| |
| rear, seemed to the two boys a veritable wonderland;
| |
| and when Carty, a youth of eighteen, was
| |
| compelled to leave school because of his bad
| |
| eyesight, he ran at once and secured the glorious
| |
| job of being boy-of-all-work in this store of
| |
| wonders. So, when he became an operator in
| |
| the Boston telephone exchange, a year later, he
| |
| had already developed to a remarkable degree
| |
| his natural genius for telephony.
| |
|
| |
| Since then, Carty and the telephone business
| |
| have grown up together, he always a little distance
| |
| in advance. No other man has touched
| |
| the apparatus of telephony at so many points.
| |
| He fought down the flimsy, clumsy methods,
| |
| which led from one snarl to another. He found
| |
| out how to do with wires what Dickens did with
| |
| words. "Let us do it right, boys, and then we
| |
| won't have any bad dreams"--this has been his
| |
| motif. And, as the crown and climax of his
| |
| work, he mapped out the profession of telephone
| |
| engineering on the widest and most comprehensive
| |
| lines.
| |
|
| |
| In Carty, the engineer evolved into the edu-
| |
| cator. His end of the American Telephone and
| |
| Telegraph Company became the University of
| |
| the Telephone. He was himself a student by
| |
| disposition, with a special taste for the writings
| |
| of Faraday, the forerunner; Tyndall, the expounder;
| |
| and Spencer, the philosopher. And
| |
| in 1890, he gathered around him a winnowed
| |
| group of college graduates--he has sixty of
| |
| them on his staff to-day--so that he might bequeath
| |
| to the telephone an engineering corps of
| |
| loyal and efficient men.
| |
|
| |
| The next problem that faced the young men
| |
| of the telephone, as soon as they had escaped from
| |
| the clamor of the mysterious noises, was the necessity
| |
| of taking down the wires in the city streets
| |
| and putting them underground. At first, they
| |
| had strung the wires on poles and roof-tops.
| |
| They had done this, not because it was cheap,
| |
| but because it was the only possible way, so
| |
| far as any one knew in that kindergarten period.
| |
| A telephone wire required the daintiest of handling.
| |
| To bury it was to smother it, to make
| |
| it dull or perhaps entirely useless. But now
| |
| that the number of wires had swollen from hun-
| |
| dreds to thousands, the overhead method had
| |
| been outgrown. Some streets in the larger cities
| |
| had become black with wires. Poles had risen
| |
| to fifty feet in height, then sixty--seventy--
| |
| eighty. Finally the highest of all pole lines was
| |
| built along West Street, New York--every pole
| |
| a towering Norway pine, with its top ninety feet
| |
| above the roadway, and carrying thirty cross-
| |
| arms and three hundred wires.
| |
|
| |
| From poles the wires soon overflowed to housetops,
| |
| until in New York alone they had overspread
| |
| eleven thousand roofs. These roofs had
| |
| to be kept in repair, and their chimneys were
| |
| the deadly enemies of the iron wires. Many a
| |
| wire, in less than two or three years, was withered
| |
| to the merest shred of rust. As if these
| |
| troubles were not enough, there were the storms
| |
| of winter, which might wipe out a year's revenue
| |
| in a single day. The sleet storms were the
| |
| worst. Wires were weighted down with ice,
| |
| often three pounds of ice per foot of wire. And
| |
| so, what with sleet, and corrosion, and the cost
| |
| of roof-repairing, and the lack of room for more
| |
| wires, the telephone men were between the devil
| |
| and the deep sea--between the urgent necessity
| |
| of burying their wires, and the inexorable fact
| |
| that they did not know how to do it.
| |
|
| |
| Fortunately, by the time that this problem
| |
| arrived, the telephone business was fairly well
| |
| established. It had outgrown its early days of
| |
| ridicule and incredulity. It was paying wages
| |
| and salaries and even dividends. Evidently it
| |
| had arrived on the scene in the nick of time--
| |
| after the telegraph and before the trolleys and
| |
| electric lights. Had it been born ten years later,
| |
| it might not have been able to survive. So delicate
| |
| a thing as a baby telephone could scarcely
| |
| have protected itself against the powerful currents
| |
| of electricity that came into general use in
| |
| 1886, if it had not first found out a way of hiding
| |
| safely underground.
| |
|
| |
| The first declaration in favor of an underground
| |
| system was made by the Boston company
| |
| in 1880. "It may be expedient to place our entire
| |
| system underground," said the sorely perplexed
| |
| manager, "whenever a practicable method
| |
| is found of accomplishing: it." All manner of
| |
| theories were afloat but Theodore N. Vail, who
| |
| was usually the man of constructive imagination
| |
| in emergencies, began in 1882 a series of actual
| |
| experiments at Attleborough, Massachusetts, to
| |
| find out exactly what could, and what could not,
| |
| be done with wires that were buried in the earth.
| |
|
| |
| A five-mile trench was dug beside a railway
| |
| track. The work was done handily and cheaply
| |
| by the labor-saving plan of hitching a locomotive
| |
| to a plough. Five ploughs were jerked apart
| |
| before the work was finished. Then, into this
| |
| trench were laid wires with every known sort
| |
| of covering. Most of them, naturally, were
| |
| wrapped with rubber or gutta-percha, after the
| |
| fashion of a submarine cable. When all were in
| |
| place, the willing locomotive was harnessed to a
| |
| huge wooden drag, which threw the ploughed
| |
| soil back into the trench and covered the wires
| |
| a foot deep. It was the most professional cable-
| |
| laying that any one at that time could do, and it
| |
| succeeded, not brilliantly, but well enough to
| |
| encourage the telephone engineers to go ahead.
| |
|
| |
| Several weeks later, the first two cables for
| |
| actual use were laid in Boston and Brooklyn;
| |
| and in 1883 Engineer J. P. Davis was set to
| |
| grapple with the Herculean labor of putting a
| |
| complete underground system in the wire-bound
| |
| city of New York. This he did in spite of a
| |
| bombardment of explosions from leaky gas-
| |
| pipes, and with a woeful lack of experts and
| |
| standard materials. All manner of makeshifts
| |
| had to be tried in place of tile ducts, which were
| |
| not known in 1883. Iron pipe was used at first,
| |
| then asphalt, concrete, boxes of sand and creosoted
| |
| wood. As for the wires, they were first
| |
| wrapped in cotton, and then twisted into cables,
| |
| usually of a hundred wires each. And to prevent
| |
| the least taint of moisture, which means
| |
| sudden death to a telephone current, these cables
| |
| were invariably soaked in oil.
| |
|
| |
| This oil-filled type of cable carried the telephone
| |
| business safely through half a dozen years.
| |
| But it was not the final type. It was preliminary
| |
| only, the best that could be made at that
| |
| time. Not one is in use to-day. In 1888 Theodore
| |
| Vail set on foot a second series of experiments,
| |
| to see if a cable could be made that was
| |
| better suited as a highway for the delicate electric
| |
| currents of the telephone. A young engineer
| |
| named John A. Barrett, who had already made
| |
| his mark as an expert, by finding a way to twist
| |
| and transpose the wires, was set apart to tackle
| |
| this problem. Being an economical Vermonter,
| |
| Barrett went to work in a little wooden shed in
| |
| the backyard of a Brooklyn foundry. In this
| |
| foundry he had seen a unique machine that could
| |
| be made to mould hot lead around a rope of
| |
| twisted wires. This was a notable discovery.
| |
| It meant TIGHT COVERINGS. It meant a victory
| |
| over that most troublesome of enemies--moisture.
| |
| Also, it meant that cables could henceforth
| |
| be made longer, with fewer sleeves and
| |
| splices, and without the oil, which had always
| |
| been an unmitigated nuisance.
| |
|
| |
| Next, having made the cable tight, Barrett
| |
| set out to produce it more cheaply and by accident
| |
| stumbled upon a way to make it immensely
| |
| more efficient. All wires were at that
| |
| time wrapped with cotton, and his plan was to
| |
| find some less costly material that would serve
| |
| the same purpose. One of his workmen, a Virginian,
| |
| suggested the use of paper twine, which
| |
| had been used in the South during the Civil
| |
| War, when cotton was scarce and expensive.
| |
| Barrett at once searched the South for paper
| |
| twine and found it. He bought a barrel of it
| |
| from a small factory in Richmond, but after a
| |
| trial it proved to be too flimsy. If such paper
| |
| could be put on flat, he reasoned, it would be
| |
| stronger. Just then he heard of an erratic
| |
| genius who had an invention for winding paper
| |
| tape on wire for the use of milliners.
| |
|
| |
| Paper-wound bonnet-wire! Who could imagine
| |
| any connection between this and the telephone?
| |
| Yet this hint was exactly what Barrett
| |
| needed. He experimented until he had devised
| |
| a machine that crumpled the paper around the
| |
| wire, instead of winding it tightly. This was the
| |
| finishing touch. For a time these paper-wound
| |
| cables were soaked in oil, but in 1890 Engineer
| |
| F. A. Pickernell dared to trust to the tightness
| |
| of the lead sheathing, and laid a "dry core"
| |
| cable, the first of the modern type, in one of
| |
| the streets of Philadelphia. This cable was the
| |
| event of the year. It was not only cheaper. It
| |
| was the best-talking cable that had ever been
| |
| harnessed to a telephone.
| |
|
| |
| What Barrett had done was soon made clear.
| |
| By wrapping the wire with loose paper, he had
| |
| in reality cushioned it with AIR, which is the best
| |
| possible insulator. Not the paper, but the air
| |
| in the paper, had improved the cable. More air
| |
| was added by the omission of the oil. And presently
| |
| Barrett perceived that he had merely reproduced
| |
| in a cable, as far as possible, the
| |
| conditions of the overhead wires, which are
| |
| separated by nothing but air.
| |
|
| |
| By 1896 there were two hundred thousand
| |
| miles of wire snugly wrapped in paper and lying
| |
| in leaden caskets beneath the streets of the cities,
| |
| and to-day there are six million miles of it owned
| |
| by the affiliated Bell companies. Instead of
| |
| blackening the streets, the wire nerves of the
| |
| telephone are now out of sight under the roadway,
| |
| and twining into the basements of buildings
| |
| like a new sort of metallic ivy. Some cables are
| |
| so large that a single spool of cable will weigh
| |
| twenty-six tons and require a giant truck and a
| |
| sixteen-horse team to haul it to its resting-place.
| |
| As many as twelve hundred wires are often
| |
| bunched into one sheath, and each cable lies
| |
| loosely in a little duct of its own. It is reached
| |
| by manholes where it runs under the streets and
| |
| in little switching-boxes placed at intervals it
| |
| is frayed out into separate pairs of wires that
| |
| blossom at length into telephones.
| |
|
| |
| Out in the open country there are still the
| |
| open wires, which in point of talking are the
| |
| best. In the suburbs of cities there are neat
| |
| green posts with a single gray cable hung from
| |
| a heavy wire. Usually, a telephone pole is made
| |
| from a sixty-year-old tree, a cedar, chestnut, or
| |
| juniper. It lasts twelve years only, so that the
| |
| one item of poles is still costing the telephone
| |
| companies several millions a year. The total
| |
| number of poles now in the United States, used
| |
| by telephone and telegraph companies, once
| |
| covered an area, before they were cut down, as
| |
| large as the State of Rhode Island.
| |
|
| |
| But the highest triumph of wire-laying came
| |
| when New York swept into the Skyscraper
| |
| Age, and when hundreds of tall buildings, as
| |
| high as the fall of the waters of Niagara, grew
| |
| up like a range of magical cliffs upon the
| |
| precious rock of Manhattan. Here the work of
| |
| the telephone engineer has been so well done that
| |
| although every room in these cliff-buildings has
| |
| its telephone, there is not a pole in sight, not a
| |
| cross-arm, not a wire. Nothing but the tip-ends
| |
| of an immense system are visible. No sooner
| |
| is a new skyscraper walled and roofed, than the
| |
| telephones are in place, at once putting the tenants
| |
| in touch with the rest of the city and the
| |
| greater part of the United States. In a single
| |
| one of these monstrous buildings, the Hudson
| |
| Terminal, there is a cable that runs from basement
| |
| to roof and ravels out to reach three thousand
| |
| desks. This mighty geyser of wires is fifty
| |
| tons in weight and would, if straightened out
| |
| into a single line, connect New York with
| |
| Chicago. Yet it is as invisible as the nerves and
| |
| muscles of a human body.
| |
|
| |
| During this evolution of the cable, even the
| |
| wire itself was being remade. Vail and others
| |
| had noticed that of all the varieties of wire that
| |
| were for sale, not one was exactly suitable for
| |
| a telephone system. The first telephone wire
| |
| was of galvanized iron, which had at least the
| |
| primitive virtue of being cheap. Then came
| |
| steel wire, stronger but less durable. But these
| |
| wires were noisy and not good conductors of
| |
| electricity. An ideal telephone wire, they found,
| |
| must be made of either silver or copper. Silver
| |
| was out of the question, and copper wire was
| |
| too soft and weak. It would not carry its own
| |
| weight.
| |
|
| |
| The problem, therefore, was either to make
| |
| steel wire a better conductor, or to produce a
| |
| copper wire that would be strong enough. Vail
| |
| chose the latter, and forthwith gave orders to a
| |
| Bridgeport manufacturer to begin experiments.
| |
| A young expert named Thomas B. Doolittle was
| |
| at once set to work, and presently appeared the
| |
| first hard-drawn copper wire, made tough-
| |
| skinned by a fairly simple process. Vail bought
| |
| thirty pounds of it and scattered it in various
| |
| parts of the United States, to note the effect
| |
| upon it of different climates. One length of
| |
| it may still be seen at the Vail homestead in
| |
| Lyndonville, Vermont. Then this hard-drawn
| |
| wire was put to a severe test by being strung
| |
| between Boston and New York. This line was a
| |
| brilliant success, and the new wire was hailed
| |
| with great delight as the ideal servant of the
| |
| telephone.
| |
|
| |
| Since then there has been little trouble with
| |
| copper wire, except its price. It was four times
| |
| as good as iron wire, and four times as expensive.
| |
| Every mile of it, doubled, weighed two hundred
| |
| pounds and cost thirty dollars. On the long
| |
| lines, where it had to be as thick as a lead pencil,
| |
| the expense seemed to be ruinously great.
| |
| When the first pair of wires was strung between
| |
| New York and Chicago, for instance, it was
| |
| found to weigh 870,000 pounds--a full load for
| |
| a twenty-two-car freight train; and the cost of
| |
| the bare metal was $130,000. So enormous has
| |
| been the use of copper wire since then by the
| |
| telephone companies, that fully one-fourth of all
| |
| the capital invested in the telephone has gone to
| |
| the owners of the copper mines.
| |
|
| |
| For several years the brains of the telephone
| |
| men were focussed upon this problem--how to
| |
| reduce the expenditure on copper. One uncanny
| |
| device, which would seem to be a mere
| |
| inventor's fantasy if it had not already saved
| |
| the telephone companies four million dollars or
| |
| more, is known as the "phantom circuit." It
| |
| enables three messages to run at the same time,
| |
| where only two ran before. A double track of
| |
| wires is made to carry three talk-trains running
| |
| abreast, a feat made possible by the whimsical
| |
| disposition of electricity, and which is utterly
| |
| inconceivable in railroading. This invention,
| |
| which is the nearest approach as yet to multiple
| |
| telephony, was conceived by Jacobs in England
| |
| and Carty in the United States.
| |
|
| |
| But the most copper money has been saved
| |
| --literally tens of millions of dollars--by persuading
| |
| thin wires to work as efficiently as thick
| |
| ones. This has been done by making better
| |
| transmitters, by insulating the smaller wires
| |
| with enamel instead of silk, and by placing coils
| |
| of a certain nature at intervals upon the wires.
| |
| The invention of this last device startled the telephone
| |
| men like a flash of lightning out of a blue
| |
| sky. It came from outside--from the quiet laboratory
| |
| of a Columbia professor who had arrived
| |
| in the United States as a young Hungarian immigrant
| |
| not many years earlier. From this
| |
| professor, Michael J. Pupin, came the idea of
| |
| "loading" a telephone line, in such a way as to
| |
| reinforce the electric current. It enabled a thin
| |
| wire to carry as far as a thick one, and thus
| |
| saved as much as forty dollars a wire per mile.
| |
| As a reward for his cleverness, a shower of gold
| |
| fell upon Pupin, and made him in an instant as
| |
| rich as one of the grand-dukes of his native land.
| |
|
| |
| It is now a most highly skilled occupation,
| |
| supporting fully fifteen thousand families, to
| |
| put the telephone wires in place and protect them
| |
| against innumerable dangers. This is the
| |
| profession of the wire chiefs and their men, a
| |
| corps of human spiders, endlessly spinning
| |
| threads under streets and above green fields, on
| |
| the beds of rivers and the slopes of mountains,
| |
| massing them in cities and fluffing them out
| |
| among farms and villages. To tell the doings
| |
| of a wire chief, in the course of his ordinary
| |
| week's work, would in itself make a lively book
| |
| of adventures. Even a washerwoman, with one
| |
| lone, non-electrical clothes-line of a hundred
| |
| yards to operate, has often enough trouble
| |
| with it. But the wire chiefs of the Bell telephone
| |
| have charge of as much wire as would
| |
| make TWO HUNDRED MILLION CLOTHES-LINES--ten
| |
| apiece to every family in the United States;
| |
| and these lines are not punctuated with clothespins,
| |
| but with the most delicate of electrical
| |
| instruments.
| |
|
| |
| The wire chiefs must detect trouble under a
| |
| thousand disguises. Perhaps a small boy has
| |
| thrown a snake across the wires or driven a nail
| |
| into a cable. Perhaps some self-reliant citizen
| |
| has moved his own telephone from one room to another.
| |
| Perhaps a sudden rainstorm has splashed
| |
| its fatal moisture upon an unwiped joint. Or
| |
| perhaps a submarine cable has been sat upon by
| |
| the Lusitania and flattened to death. But no
| |
| matter what the trouble, a telephone system cannot
| |
| be stopped for repairs. It cannot be picked
| |
| up and put into a dry-dock. It must be repaired
| |
| or improved by a sort of vivisection while it is
| |
| working. It is an interlocking unit, a living,
| |
| conscious being, half human and half machine;
| |
| and an injury in any one place may cause a pain
| |
| or sickness to its whole vast body.
| |
|
| |
| And just as the particles of a human body
| |
| change every six or seven years, without disturb-
| |
| ing the body, so the particles of our telephone
| |
| systems have changed repeatedly without any
| |
| interruption of traffic. The constant flood of
| |
| new inventions has necessitated several complete
| |
| rebuildings. Little or nothing has ever been
| |
| allowed to wear out. The New York system
| |
| was rebuilt three times in sixteen years; and
| |
| many a costly switchboard has gone to the scrap-
| |
| heap at three or four years of age. What with
| |
| repairs and inventions and new construction, the
| |
| various Bell companies have spent at least $425,000,000
| |
| in the first ten years of the twentieth
| |
| century, without hindering for a day the ceaseless
| |
| torrent of electrical conversation.
| |
|
| |
| The crowning glory of a telephone system of
| |
| to-day is not so much the simple telephone itself,
| |
| nor the maze and mileage of its cables, but rather
| |
| the wonderful mechanism of the Switchboard.
| |
| This is the part that will always remain mysterious
| |
| to the public. It is seldom seen, and it remains
| |
| as great a mystery to those who have seen
| |
| it as to those who have not. Explanations of
| |
| it are futile. As well might any one expect to
| |
| learn Sanscrit in half an hour as to understand
| |
| a switchboard by making a tour of investigation
| |
| around it. It is not like anything else that either
| |
| man or Nature has ever made. It defies all
| |
| metaphors and comparisons. It cannot be
| |
| shown by photography, not even in moving-pictures,
| |
| because so much of it is concealed inside
| |
| its wooden body. And few people, if any, are
| |
| initiated into its inner mysteries except those
| |
| who belong to its own cortege of inventors and
| |
| attendants.
| |
|
| |
| A telephone switchboard is a pyramid of inventions.
| |
| If it is full-grown, it may have two
| |
| million parts. It may be lit with fifteen thousand
| |
| tiny electric lamps and nerved with as much
| |
| wire as would reach from New York to Berlin.
| |
| It may cost as much as a thousand pianos or as
| |
| much as three square miles of farms in Indiana.
| |
| The ten thousand wire hairs of its head are not
| |
| only numbered, but enswathed in silk, and
| |
| combed out in so marvellous a way that any one
| |
| of them can in a flash be linked to any other.
| |
| Such hair-dressing! Such puffs and braids and
| |
| ringlet relays! Whoever would learn the utmost
| |
| that may be done with copper hairs of Titian
| |
| red, must study the fantastic coiffure of a telephone
| |
| Switchboard.
| |
|
| |
| If there were no switchboard, there would still
| |
| be telephones, but not a telephone system. To
| |
| connect five thousand people by telephone requires
| |
| five thousand wires when the wires run
| |
| to a switchboard; but without a switchboard
| |
| there would have to be 12,497,500 wires--4,999
| |
| to every telephone. As well might there be a
| |
| nerve-system without a brain, as a telephone
| |
| system without a switchboard. If there had been
| |
| at first two separate companies, one owning the
| |
| telephone and the other the switchboard, neither
| |
| could have done the business.
| |
|
| |
| Several years before the telephone got a
| |
| switchboard of its own, it made use of the boards
| |
| that had been designed for the telegraph. These
| |
| were as simple as wheelbarrows, and became
| |
| absurdly inadequate as soon as the telephone business
| |
| began to grow. Then there came adaptations
| |
| by the dozen. Every telephone manager
| |
| became by compulsion an inventor. There was
| |
| no source of information and each exchange did
| |
| the best it could. Hundreds of patents were
| |
| taken out. And by 1884 there had come to be
| |
| a fairly definite idea of what a telephone switchboard
| |
| ought to be.
| |
|
| |
| The one man who did most to create the switchboard,
| |
| who has been its devotee for more than
| |
| thirty years, is a certain modest and little known
| |
| inventor, still alive and busy, named Charles E.
| |
| Scribner. Of the nine thousand switchboard
| |
| patents, Scribner holds six hundred or more.
| |
| Ever since 1878, when he devised the first "jackknife
| |
| switch," Scribner has been the wizard of
| |
| the switchboard. It was he who saw most clearly
| |
| its requirements. Hundreds of others have
| |
| helped, but Scribner was the one man who persevered,
| |
| who never asked for an easier job, and
| |
| who in the end became the master of his craft.
| |
|
| |
| It may go far to explain the peculiar genius
| |
| of Scribner to say that he was born in 1858, in
| |
| the year of the laying of the Atlantic Cable; and
| |
| that his mother was at the time profoundly interested
| |
| in the work and anxious for its success.
| |
| His father was a judge in Toledo; but young
| |
| Scribner showed no aptitude for the tangles of
| |
| the law. He preferred the tangles of wire and
| |
| system in miniature, which he and several other
| |
| boys had built and learned to operate. These boys
| |
| had a benefactor in an old bachelor named
| |
| Thomas Bond. He had no special interest in
| |
| telegraphy. He was a dealer in hides. But he
| |
| was attracted by the cleverness of the boys and
| |
| gave them money to buy more wires and more
| |
| batteries. One day he noticed an invention of
| |
| young Scribner's--a telegraph repeater.
| |
|
| |
| "This may make your fortune," he said, "but
| |
| no mechanic in Toledo can make a proper model
| |
| of it for you. You must go to Chicago, where
| |
| telegraphic apparatus is made." The boy gladly
| |
| took his advice and went to the Western Electric
| |
| factory in Chicago. Here he accidentally met
| |
| Enos M. Barton, the head of the factory. Barton
| |
| noted that the boy was a genius and offered
| |
| him a job, which he accepted and has held ever
| |
| since. Such is the story of the entrance of
| |
| Charles E. Scribner into the telephone business,
| |
| where he has been well-nigh indispensable.
| |
|
| |
| His monumental work has been the development
| |
| of the MULTIPLE Switchboard, a much more
| |
| brain-twisting problem than the building of the
| |
| Pyramids or the digging of the Panama Canal.
| |
| The earlier types of switchboard had become too
| |
| cumbersome by 1885. They were well enough
| |
| for five hundred wires but not for five thousand.
| |
| In some exchanges as many as half a dozen
| |
| operators were necessary to handle a single call;
| |
| and the clamor and confusion were becoming
| |
| unbearable. Some handier and quieter way had
| |
| to be devised, and thus arose the Multiple board.
| |
| The first crude idea of such a way had sprung
| |
| to life in the brain of a Chicago man named L.
| |
| B. Firman, in 1879; but he became a farmer
| |
| and forsook his invention in its infancy.
| |
|
| |
| In the Multiple board, as it grew up under the
| |
| hands of Scribner, the outgoing wires are duplicated
| |
| so as to be within reach of every operator.
| |
| A local call can thus be answered at once by the
| |
| operator who receives it; and any operator who is
| |
| overwhelmed by a sudden rush of business can
| |
| be helped by her companions. Every wire that
| |
| comes into the board is tasselled out into many
| |
| ends, and by means of a "busy test," invented by
| |
| Scribner, only one of these ends can be put
| |
| into use at a time. The normal limit of such
| |
| a board is ten thousand wires, and will always
| |
| remain so, unless a race of long-armed giantesses
| |
| should appear, who would be able to reach over
| |
| a greater expanse of board. At present, a business
| |
| of more than ten thousand lines means a
| |
| second exchange.
| |
|
| |
| The Multiple board was enormously expensive.
| |
| It grew more and more elaborate until it
| |
| cost one-third of a million dollars. The telephone
| |
| men racked their brains to produce something
| |
| cheaper to take its place, and they failed.
| |
| The Multiple boards swallowed up capital as a
| |
| desert swallows water, but THEY SAVED TEN SECONDS
| |
| ON EVERY CALL. This was an unanswerable
| |
| argument in their favor, and by 1887 twenty-
| |
| one of them were in use.
| |
|
| |
| Since then, the switchboard has had three
| |
| or four rebuildings. There has seemed to be no
| |
| limit to the demands of the public or the fertility
| |
| of Scribner's brain. Persistent changes were
| |
| made in the system of signalling. The first signal,
| |
| used by Bell and Watson, was a tap on the
| |
| diaphragm with the finger-nail. Soon after-
| |
| wards came a "buzzer," and then the magneto-
| |
| electric bell. In 1887 Joseph O'Connell, of
| |
| Chicago, conceived of the use of tiny electric
| |
| lights as signals, a brilliant idea, as an electric
| |
| light makes no noise and can be seen either by
| |
| night or by day. In 1901, J. J. Carty invented
| |
| the "bridging bell," a way to put four houses on
| |
| a single wire, with a different signal for each
| |
| house. This idea made the "party line" practicable,
| |
| and at once created a boom in the use of
| |
| the telephone by enterprising farmers.
| |
|
| |
| In 1896 there came a most revolutionary
| |
| change in switchboards. All things were made
| |
| new. Instead of individual batteries, one at
| |
| each telephone, a large common battery was installed
| |
| in the exchange itself. This meant better
| |
| signalling and better talking. It reduced
| |
| the cost of batteries and put them in charge of
| |
| experts. It established uniformity. It introduced
| |
| the federal idea into the mechanism of a
| |
| telephone system. Best of all, it saved FOUR
| |
| SECONDS ON EVERY CALL. The first of these centralizing
| |
| switchboards was put in place at Philadelphia;
| |
| and other cities followed suit as fast as
| |
| they could afford the expense of rebuilding.
| |
| Since then, there have come some switchboards
| |
| that are wholly automatic. Few of these have
| |
| been put into use, for the reason that a switchboard,
| |
| like a human body, must be semi-automatic
| |
| only. To give the most efficient service, there
| |
| will always need to be an expert to stand between
| |
| it and the public.
| |
|
| |
| As the final result of all these varying changes
| |
| in switchboards and signals and batteries, there
| |
| grew up the modern Telephone Exchange.
| |
| This is the solar plexus of the telephone body.
| |
| It is the vital spot. It is the home of the switchboard.
| |
| It is not any one's invention, as the
| |
| telephone was. It is a growing mechanism that
| |
| is not yet finished, and may never be; but it has
| |
| already evolved far enough to be one of the
| |
| wonders of the electrical world. There is probably
| |
| no other part of an American city's equipment
| |
| that is as sensitive and efficient as a
| |
| telephone exchange.
| |
|
| |
| The idea of the exchange is somewhat older
| |
| than the idea of the telephone itself. There were
| |
| communication exchanges before the invention
| |
| of the telephone. Thomas B. Doolittle had one
| |
| in Bridgeport, using telegraph instruments
| |
| Thomas B. A. David had one in Pittsburg, using
| |
| printing-telegraph machines, which required
| |
| little skill to operate. And William A. Childs
| |
| had a third, for lawyers only, in New York,
| |
| which used dials at first and afterwards printing
| |
| machines. These little exchanges had set
| |
| out to do the work that is done to-day by the
| |
| telephone, and they did it after a fashion, in a
| |
| most crude and expensive way. They helped
| |
| to prepare the way for the telephone, by building
| |
| up small constituencies that were ready for the
| |
| telephone when it arrived.
| |
|
| |
| Bell himself was perhaps the first to see the
| |
| future of the telephone exchange. In a letter
| |
| written to some English capitalists in 1878, he
| |
| said: "It is possible to connect every man's
| |
| house, office or factory with a central station, so
| |
| as to give him direct communication with his
| |
| neighbors. . . . It is conceivable that cables
| |
| of telephone wires could be laid underground, or
| |
| suspended overhead, connecting by branch wires
| |
| with private dwellings, shops, etc., and uniting
| |
| them through the main cable with a central
| |
| office." This remarkable prophecy has now become
| |
| stale reading, as stale as Darwin's "Origin
| |
| of Species," or Adam Smith's "Wealth of
| |
| Nations." But at the time that it was written it
| |
| was a most fanciful dream.
| |
|
| |
| When the first infant exchange for telephone
| |
| service was born in Boston, in 1877, it was the
| |
| tiny offspring of a burglar-alarm business
| |
| operated by E. T. Holmes, a young man whose
| |
| father had originated the idea of protecting
| |
| property by electric wires in 1858. Holmes was
| |
| the first practical man who dared to offer telephone
| |
| service for sale. He had obtained two
| |
| telephones, numbers six and seven, the first five
| |
| having gone to the junk-heap; and he attached
| |
| these to a wire in his burglar-alarm office. For
| |
| two weeks his business friends played with the
| |
| telephones, like boys with a fascinating toy; then
| |
| Holmes nailed up a new shelf in his office, and on
| |
| this shelf placed six box-telephones in a row.
| |
| These could be switched into connection with the
| |
| burglar-alarm wires and any two of the six wires
| |
| could be joined by a wire cord. Nothing could
| |
| have been simpler, but it was the arrival of a
| |
| new idea in the business world.
| |
|
| |
| The Holmes exchange was on the top floor of
| |
| a little building, and in almost every other city
| |
| the first exchange was as near the roof as possible,
| |
| partly to save rent and partly because most
| |
| of the wires were strung on roof-tops. As the
| |
| telephone itself had been born in a cellar, so the
| |
| exchange was born in a garret. Usually, too,
| |
| each exchange was an off-shoot of some other
| |
| wire-using business. It was a medley of makeshifts.
| |
| Almost every part of its outfit had been
| |
| made for other uses. In Chicago all calls came
| |
| in to one boy, who bawled them up a speaking-
| |
| tube to the operators. In another city a boy received
| |
| the calls, wrote them on white alleys, and
| |
| rolled them to the boys at the switchboard.
| |
| There was no number system. Every one was
| |
| called by name. Even as late as 1880, when
| |
| New York boasted fifteen hundred telephones,
| |
| names were still in use. And as the first telephones
| |
| were used both as transmitters and receivers,
| |
| there was usually posted up a rule that
| |
| was highly important: "Don't Talk with your
| |
| Ear or Listen with your Mouth."
| |
|
| |
| To describe one of those early telephone exchanges
| |
| in the silence of a printed page is a
| |
| wholly impossible thing. Nothing but a language
| |
| of noise could convey the proper impression.
| |
| An editor who visited the Chicago
| |
| exchange in 1879 said of it: "The racket is almost
| |
| deafening. Boys are rushing madly hither
| |
| and thither, while others are putting in or taking
| |
| out pegs from a central framework as if they
| |
| were lunatics engaged in a game of fox and
| |
| geese." In the same year E. J. Hall wrote
| |
| from Buffalo that his exchange with twelve
| |
| boys had become "a perfect Bedlam." By the
| |
| clumsy methods of those days, from two to six
| |
| boys were needed to handle each call. And
| |
| as there was usually more or less of a cat-and-
| |
| dog squabble between the boys and the public,
| |
| with every one yelling at the top of his voice,
| |
| it may be imagined that a telephone exchange
| |
| was a loud and frantic place.
| |
|
| |
| Boys, as operators, proved to be most com-
| |
| plete and consistent failures. Their sins of
| |
| omission and commission would fill a book.
| |
| What with whittling the switchboards, swearing
| |
| at subscribers, playing tricks with the wires, and
| |
| roaring on all occasions like young bulls of
| |
| Bashan, the boys in the first exchanges did their
| |
| full share in adding to the troubles of the business.
| |
| Nothing could be done with them. They
| |
| were immune to all schemes of discipline. Like
| |
| the MYSTERIOUS NOISES they could not be controlled,
| |
| and by general consent they were abolished.
| |
| In place of the noisy and obstreperous
| |
| boy came the docile, soft-voiced girl.
| |
|
| |
| If ever the rush of women into the business
| |
| world was an unmixed blessing, it was when the
| |
| boys of the telephone exchanges were superseded
| |
| by girls. Here at its best was shown the
| |
| influence of the feminine touch. The quiet
| |
| voice, pitched high, the deft fingers, the patient
| |
| courtesy and attentiveness--these qualities were
| |
| precisely what the gentle telephone required in
| |
| its attendants. Girls were easier to train; they
| |
| did not waste time in retaliatory conversation;
| |
| they were more careful; and they were much
| |
| more likely to give "the soft answer that turneth
| |
| away wrath."
| |
|
| |
| A telephone call under the boy regime meant
| |
| Bedlam and five minutes; afterwards, under the
| |
| girl regime, it meant silence and twenty seconds.
| |
| Instead of the incessant tangle and tumult, there
| |
| came a new species of exchange--a quiet, tense
| |
| place, in which several score of young ladies sit
| |
| and answer the language of the switchboard
| |
| lights. Now and then, not often, the signal
| |
| lamps flash too quickly for these expert phonists.
| |
| During the panic of 1907 there was one mad hour
| |
| when almost every telephone in Wall Street region
| |
| was being rung up by some desperate speculator.
| |
| The switchboards were ablaze with lights.
| |
| A few girls lost their heads. One fainted and
| |
| was carried to the rest-room. But the others
| |
| flung the flying shuttles of talk until, in a single
| |
| exchange fifteen thousand conversations had
| |
| been made possible in sixty minutes. There are
| |
| always girls in reserve for such explosive occasions,
| |
| and when the hands of any operator are
| |
| seen to tremble, and she has a warning red spot
| |
| on each cheek, she is taken off and given a recess
| |
| until she recovers her poise.
| |
|
| |
| These telephone girls are the human part of a
| |
| great communication machine. They are weaving
| |
| a web of talk that changes into a new
| |
| pattern every minute. How many possible combinations
| |
| there are with the five million telephones
| |
| of the Bell System, or what unthinkable
| |
| mileage of conversation, no one has ever dared
| |
| to guess. But whoever has once seen the long
| |
| line of white arms waving back and forth in front
| |
| of the switchboard lights must feel that he has
| |
| looked upon the very pulse of the city's life.
| |
|
| |
| In 1902 the New York Telephone Company
| |
| started a school, the first of its kind in the world,
| |
| for the education of these telephone girls. This
| |
| school is hidden amid ranges of skyscrapers, but
| |
| seventeen thousand girls discover it in the course
| |
| of the year. It is a most particular and exclusive
| |
| school. It accepts fewer than two thousand
| |
| of these girls, and rejects over fifteen thousand.
| |
| Not more than one girl in every eight can measure
| |
| up to its standards; and it cheerfully refuses
| |
| as many students in a year as would make three
| |
| Yales or Harvards.
| |
|
| |
| This school is unique, too, in the fact that it
| |
| charges no fees, pays every student five dollars a
| |
| week, and then provides her with a job when she
| |
| graduates. But it demands that every girl shall
| |
| be in good health, quick-handed, clear-voiced,
| |
| and with a certain poise and alertness of manner.
| |
| Presence of mind, which, in Herbert Spencer's
| |
| opinion, ought to be taught in every university,
| |
| is in various ways drilled into the temperament of
| |
| the telephone girl. She is also taught the knack
| |
| of concentration, so that she may carry the
| |
| switchboard situation in her head, as a chess-
| |
| player carries in his head the arrangement of the
| |
| chess-men. And she is much more welcome at
| |
| this strange school if she is young and has never
| |
| worked in other trades, where less speed and
| |
| vigilance are required.
| |
|
| |
| No matter how many millions of dollars may
| |
| be spent upon cables and switchboards, the quality
| |
| of telephone service depends upon the girl at
| |
| the exchange end of the wire. It is she who
| |
| meets the public at every point. She is the de-
| |
| spatcher of all the talk trains; she is the ruler
| |
| of the wire highways; and she is expected to give
| |
| every passenger-voice an instantaneous express
| |
| to its destination. More is demanded from her
| |
| than from any other servant of the public. Her
| |
| clients refuse to stand in line and quietly wait
| |
| their turn, as they are quite willing to do in
| |
| stores and theatres and barber shops and railway
| |
| stations and everywhere else. They do not see
| |
| her at work and they do not know what her work
| |
| is. They do not notice that she answers a call in
| |
| an average time of three and a half seconds.
| |
| They are in a hurry, or they would not be at the
| |
| telephone; and each second is a minute long.
| |
| Any delay is a direct personal affront that makes
| |
| a vivid impression upon their minds. And they
| |
| are not apt to remember that most of the delays
| |
| and blunders are being made, not by the expert
| |
| girls, but by the careless people who persist in
| |
| calling wrong numbers and in ignoring the niceties
| |
| of telephone etiquette.
| |
|
| |
| The truth about the American telephone girl
| |
| is that she has become so highly efficient that we
| |
| now expect her to be a paragon of perfection.
| |
| To give the young lady her due, we must
| |
| acknowledge that she has done more than any
| |
| other person to introduce courtesy into the
| |
| business world. She has done most to abolish the
| |
| old-time roughness and vulgarity. She has
| |
| made big business to run more smoothly than
| |
| little business did, half a century ago. She has
| |
| shown us how to take the friction out of conversation,
| |
| and taught us refinements of politeness
| |
| which were rare even among the Beau Brummels
| |
| of pre-telephonic days. Who, for instance, until
| |
| the arrival of the telephone girl, appreciated the
| |
| difference between "Who are you?" and "Who
| |
| is this?" Or who else has so impressed upon us
| |
| the value of the rising inflection, as a gentler
| |
| habit of speech? This propaganda of politeness
| |
| has gone so far that to-day the man who is profane
| |
| or abusive at the telephone, is cut off from
| |
| the use of it. He is cast out as unfit for a telephone-
| |
| using community.
| |
|
| |
| And now, so that there shall be no anticlimax
| |
| in this story of telephone development,
| |
| we must turn the spot-light upon that immense
| |
| aggregation of workshops in which have been
| |
| made three-fifths of the telephone apparatus of
| |
| the world--the Western Electric. The mother
| |
| factory of this globe-trotting business is the biggest
| |
| thing in the spacious back-yard of Chicago,
| |
| and there are eleven smaller factories--her
| |
| children--scattered over the earth from New
| |
| York to Tokio. To put its totals into a sentence,
| |
| it is an enterprise of 26,000-man-power, and
| |
| 40,000,000-dollar-power; and the telephonic
| |
| goods that it produces in half a day are worth
| |
| one hundred thousand dollars--as much, by
| |
| the way, as the Western Union REFUSED to pay
| |
| for the Bell patents in 1877.
| |
|
| |
| The Western Electric was born in Chicago,
| |
| in the ashes of the big fire of 1871; and it has
| |
| grown up to its present greatness quietly, without
| |
| celebrating its birthdays. At first it had no
| |
| telephones to make. None had been invented, so
| |
| it made telegraphic apparatus, burglar-alarms,
| |
| electric pens, and other such things. But in 1878,
| |
| when the Western Union made its short-lived
| |
| attempt to compete with the Bell Company, the
| |
| Western Electric agreed to make its telephones.
| |
| Three years later, when the brief spasm of
| |
| competition was ended, the Western Electric
| |
| was taken in hand by the Bell people and has
| |
| since then remained the great workshop of the
| |
| telephone.
| |
|
| |
| The main plant in Chicago is not especially
| |
| remarkable from a manufacturing point of
| |
| view. Here are the inevitable lumber-yards
| |
| and foundries and machine-shops. Here is
| |
| the mad waltz of the spindles that whirl silk
| |
| and cotton threads around the copper wires,
| |
| very similar to what may be seen in any braid
| |
| factory. Here electric lamps are made, five
| |
| thousand of them in a day, in the same manner
| |
| as elsewhere, except that here they are so small
| |
| and dainty as to seem designed for fairy palaces,
| |
|
| |
| The things that are done with wire in the
| |
| Western Electric factories are too many for
| |
| any mere outsider to remember. Some wire
| |
| is wrapped with paper tape at a speed of
| |
| nine thousand miles a day. Some is fashioned
| |
| into fantastic shapes that look like
| |
| absurd sea-monsters, but which in reality are
| |
| only the nerve systems of switchboards. And
| |
| some is twisted into cables by means of a
| |
| dozen whirling drums--a dizzying sight, as
| |
| each pair of drums revolve in opposite directions.
| |
| Because of the fact that a cable's inevitable
| |
| enemy is moisture, each cable is wound
| |
| on an immense spool and rolled into an oven
| |
| until it is as dry as a cinder. Then it is put
| |
| into a strait-jacket of lead pipe, sealed at both
| |
| ends, and trundled into a waiting freight car.
| |
|
| |
| No other company uses so much wire and
| |
| hard rubber, or so many tons of brass rods, as
| |
| the Western Electric. Of platinum, too, which
| |
| is more expensive than gold, it uses one thousand
| |
| pounds a year in the making of telephone transmitters.
| |
| This is imported from the Ural Mountains.
| |
| The silk thread comes from Italy and
| |
| Japan; the iron for magnets, from Norway;
| |
| the paper tape, from Manila; the mahogany,
| |
| from South America; and the rubber, from
| |
| Brazil and the valley of the Congo. At least
| |
| seven countries must cooperate to make a
| |
| telephone message possible.
| |
|
| |
| Perhaps the most extraordinary feature in
| |
| the Western Electric factories is the multitude
| |
| of its inspectors. No other sort of manufactur-
| |
| ing, not even a Government navy-yard, has so
| |
| many. Nothing is too small to escape these
| |
| sleuths of inspection. They test every tiny disc
| |
| of mica, and throw away nine out of ten. They
| |
| test every telephone by actual talk, set up every
| |
| switchboard, and try out every cable. A single
| |
| transmitter, by the time it is completed, has had
| |
| to pass three hundred examinations; and a single
| |
| coin-box is obliged to count ten thousand nickels
| |
| before it graduates into the outer world. Seven
| |
| hundred inspectors are on guard in the two main
| |
| plants at Chicago and New York. This is a
| |
| ruinously large number, from a profit-making
| |
| point of view; but the inexorable fact is that in
| |
| a telephone system nothing is insignificant. It
| |
| is built on such altruistic lines that an injury to
| |
| any one part is the concern of all.
| |
|
| |
| As usual, when we probe into the history of a
| |
| business that has grown great and overspread
| |
| the earth, we find a Man; and the Western Electric
| |
| is no exception to this rule. Its Man, still
| |
| fairly hale and busy after forty years of
| |
| leadership, is Enos M. Barton. His career is the
| |
| typical American story of self-help. He was a
| |
| telegraph messenger boy in New York during
| |
| the Civil War, then a telegraph operator in
| |
| Cleveland. In 1869 his salary was cut down
| |
| from one hundred dollars a month to ninety dollars;
| |
| whereupon he walked out and founded the
| |
| Western Electric in a shabby little machine-shop.
| |
| Later he moved to Chicago, took in Elisha Gray
| |
| as his partner, and built up a trade in the making
| |
| of telegraphic materials.
| |
|
| |
| When the telephone was invented, Barton was
| |
| one of the sceptics. "I well remember my disgust,"
| |
| he said, "when some one told me it was
| |
| possible to send conversation along a wire."
| |
| Several months later he saw a telephone and at
| |
| once became one of its apostles. By 1882 his
| |
| plant had become the official workshop of the
| |
| Bell Companies. It was the headquarters of
| |
| invention and manufacturing. Here was gathered
| |
| a notable group of young men, brilliant and
| |
| adventurous, who dared to stake their futures
| |
| on the success of the telephone. And always
| |
| at their head was Barton, as a sort of human
| |
| switchboard, who linked them all together and
| |
| kept them busy.
| |
|
| |
| In appearance, Enos M. Barton closely resembles
| |
| ex-President Eliot, of Harvard. He is
| |
| slow in speech, simple in manner, and with a
| |
| rare sagacity in business affairs. He was not an
| |
| organizer, in the modern sense. His policy was
| |
| to pick out a man, put him in a responsible place,
| |
| and judge him by results. Engineers could become
| |
| bookkeepers, and bookkeepers could become
| |
| engineers. Such a plan worked well in
| |
| the earlier days, when the art of telephony was
| |
| in the making, and when there was no source of
| |
| authority on telephonic problems. Barton is
| |
| the bishop emeritus of the Western Electric
| |
| to-day; and the big industry is now being run
| |
| by a group of young hustlers, with H. B. Thayer
| |
| at the head of the table. Thayer is a Vermonter
| |
| who has climbed the ladder of experience from
| |
| its lower rungs to the top. He is a typical
| |
| Yankee--lean, shrewd, tireless, and with a cold-
| |
| blooded sense of justice that fits him for the
| |
| leadership of twenty-six thousand people.
| |
|
| |
| So, as we have seen, the telephone as Bell invented
| |
| it, was merely a brilliant beginning in
| |
| the development of the art of telephony. It was
| |
| an elfin birth--an elusive and delicate sprite
| |
| that had to be nurtured into maturity. It was
| |
| like a soul, for which a body had to be created;
| |
| and no one knew how to make such a body.
| |
| Had it been born in some less energetic country,
| |
| it might have remained feeble and undeveloped;
| |
| but not in the United States. Here in one year
| |
| it had become famous, and in three years it had
| |
| become rich. Bell's invincible patent was soon
| |
| buttressed by hundreds of others. An open-
| |
| door policy was adopted for invention. Change
| |
| followed change to such a degree that the experts
| |
| of 1880 would be lost to-day in the mazes of
| |
| a telephone exchange.
| |
|
| |
| The art of the telephone engineer has in thirty
| |
| years grown from the most crude and clumsy
| |
| of experiments into an exact and comprehensive
| |
| profession. As Carty has aptly said, "At first
| |
| we invariably approached every problem from
| |
| the wrong end. If we had been told to load a
| |
| herd of cattle on a steamer, our method would
| |
| have been to hire a Hagenbeck to train the cattle
| |
| for a couple of years, so that they would know
| |
| enough to walk aboard of the ship when he gave
| |
| the signal; but to-day, if we had to ship cattle,
| |
| we would know enough to make a greased chute
| |
| and slide them on board in a jiffy."
| |
|
| |
| The telephone world has now its own standards
| |
| and ideals. It has a language of its own, a telephonese
| |
| that is quite unintelligible to outsiders.
| |
| It has as many separate branches of study as
| |
| medicine or law. There are few men, half a
| |
| dozen at most, who can now be said to have a
| |
| general knowledge of telephony. And no matter
| |
| how wise a telephone expert may be, he can
| |
| never reach perfection, because of the amazing
| |
| variety of things that touch or concern his
| |
| profession.
| |
|
| |
| "No one man knows all the details now," said
| |
| Theodore Vail. "Several days ago I was walking
| |
| through a telephone exchange and I saw
| |
| something new. I asked Mr. Carty to explain
| |
| it. He is our chief engineer; but he did not
| |
| understand it. We called the manager. He
| |
| did n't know, and called his assistant. He did n't
| |
| know, and called the local engineer, who was able
| |
| to tell us what it was."
| |
|
| |
| To sum up this development of the art of tele-
| |
| phony--to present a bird's-eye view--it may be
| |
| divided into four periods:
| |
|
| |
| 1. Experiment. 1876 to 1886. This was the
| |
| period of invention, in which there were no experts
| |
| and no authorities. Telephonic apparatus
| |
| consisted of makeshifts and adaptations. It was
| |
| the period of iron wire, imperfect transmitters,
| |
| grounded circuits, boy operators, peg switchboards,
| |
| local batteries, and overhead lines.
| |
|
| |
| 2. Development. 1886 to 1896. In this
| |
| period amateurs became engineers. The proper
| |
| type of apparatus was discovered, and was
| |
| improved to a high point of efficiency. In this
| |
| period came the multiple switchboard, copper
| |
| wire, girl operators, underground cables, metallic
| |
| circuit, common battery, and the long-distance
| |
| lines.
| |
|
| |
| 3. Expansion. 1896 to 1906. This was the
| |
| era of big business. It was an autumn period,
| |
| in which the telephone men and the public began
| |
| to reap the fruits of twenty years of investment
| |
| and hard work. It was the period of the message
| |
| rate, the pay station, the farm line, and the
| |
| private branch exchange.
| |
|
| |
| 4. Organization. 1906--. With the success
| |
| of the Pupin coil, there came a larger life
| |
| for the telephone. It became less local and more
| |
| national. It began to link together its scattered
| |
| parts. It discouraged the waste and anarchy
| |
| of duplication. It taught its older, but smaller
| |
| brother, the telegraph, to cooperate. It put
| |
| itself more closely in touch with the will of the
| |
| public. And it is now pushing ahead, along the
| |
| two roads of standardization and efficiency,
| |
| toward its ideal of one universal telephone
| |
| system for the whole nation. The key-word of
| |
| the telephone development of to-day is this--
| |
| organization.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| ==CHAPTER V - THE EXPANSION OF THE BUSINESS==
| |
|
| |
| The telephone business did not really begin
| |
| to grow big and overspread the earth until
| |
| 1896, but the keynote of expansion was first
| |
| sounded by Theodore Vail in the earliest days,
| |
| when as yet the telephone was a babe in arms.
| |
| In 1879 Vail said, in a letter written to one of his
| |
| captains:
| |
|
| |
| "Tell our agents that we have a proposition
| |
| on foot to connect the different cities for the purpose
| |
| of personal communication, and in other
| |
| ways to organize a GRAND TELEPHONIC SYSTEM."
| |
|
| |
| This was brave talk at that time, when there
| |
| were not in the whole world as many telephones
| |
| as there are to-day in Cincinnati. It was brave
| |
| talk in those days of iron wire, peg switchboards,
| |
| and noisy diaphragms. Most telephone men
| |
| regarded it as nothing more than talk. They did
| |
| not see any business future for the telephone ex-
| |
| cept in short-distance service. But Vail was in
| |
| earnest. His previous experience as the head of
| |
| the railway mail service had lifted him up to a
| |
| higher point of view. He knew the need of a
| |
| national system of communication that would be
| |
| quicker and more direct than either the telegraph
| |
| or the post office.
| |
|
| |
| "I saw that if the telephone could talk one
| |
| mile to-day," he said, "it would be talking a
| |
| hundred miles to-morrow." And he persisted, in
| |
| spite of a considerable deal of ridicule, in
| |
| maintaining that the telephone was destined to
| |
| connect cities and nations as well as individuals.
| |
|
| |
| Four months after he had prophesied the
| |
| "grand telephonic system," he encouraged
| |
| Charles J. Glidden, of world-tour fame, to build
| |
| a telephone line between Boston and Lowell.
| |
| This was the first inter-city line. It was well
| |
| placed, as the owners of the Lowell mills lived in
| |
| Boston, and it made a small profit from the
| |
| start. This success cheered Vail on to a master-
| |
| effort. He resolved to build a line from Boston
| |
| to Providence, and was so stubbornly bent upon
| |
| doing this that when the Bell Company refused
| |
| to act, he picked up the risk and set off with it
| |
| alone. He organized a company of well-
| |
| known Rhode Islanders--nicknamed the
| |
| "Governors' Company"--and built the line. It was
| |
| a failure at first, and went by the name of "Vail's
| |
| Folly." But Engineer Carty, by a happy
| |
| thought, DOUBLED THE WIRE, and thus in a moment
| |
| established two new factors in the telephone
| |
| business--the Metallic Circuit and the Long
| |
| Distance line.
| |
|
| |
| At once the Bell Company came over to Vail's
| |
| point of view, bought his new line, and launched
| |
| out upon what seemed to be the foolhardy enterprise
| |
| of stringing a double wire from Boston to
| |
| New York. This was to be not only the longest
| |
| of all telephone lines, strung on ten thousand
| |
| poles; it was to be a line de luxe, built of glistening
| |
| red copper, not iron. Its cost was to be
| |
| seventy thousand dollars, which was an enormous
| |
| sum in those hardscrabble days. There
| |
| was much opposition to such extravagance, and
| |
| much ridicule. "I would n't take that line as
| |
| a gift," said one of the Bell Company's officials.
| |
|
| |
| But when the last coil of wire was stretched
| |
| into place, and the first "Hello" leaped from
| |
| Boston to New York, the new line was a victorious
| |
| success. It carried messages from the
| |
| first day; and more, it raised the whole telephone
| |
| business to a higher level. It swept away the
| |
| prejudice that telephone service could become
| |
| nothing more than a neighborhood affair. "It
| |
| was the salvation of the business," said Edward
| |
| J. Hill. It marked a turning-point in the history
| |
| of the telephone, when the day of small
| |
| things was ended and the day of great things was
| |
| begun. No one man, no hundred men, had
| |
| created it. It was the final result of ten years of
| |
| invention and improvement.
| |
|
| |
| While this epoch-making line was being
| |
| strung, Vail was pushing his "grand telephonic
| |
| system" policy by organizing The American
| |
| Telephone and Telegraph Company. This, too,
| |
| was a master-stroke. It was the introduction of
| |
| the staff-and-line method of organization into
| |
| business. It was doing for the forty or fifty
| |
| Bell Companies what Von Moltke did for the
| |
| German army prior to the Franco-Prussian
| |
| War. It was the creation of a central company
| |
| that should link all local companies together,
| |
| and itself own and operate the means by which
| |
| these companies are united. This central company
| |
| was to grapple with all national problems,
| |
| to own all telephones and long-distance lines, to
| |
| protect all patents, and to be the headquarters of
| |
| invention, information, capital, and legal protection
| |
| for the entire federation of Bell Companies.
| |
|
| |
| Seldom has a company been started with so
| |
| small a capital and so vast a purpose. It had
| |
| no more than $100,000 of capital stock, in 1885;
| |
| but its declared object was nothing less than to
| |
| establish a system of wire communication for
| |
| the human race. Here are, in its own words,
| |
| the marching orders of this Company: "To
| |
| connect one or more points in each and every
| |
| city, town, or place an the State of New York,
| |
| with one or more points in each and every other
| |
| city, town, or place in said State, and in each
| |
| and every other of the United States, and in
| |
| Canada, and Mexico; and each and every of said
| |
| cities, towns, and places is to be connected with
| |
| each and every other city, town, or place in said
| |
| States and countries, and also by cable and other
| |
| appropriate means with the rest of the known
| |
| world."
| |
|
| |
| So ran Vail's dream, and for nine years he
| |
| worked mightily to make it come true. He remained
| |
| until the various parts of the business had
| |
| grown together, and until his plan for a "grand
| |
| telephonic system" was under way and fairly
| |
| well understood. Then he went out, into a
| |
| series of picturesque enterprises, until he had
| |
| built up a four-square fortune; and recently, in
| |
| 1907, he came back to be the head of the telephone
| |
| business, and to complete the work of organization
| |
| that he started thirty years before.
| |
|
| |
| When Vail said auf wiedersehen to the telephone
| |
| business, it had passed from infancy to
| |
| childhood. It was well shaped but not fully
| |
| grown. Its pioneering days were over. It was
| |
| self-supporting and had a little money in the
| |
| bank. But it could not then have carried the
| |
| load of traffic that it carries to-day. It had still
| |
| too many problems to solve and too much general
| |
| inertia to overcome. It needed to be conserved,
| |
| drilled, educated, popularized. And the man
| |
| who was finally chosen to replace Vail was in
| |
| many respects the appropriate leader for such a
| |
| preparatory period.
| |
|
| |
| Hudson--John Elbridge Hudson--was the
| |
| name of the new head of the telephone people.
| |
| He was a man of middle age, born in Lynn and
| |
| bred in Boston; a long-pedigreed New Englander,
| |
| whose ancestors had smelted iron ore in
| |
| Lynn when Charles the First was King. He
| |
| was a lawyer by profession and a university professor
| |
| by temperament. His specialty, as a man
| |
| of affairs, had been marine law; and his hobby
| |
| was the collection of rare books and old English
| |
| engravings. He was a master of the Greek language,
| |
| and very fond of using it. On all possible
| |
| occasions he used the language of Pericles in
| |
| his conversation; and even carried this preference
| |
| so far as to write his business memoranda in
| |
| Greek. He was above all else a scholar, then a
| |
| lawyer, and somewhat incidentally the central
| |
| figure in the telephone world.
| |
|
| |
| But it was of tremendous value to the telephone
| |
| business at that time to have at its head a
| |
| man of Hudson's intellectual and moral calibre.
| |
|
| |
| He gave it tone and prestige. He built up its
| |
| credit. He kept it clean and clear above all
| |
| suspicion of wrong-doing. He held fast whatever
| |
| had been gained. And he prepared the way
| |
| for the period of expansion by borrowing fifty
| |
| millions for improvements, and by adding greatly
| |
| to the strength and influence of the American
| |
| Telephone and Telegraph Company.
| |
|
| |
| Hudson remained at the head of the telephone
| |
| table until his death, in 1900, and thus lived to
| |
| see the dawn of the era of big business. Under
| |
| his regime great things were done in the development
| |
| of the art. The business was pushed ahead
| |
| at every point by its captains. Every man in
| |
| his place, trying to give a little better service
| |
| than yesterday--that was the keynote of the
| |
| Hudson period. There was no one preeminent
| |
| genius. Each important step forward was the
| |
| result of the cooperation of many minds, and the
| |
| prodding necessities of a growing traffic.
| |
|
| |
| By 1896, when the Common Battery system
| |
| created a new era, the telephone engineer had
| |
| pretty well mastered his simpler troubles. He
| |
| was able to handle his wires, no matter how many.
| |
| By this time, too, the public was ready for the
| |
| telephone. A new generation had grown up,
| |
| without the prejudices of its fathers. People
| |
| had grown away from the telegraphic habit of
| |
| thought, which was that wire communications
| |
| were expensive luxuries for the few. The telephone
| |
| was, in fact, a new social nerve, so new and
| |
| so novel that very nearly twenty years went by
| |
| before it had fully grown into place, and before
| |
| the social body developed the instinct of using it.
| |
|
| |
| Not that the difficulties of the telephone
| |
| engineers were over, for they were not. They
| |
| have seemed to grow more numerous and complex
| |
| every year. But by 1896 enough had been
| |
| done to warrant a forward movement. For the
| |
| next ten-year period the keynote of telephone
| |
| history was EXPANSION. Under the prevailing
| |
| flat-rate plan of payment, all customers paid the
| |
| same yearly price and then used their telephones
| |
| as often as they pleased. This was a simple
| |
| method, and the most satisfactory for small towns
| |
| and farming regions. But in a great city such
| |
| a plan grew to be suicidal. In New York, for
| |
| instance, the price had to be raised to $240,
| |
| which lifted the telephone as high above the mass
| |
| of the citizens as though it were a piano or a
| |
| diamond sunburst. Such a plan was strangling
| |
| the business. It was shutting out the small
| |
| users. It was clogging the wires with deadhead
| |
| calls. It was giving some people too little
| |
| service and others too much. It was a very
| |
| unsatisfactory situation.
| |
|
| |
| How to extend the service and at the same time
| |
| cheapen it to small users--that was the Gordian
| |
| knot; and the man who unquestionably did most
| |
| to untie it was Edward J. Hall. Mr. Hall
| |
| founded the telephone business in Buffalo in
| |
| 1878, and seven years afterwards became the
| |
| chief of the long-distance traffic. He was then,
| |
| and is to-day, one of the statesmen of the telephone.
| |
| For more than thirty years he has been
| |
| the "candid friend" of the business, incessantly
| |
| suggesting, probing, and criticising. Keen and
| |
| dispassionate, with a genius for mercilessly cutting
| |
| to the marrow of a proposition, Hall has
| |
| at the same time been a zealot for the improvement
| |
| and extension of telephone service. It was
| |
| he who set the agents free from the ball-and-
| |
| chain of royalties, allowing them to pay instead a
| |
| percentage of gross receipts. And it was he
| |
| who "broke the jam," as a lumberman would
| |
| say, by suggesting the MESSAGE RATE system.
| |
|
| |
| By this plan, which U. N. Bethell developed
| |
| to its highest point in New York, a user of the
| |
| telephone pays a fixed minimum price for a
| |
| certain number of messages per year, and extra
| |
| for all messages over this number. The large
| |
| user pays more, and the little user pays less. It
| |
| opened up the way to such an expansion of telephone
| |
| business as Bell, in his rosiest dreams, had
| |
| never imagined. In three years, after 1896,
| |
| there were twice as many users; in six years there
| |
| were four times as many; in ten years there were
| |
| eight to one. What with the message rate and
| |
| the pay station, the telephone was now on its way
| |
| to be universal. It was adapted to all kinds and
| |
| conditions of men. A great corporation, nerved
| |
| at every point with telephone wires, may now pay
| |
| fifty thousand dollars to the Bell Company, while
| |
| at the same time a young Irish immigrant boy,
| |
| just arrived in New York City, may offer five
| |
| coppers and find at his disposal a fifty million
| |
| dollar telephone system.
| |
|
| |
| When the message rate was fairly well established,
| |
| Hudson died--fell suddenly to the
| |
| ground as he was about to step into a railway
| |
| carriage. In his place came Frederick P. Fish,
| |
| also a lawyer and a Bostonian. Fish was a popular,
| |
| optimistic man, with a "full-speed-ahead"
| |
| temperament. He pushed the policy of expansion
| |
| until he broke all the records. He borrowed
| |
| money in stupendous amounts--$150,000,000 at
| |
| one time--and flung it into a campaign of red-
| |
| hot development. More business he demanded,
| |
| and more, and more, until his captains, like a
| |
| thirty-horse team of galloping horses, became
| |
| very nearly uncontrollable.
| |
|
| |
| It was a fast and furious period. The whole
| |
| country was ablaze with a passion of prosperity.
| |
| After generations of conflict, the men with large
| |
| ideas had at last put to rout the men of small
| |
| ideas. The waste and folly of competition had
| |
| everywhere driven men to the policy of cooperation.
| |
| Mills were linked to mills and factories to
| |
| factories, in a vast mutualism of industry such
| |
| as no other age, perhaps, has ever known. And
| |
| as the telephone is essentially the instrument of
| |
| co-working and interdependent people, it found
| |
| itself suddenly welcomed as the most popular and
| |
| indispensable of all the agencies that put men in
| |
| touch with each other.
| |
|
| |
| To describe this growth in a single sentence,
| |
| we might say that the Bell telephone secured its
| |
| first million of capital in 1879; its first million of
| |
| earnings in 1882; its first million of dividends in
| |
| 1884; its first million of surplus in 1885. It had
| |
| paid out its first million for legal expenses by
| |
| 1886; began first to send a million messages a
| |
| day in 1888; had strung its first million miles of
| |
| wire in 1900; and had installed its first million
| |
| telephones in 1898. By 1897 it had spun as
| |
| many cobwebs of wire as the mighty Western
| |
| Union itself; by 1900 it had twice as many miles
| |
| of wire as the Western Union, and in 1905 FIVE
| |
| TIMES as many. Such was the plunging progress
| |
| of the Bell Companies in this period of expansion,
| |
| that by 1905 they had swept past all
| |
| European countries combined, not only in the
| |
| quality of the service but in the actual number of
| |
| telephones in use. This, too, without a cent of
| |
| public money, or the protection of a tariff, or the
| |
| prestige of a governmental bureau.
| |
|
| |
| By 1892 Boston and New York were talking
| |
| to Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburg, and Washington.
| |
| One-half of the people of the United
| |
| States were within talking distance of each other.
| |
| The THOUSAND-MILE TALK had ceased to be a fairy
| |
| tale. Several years later the western end of the
| |
| line was pushed over the plains to Nebraska,
| |
| enabling the spoken word in Boston to be heard
| |
| in Omaha. Slowly and with much effort the
| |
| public were taught to substitute the telephone for
| |
| travel. A special long-distance salon was fitted
| |
| up in New York City to entice people into the
| |
| habit of talking to other cities. Cabs were sent
| |
| for customers; and when one arrived, he was
| |
| escorted over Oriental rugs to a gilded booth,
| |
| draped with silken curtains. This was the
| |
| famous "Room Nine." By such and many other
| |
| allurements a larger idea of telephone service was
| |
| given to the public mind; until in 1909 at least
| |
| eighteen thousand New York-Chicago conversa-
| |
| tions were held, and the revenue from strictly
| |
| long-distance messages was twenty-two thousand
| |
| dollars a day.
| |
|
| |
| By 1906 even the Rocky Mountain Bell Company
| |
| had grown to be a ten-million-dollar enterprise.
| |
| It began at Salt Lake City with a
| |
| hundred telephones, in 1880. Then it reached
| |
| out to master an area of four hundred and
| |
| thirteen thousand square miles--a great Lone
| |
| Land of undeveloped resources. Its linemen
| |
| groped through dense forests where their poles
| |
| looked like toothpicks beside the towering pines
| |
| and cedars. They girdled the mountains and
| |
| basted the prairies with wire, until the lonely
| |
| places were brought together and made sociable.
| |
| They drove off the Indians, who wanted the
| |
| bright wire for ear-rings and bracelets; and the
| |
| bears, which mistook the humming of the wires
| |
| for the buzzing of bees, and persisted in gnawing
| |
| the poles down. With the most heroic
| |
| optimism, this Rocky Mountain Company persevered
| |
| until, in 1906, it had created a seventy-
| |
| thousand-mile nerve-system for the far West.
| |
|
| |
| Chicago, in this year, had two hundred thou-
| |
| sand telephones in use, in her two hundred
| |
| square miles of area. The business had been
| |
| built up by General Anson Stager, who was
| |
| himself wealthy, and able to attract the support
| |
| of such men as John Crerar, H. H. Porter, and
| |
| Robert T. Lincoln. Since 1882 it has paid
| |
| dividends, and in one glorious year its stock
| |
| soared to four hundred dollars a share. The old-
| |
| timers--the men who clambered over roof-tops
| |
| in 1878 and tacked iron wires wherever they could
| |
| without being chased off--are still for the most
| |
| part in control of the Chicago company.
| |
|
| |
| But as might have been expected, it was New
| |
| York City that was the record-breaker when the
| |
| era of telephone expansion arrived. Here the
| |
| flood of big business struck with the force of a
| |
| tidal wave. The number of users leaped from
| |
| 56,000 in 1900 up to 810,000 in 1908. In a
| |
| single year of sweating and breathless activity,
| |
| 65,000 new telephones were put on desks or hung
| |
| on walls--an average of one new user for every
| |
| two minutes of the business day.
| |
|
| |
| Literally tons, and hundreds of tons, of
| |
| telephones were hauled in drays from the factory
| |
| and put in place in New York's homes and
| |
| offices. More and more were demanded, until
| |
| to-day there are more telephones in New York
| |
| than there are in the four countries, France,
| |
| Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland combined.
| |
| As a user of telephones New York has risen to be
| |
| unapproachable. Mass together all the telephones
| |
| of London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester,
| |
| Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffleld, Bristol,
| |
| and Belfast, and there will even then be barely as
| |
| many as are carrying the conversations of this
| |
| one American city.
| |
|
| |
| In 1879 the New York telephone directory was
| |
| a small card, showing two hundred and fifty-two
| |
| names; but now it has grown to be an eight-hundred-page
| |
| quarterly, with a circulation of half a
| |
| million, and requiring twenty drays, forty horses,
| |
| and four hundred men to do the work of distribution.
| |
| There was one shabby little exchange
| |
| thirty years ago; but now there are fifty-two
| |
| exchanges, as the nerve-centres of a vast fifty-
| |
| million-dollar system. Incredible as it may seem
| |
| to foreigners, it is literally true that in a single
| |
| building in New York, the Hudson Terminal,
| |
| there are more telephones than in Odessa or
| |
| Madrid, more than in the two kingdoms of
| |
| Greece and Bulgaria combined.
| |
|
| |
| Merely to operate this system requires an army
| |
| of more than five thousand girls. Merely to keep
| |
| their records requires two hundred and thirty-five
| |
| million sheets of paper a year. Merely to do the
| |
| writing of these records wears away five hundred
| |
| and sixty thousand lead pencils. And merely to
| |
| give these girls a cup of tea or coffee at noon,
| |
| compels the Bell Company to buy yearly six
| |
| thousand pounds of tea, seventeen thousand
| |
| pounds of coffee, forty-eight thousand cans of
| |
| condensed milk, and one hundred and forty
| |
| barrels of sugar.
| |
|
| |
| The myriad wires of this New York system
| |
| are tingling with talk every minute of the day
| |
| and night. They are most at rest between three
| |
| and four o'clock in the morning, although even
| |
| then there are usually ten calls a minute. Between
| |
| five and six o'clock, two thousand New
| |
| Yorkers are awake and at the telephone. Half
| |
| an hour later there are twice as many. Between
| |
| seven and eight twenty-five thousand people
| |
| have called up twenty-five thousand other people,
| |
| so that there are as many people talking by
| |
| wire as there were in the whole city of New York
| |
| in the Revolutionary period. Even this is only
| |
| the dawn of the day's business. By half-past
| |
| eight it is doubled; by nine it is trebled; by ten it
| |
| is multiplied sixfold; and by eleven the roar has
| |
| become an incredible babel of one hundred and
| |
| eighty thousand conversations an hour, with
| |
| fifty new voices clamoring at the exchanges every
| |
| second.
| |
|
| |
| This is "the peak of the load." It is the topmost
| |
| pinnacle of talk. It is the utmost degree of
| |
| service that the telephone has been required to
| |
| give in any city. And it is as much a world's
| |
| wonder, to men and women of imagination, as
| |
| the steel mills of Homestead or the turbine
| |
| leviathans that curve across the Atlantic Ocean
| |
| in four and a half days.
| |
|
| |
| As to the men who built it up: Charles F.
| |
| Cutler died in 1907, but most of the others are
| |
| still alive and busy. Union N. Bethell, now in
| |
| Cutler's place at the head of the New York
| |
| Company, has been the operating chief for
| |
| eighteen years. He is a man of shrewdness and
| |
| sympathy, with a rare sagacity in solving knotty
| |
| problems, a president of the new type, who
| |
| regards his work as a sort of obligation he owes to
| |
| the public. And just as foreigners go to Pittsburg
| |
| to see the steel business at its best; just as
| |
| they go to Iowa and Kansas to see the New
| |
| Farmer, so they make pilgrimages to Bethell's
| |
| office to learn the profession of telephony.
| |
|
| |
| This unparalleled telephone system of New
| |
| York grew up without having at any time the
| |
| rivalry of competition. But in many other cities
| |
| and especially in the Middle West, there sprang
| |
| up in 1895 a medley of independent companies.
| |
| The time of the original patents had expired, and
| |
| the Bell Companies found themselves freed from
| |
| the expense of litigation only to be snarled up in
| |
| a tangle of duplication. In a few years there
| |
| were six thousand of these little Robinson Crusoe
| |
| companies. And by 1901 they had put in use
| |
| more than a million telephones and were professing
| |
| to have a capital of a hundred millions.
| |
|
| |
| Most of these companies were necessary and
| |
| did much to expand the telephone business into
| |
| new territory. They were in fact small mutual
| |
| associations of a dozen or a hundred farmers,
| |
| whose aim was to get telephone service at cost.
| |
| But there were other companies, probably a thousand
| |
| or more, which were organized by promoters
| |
| who built their hopes on the fact that the Bell
| |
| Companies were unpopular, and on the myth that
| |
| they were fabulously rich. Instead of legitimately
| |
| extending telephone lines into communities
| |
| that had none, these promoters proceeded to
| |
| inflict the messy snarl of an overlapping system
| |
| upon whatever cities would give them permission
| |
| to do so.
| |
|
| |
| In this way, masked as competition, the
| |
| nuisance and waste of duplication began in most
| |
| American cities. The telephone business was
| |
| still so young, it was so little appreciated even by
| |
| the telephone officials and engineers, that the
| |
| public regarded a second or a third telephone
| |
| system in one city as quite a possible and desirable
| |
| innovation. "We have two ears," said one
| |
| promoter; "why not therefore have two telephones?"
| |
|
| |
| This duplication went merrily on for years
| |
| before it was generally discovered that the telephone
| |
| is not an ear, but a nerve system; and that
| |
| such an experiment as a duplicate nerve system
| |
| has never been attempted by Nature, even in her
| |
| most frivolous moods. Most people fancied that
| |
| a telephone system was practically the same as a
| |
| gas or electric light system, which can often be
| |
| duplicated with the result of cheaper rates and
| |
| better service. They did not for years discover
| |
| that two telephone companies in one city means
| |
| either half service or double cost, just as two fire
| |
| departments or two post offices would.
| |
|
| |
| Some of these duplicate companies built up a
| |
| complete plant, and gave good local service,
| |
| while others proved to be mere stock bubbles.
| |
| Most of them were over-capitalized, depending
| |
| upon public sympathy to atone for deficiencies in
| |
| equipment. One which had printed fifty million
| |
| dollars of stock for sale was sold at auction in
| |
| 1909 for four hundred thousand dollars. All
| |
| told, there were twenty-three of these bubbles
| |
| that burst in 1905, twenty-one in 1906, and twelve
| |
| in 1907. So high has been the death-rate among
| |
| these isolated companies that at a recent conven-
| |
| tion of telephone agents, the chairman's gavel
| |
| was made of thirty-five pieces of wood, taken
| |
| from thirty-five switchboards of thirty-five
| |
| extinct companies.
| |
|
| |
| A study of twelve single-system cities and
| |
| twenty-seven double-system cities shows that
| |
| there are about eleven per cent more telephones
| |
| under the double-system, and that where the
| |
| second system is put in, every fifth user is
| |
| obliged to pay for two telephones. The rates
| |
| are alike, whether a city has one or two systems.
| |
| Duplicating companies raised their rates in
| |
| sixteen cities out of the twenty-seven, and
| |
| reduced them in one city. Taking the United
| |
| States as a whole, there are to-day fully two
| |
| hundred and fifty thousand people who are paying
| |
| for two telephones instead of one, an
| |
| economic waste of at least ten million dollars a
| |
| year.
| |
|
| |
| A fair-minded survey of the entire independent
| |
| telephone movement would probably show that
| |
| it was at first a stimulant, followed, as stimulants
| |
| usually are, by a reaction. It was unquestionably
| |
| for several years a spur to the Bell Com-
| |
| panies. But it did not fulfil its promises of
| |
| cheap rates, better service, and high dividends;
| |
| it did little or nothing to improve telephonic
| |
| apparatus, producing nothing new except the
| |
| automatic switchboard--a brilliant invention,
| |
| which is now in its experimental period. In the
| |
| main, perhaps, it has been a reactionary and
| |
| troublesome movement in the cities, and a progressive
| |
| movement among the farmers.
| |
|
| |
| By 1907 it was a wave that had spent its force.
| |
| It was no longer rolling along easily on the broad
| |
| ocean of hope, but broken and turned aside by the
| |
| rocks of actual conditions. One by one the telephone
| |
| promoters learned the limitations of an
| |
| isolated company, and asked to be included as
| |
| members of the Bell family. In 1907 four
| |
| hundred and fifty-eight thousand independent
| |
| telephones were linked by wire to the nearest Bell
| |
| Company; and in 1908 these were followed by
| |
| three hundred and fifty thousand more. After
| |
| this landslide to the policy of consolidation, there
| |
| still remained a fairly large assortment of
| |
| independent companies; but they had lost their
| |
| dreams and their illusions.
| |
|
| |
| As might have been expected, the independent
| |
| movement produced a number of competent local
| |
| leaders, but none of national importance. The
| |
| Bell Companies, on the other hand, were officered
| |
| by men who had for a quarter of a century been
| |
| surveying telephone problems from a national
| |
| point of view. At their head, from 1907 onwards,
| |
| was Theodore N. Vail, who had returned
| |
| dramatically, at the precise moment when he
| |
| was needed, to finish the work that he had begun
| |
| in 1878. He had been absent for twenty years,
| |
| developing water-power and building street-
| |
| railways in South America. In the first act of
| |
| the telephone drama, it was he who put the enterprise
| |
| upon a business basis, and laid down the
| |
| first principles of its policy. In the second and
| |
| third acts he had no place; but when the curtain
| |
| rose upon the fourth act, Vail was once more the
| |
| central figure, standing white-haired among his
| |
| captains, and pushing forward the completion
| |
| of the "grand telephonic system" that he had
| |
| dreamed of when the telephone was three
| |
| years old.
| |
|
| |
| Thus it came about that the telephone business
| |
| was created by Vail, conserved by Hudson,
| |
| expanded by Fish, and is now in process of being
| |
| consolidated by Vail. It is being knit together
| |
| into a stupendous Bell System--a federation of
| |
| self-governing companies, united by a central
| |
| company that is the busiest of them all. It is no
| |
| longer protected by any patent monopoly.
| |
| Whoever is rich enough and rash enough may
| |
| enter the field. But it has all the immeasurable
| |
| advantages that come from long experience,
| |
| immense bulk, the most highly skilled specialists,
| |
| and an abundance of capital. "The Bell System
| |
| is strong," says Vail, "because we are all tied
| |
| up together; and the success of one is therefore
| |
| the concern of all."
| |
|
| |
| The Bell System! Here we have the motif
| |
| of American telephone development. Here is
| |
| the most comprehensive idea that has entered any
| |
| telephone engineer's brain. Already this Bell
| |
| System has grown to be so vast, so nearly akin
| |
| to a national nerve system, that there is nothing
| |
| else to which we can compare it. It is so wide-
| |
| spread that few are aware of its greatness. It
| |
| is strung out over fifty thousand cities and
| |
| communities.
| |
|
| |
| If it were all gathered together into one place,
| |
| this Bell System, it would make a city of
| |
| Telephonia as large as Baltimore. It would
| |
| contain half of the telephone property of the
| |
| world. Its actual wealth would be fully $760,000,000,
| |
| and its revenue would be greater than
| |
| the revenue of the city of New York.
| |
|
| |
| Part of the property of the city of Telephonia
| |
| consists of ten million poles, as many as would
| |
| make a fence from New York to California, or
| |
| put a stockade around Texas. If the Telephonians
| |
| wished to use these poles at home, they might
| |
| drive them in as piles along their water-front,
| |
| and have a twenty-five thousand-acre dock; or if
| |
| their city were a hundred square miles in extent,
| |
| they might set up a seven-ply wall around it with
| |
| these poles.
| |
|
| |
| Wire, too! Eleven million miles of it! This
| |
| city of Telephonia would be the capital of an
| |
| empire of wire. Not all the men in New York
| |
| State could shoulder this burden of wire and
| |
| carry it. Throw all the people of Illinois in
| |
| one end of the scale, and put on the other side the
| |
| wire-wealth of Telephonia, and long before the
| |
| last coil was in place, the Illinoisans would be in
| |
| the air.
| |
|
| |
| What would this city do for a living? It
| |
| would make two-thirds of the telephones, cables,
| |
| and switchboards of all countries. Nearly one-
| |
| quarter of its citizens would work in factories,
| |
| while the others would be busy in six thousand
| |
| exchanges, making it possible for the people of
| |
| the United States to talk to one another at the
| |
| rate of SEVEN THOUSAND MILLION CONVERSATIONS A YEAR.
| |
|
| |
| The pay-envelope army that moves to work
| |
| every morning in Telephonia would be a host of
| |
| one hundred and ten thousand men and girls,
| |
| mostly girls,--as many girls as would fill Vassar
| |
| College a hundred times and more, or double the
| |
| population of Nevada. Put these men and girls
| |
| in line, march them ten abreast, and six hours
| |
| would pass before the last company would arrive
| |
| at the reviewing stand. In single file this throng
| |
| of Telephonians would make a living wall from
| |
| New York to New Haven.
| |
|
| |
| Such is the extraordinary city of which Alexander
| |
| Graham Bell was the only resident in 1875.
| |
| It has been built up without the backing of any
| |
| great bank or multi-millionaire. There have
| |
| been no Vanderbilts in it, no Astors, Rockefellers,
| |
| Rothschilds, Harrimans. There are even
| |
| now only four men who own as many as ten
| |
| thousand shares of the stock of the central company.
| |
| This Bell System stands as the life-work
| |
| of unprivileged men, who are for the most part
| |
| still alive and busy. With very few and trivial
| |
| exceptions, every part of it was made in the
| |
| United States. No other industrial organism of
| |
| equal size owes foreign countries so little. Alike
| |
| in its origin, its development, and its highest
| |
| point of efficiency and expansion, the telephone is
| |
| as essentially American as the Declaration of
| |
| Independence or the monument on Bunker Hill.
| |
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
Zeile 5.395: |
Zeile 636: |
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
| ==CHAPTER VII - THE TELEPHONE AND NATIONAL EFFICIENCY==
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| The larger significance of the telephone is
| |
| that it completes the work of eliminating
| |
| the hermit and gypsy elements of civilization.
| |
| In an almost ideal way, it has made
| |
| intercommunication possible without travel. It has
| |
| enabled a man to settle permanently in one place,
| |
| and yet keep in personal touch with his fellows.
| |
|
| |
| Until the last few centuries, much of the world
| |
| was probably what Morocco is to-day--a region
| |
| without wheeled vehicles or even roads of any
| |
| sort. There is a mythical story of a wonderful
| |
| speaking-trumpet possessed by Alexander the
| |
| Great, by which he could call a soldier who was
| |
| ten miles distant; but there was probably no
| |
| substitute for the human voice except flags and
| |
| beacon-fires, or any faster method of travel than
| |
| the gait of a horse or a camel across ungraded
| |
| plains. The first sensation of rapid transit
| |
| doubtless came with the sailing vessel; but it was
| |
| the play-toy of the winds, and unreliable. When
| |
| Columbus dared to set out on his famous voyage,
| |
| he was five weeks in crossing from Spain to the
| |
| West Indies, his best day's record two hundred
| |
| miles. The swift steamship travel of to-day
| |
| did not begin until 1838, when the Great
| |
| Western raced over the Atlantic in fifteen days.
| |
|
| |
| As for organized systems of intercommunication,
| |
| they were unknown even under the rule of
| |
| a Pericles or a Caesar. There was no post office
| |
| in Great Britain until 1656--a generation after
| |
| America had begun to be colonized. There was
| |
| no English mail-coach until 1784; and when Benjamin
| |
| Franklin was Postmaster General at Philadelphia,
| |
| an answer by mail from Boston, when
| |
| all went well, required not less than three weeks.
| |
| There was not even a hard-surface road in the
| |
| thirteen United States until 1794; nor even a
| |
| postage stamp until 1847, the year in which
| |
| Alexander Graham Bell was born. In this same
| |
| year Henry Clay delivered his memorable speech
| |
| on the Mexican War, at Lexington, Kentucky,
| |
| and it was telegraphed to The New York Herald
| |
| at a cost of five hundred dollars, thus breaking
| |
| all previous records for news-gathering enterprise.
| |
| Eleven years later the first cable established
| |
| an instantaneous sign-language between
| |
| Americans and Europeans; and in 1876 there
| |
| came the perfect distance-talking of the telephone.
| |
|
| |
| No invention has been more timely than the
| |
| telephone. It arrived at the exact period when
| |
| it was needed for the organization of great cities
| |
| and the unification of nations. The new ideas
| |
| and energies of science, commerce, and cooperation
| |
| were beginning to win victories in all parts
| |
| of the earth. The first railroad had just arrived
| |
| in China; the first parliament in Japan; the first
| |
| constitution in Spain. Stanley was moving like
| |
| a tiny point of light through the heart of the
| |
| Dark Continent. The Universal Postal Union
| |
| had been organized in a little hall in Berne. The
| |
| Red Cross movement was twelve years old. An
| |
| International Congress of Hygiene was being
| |
| held at Brussells, and an International Congress
| |
| of Medicine at Philadelphia. De Lesseps had
| |
| finished the Suez Canal and was examining
| |
| Panama. Italy and Germany had recently been
| |
| built into nations; France had finally swept aside
| |
| the Empire and the Commune and established the
| |
| Republic. And what with the new agencies of
| |
| railroads, steamships, cheap newspapers, cables,
| |
| and telegraphs, the civilized races of mankind had
| |
| begun to be knit together into a practical consolidation.
| |
|
| |
| To the United States, especially, the telephone
| |
| came as a friend in need. After a hundred years
| |
| of growth, the Republic was still a loose confederation
| |
| of separate States, rather than one great
| |
| united nation. It had recently fallen apart for
| |
| four years, with a wide gulf of blood between;
| |
| and with two flags, two Presidents, and two
| |
| armies. In 1876 it was hesitating halfway
| |
| between doubt and confidence, between the old
| |
| political issues of North and South, and the new
| |
| industrial issues of foreign trade and the development
| |
| of material resources. The West was
| |
| being thrown open. The Indians and buffaloes
| |
| were being driven back. There was a line of
| |
| railway from ocean to ocean. The population
| |
| was gaining at the rate of a million a year. Col-
| |
| orado had just been baptized as a new State.
| |
| And it was still an unsolved problem whether or
| |
| not the United States could be kept united,
| |
| whether or not it could be built into an organic
| |
| nation without losing the spirit of self-help and
| |
| democracy.
| |
|
| |
| It is not easy for us to realize to-day how
| |
| young and primitive was the United States of
| |
| 1876. Yet the fact is that we have twice the
| |
| population that we had when the telephone was
| |
| invented. We have twice the wheat crop and
| |
| twice as much money in circulation. We have
| |
| three times the railways, banks, libraries,
| |
| newspapers, exports, farm values, and national
| |
| wealth. We have ten million farmers who make
| |
| four times as much money as seven million
| |
| farmers made in 1876. We spend four times as
| |
| much on our public schools, and we put four
| |
| times as much in the savings bank. We have
| |
| five times as many students in the colleges.
| |
| And we have so revolutionized our methods of
| |
| production that we now produce seven times as
| |
| much coal, fourteen times as much oil and pig-
| |
| iron, twenty-two times as much copper, and
| |
| forty-three times as much steel.
| |
|
| |
| There were no skyscrapers in 1876, no
| |
| trolleys, no electric lights, no gasoline engines,
| |
| no self-binders, no bicycles, no automobiles.
| |
| There was no Oklahoma, and the combined
| |
| population of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and
| |
| Arizona was about equal to that of Des Moines.
| |
| It was in this year that General Custer was killed
| |
| by the Sioux; that the flimsy iron railway bridge
| |
| fell at Ashtabula; that the "Molly Maguires"
| |
| terrorized Pennsylvania; that the first wire of
| |
| the Brooklyn Bridge was strung; and that Boss
| |
| Tweed and Hell Gate were both put out of the
| |
| way in New York.
| |
|
| |
| The Great Elm, under which the Revolutionary
| |
| patriots had met, was still standing on
| |
| Boston Common. Daniel Drew, the New York
| |
| financier, who was born before the American
| |
| Constitution was adopted, was still alive; so
| |
| were Commodore Vanderbilt, Joseph Henry, A.
| |
| T. Stewart, Thurlow Weed, Peter Cooper,
| |
| Cyrus McCormick, Lucretia Mott, Bryant,
| |
| Longfellow, and Emerson. Most old people
| |
| could remember the running of the first railway
| |
| train; people of middle age could remember the
| |
| sending of the first telegraph message; and
| |
| the children in the high schools remembered the
| |
| laying of the first Atlantic Cable.
| |
|
| |
| The grandfathers of 1876 were fond of telling
| |
| how Webster opposed taking Texas and Oregon
| |
| into the Union; how George Washington
| |
| advised against including the Mississippi River;
| |
| and how Monroe warned Congress that a
| |
| country that reached from the Atlantic to the
| |
| Middle West was "too extensive to be governed
| |
| but by a despotic monarchy." They told how
| |
| Abraham Lincoln, when he was postmaster of
| |
| New Salem, used to carry the letters in his coon-
| |
| skin cap and deliver them at sight; how in 1822
| |
| the mails were carried on horseback and not in
| |
| stages, so as to have the quickest possible service;
| |
| and how the news of Madison's election was three
| |
| weeks in reaching the people of Kentucky.
| |
| When the telegraph was mentioned, they told
| |
| how in Revolutionary days the patriots used a
| |
| system of signalling called "Washington's Tele-
| |
| graph," consisting of a pole, a flag, a basket, and
| |
| a barrel.
| |
|
| |
| So, the young Republic was still within
| |
| hearing distance of its childhood, in 1876. Both
| |
| in sentiment and in methods of work it was
| |
| living close to the log-cabin period. Many of
| |
| the old slow ways survived, the ways that were
| |
| fast enough in the days of the stage-coach and
| |
| the tinder-box. There were seventy-seven thousand
| |
| miles of railway, but poorly built and in
| |
| short lengths. There were manufacturing industries
| |
| that employed two million, four hundred
| |
| thousand people, but every trade was
| |
| broken up into a chaos of small competitive
| |
| units, each at war with all the others. There
| |
| were energy and enterprise in the highest degree,
| |
| but not efficiency or organization. Little as we
| |
| knew it, in 1876 we were mainly gathering together
| |
| the plans and the raw materials for the
| |
| building up of the modern business world, with
| |
| its quick, tense life and its national structure of
| |
| immense coordinated industries.
| |
|
| |
| In 1876 the age of specialization and community
| |
| of interest was in its dawn. The cobbler
| |
| had given place to the elaborate factory, in which
| |
| seventy men cooperated to make one shoe. The
| |
| merchant who had hitherto lived over his store
| |
| now ventured to have a home in the suburbs.
| |
| No man was any longer a self-sufficient Robinson
| |
| Crusoe. He was a fraction, a single part of
| |
| a social mechanism, who must necessarily keep
| |
| in the closest touch with many others.
| |
|
| |
| A new interdependent form of civilization was
| |
| about to be developed, and the telephone arrived
| |
| in the nick of time to make this new civilization
| |
| workable and convenient. It was the unfolding
| |
| of a new organ. Just as the eye had become the
| |
| telescope, and the hand had become machinery,
| |
| and the feet had become railways, so the voice
| |
| became the telephone. It was a new ideal
| |
| method of communication that had been made
| |
| indispensable by new conditions. The prophecy
| |
| of Carlyle had come true, when he said that "men
| |
| cannot now be bound to men by brass collars;
| |
| you will have to bind them by other far nobler
| |
| and cunninger methods."
| |
|
| |
| Railways and steamships had begun this work
| |
| of binding man to man by "nobler and cunninger
| |
| methods." The telegraph and cable had gone
| |
| still farther and put all civilized people within
| |
| sight of each other, so that they could communicate
| |
| by a sort of deaf and dumb alphabet. And
| |
| then came the telephone, giving direct instantaneous
| |
| communication and putting the people
| |
| of each nation within hearing distance of each
| |
| other. It was the completion of a long series of
| |
| inventions. It was the keystone of the arch. It
| |
| was the one last improvement that enabled
| |
| interdependent nations to handle themselves and to
| |
| hold together.
| |
|
| |
| To make railways and steamboats carry letters
| |
| was much, in the evolution of the means of
| |
| communication. To make the electric wire carry
| |
| signals was more, because of the instantaneous
| |
| transmission of important news. But to make
| |
| the electric wire carry speech was MOST, because
| |
| it put all fellow-citizens face to face, and
| |
| made both message and answer instantaneous.
| |
| The invention of the telephone taught the Genie
| |
| of Electricity to do better than to carry mes-
| |
| sages in the sign language of the dumb. It
| |
| taught him to speak. As Emerson has finely
| |
| said:
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| "We had letters to send. Couriers could not go fast
| |
| enough, nor far enough; broke their wagons, foundered
| |
| their horses; bad roads in Spring, snowdrifts in Winter,
| |
| heat in Summer--could not get their horses out of a
| |
| walk. But we found that the air and the earth were
| |
| full of electricity, and always going our way, just the
| |
| way we wanted to send. WOULD HE TAKE A MESSAGE,
| |
| Just as lief as not; had nothing else to do; would carry
| |
| it in no time."
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| As to the exact value of the telephone to the
| |
| United States in dollars and cents, no one can
| |
| tell. One statistician has given us a total of
| |
| three million dollars a day as the amount saved
| |
| by using telephones. This sum may be far too
| |
| high, or too low. It can be no more than a
| |
| guess. The only adequate way to arrive at the
| |
| value of the telephone is to consider the nation as
| |
| a whole, to take it all in all as a going concern,
| |
| and to note that such a nation would be absolutely
| |
| impossible without its telephone service.
| |
| Some sort of a slower and lower grade republic
| |
| we might have, with small industrial units, long
| |
| hours of labor, lower wages, and clumsier ways.
| |
| The money loss would be enormous, but more
| |
| serious still would be the loss in the QUALITY OF
| |
| THE NATIONAL LIFE. Inevitably, an untelephoned
| |
| nation is less social, less unified, less progressive,
| |
| and less efficient. It belongs to an inferior
| |
| species.
| |
|
| |
| How to make a civilization that is organized
| |
| and quick, instead of a barbarism that was
| |
| chaotic and slow--that is the universal human
| |
| problem, not wholly solved to-day. And how to
| |
| develop a science of intercommunication, which
| |
| commenced when the wild animals began to
| |
| travel in herds and to protect themselves from
| |
| their enemies by a language of danger-signals,
| |
| and to democratize this science until the entire
| |
| nation becomes self-conscious and able to act as
| |
| one living being--that is the part of this universal
| |
| problem which finally necessitated the invention
| |
| of the telephone.
| |
|
| |
| With the use of the telephone has come a new
| |
| habit of mind. The slow and sluggish mood has
| |
| been sloughed off. The old to-morrow habit has
| |
| been superseded by "Do It To-day"; and life
| |
| has become more tense, alert, vivid. The brain
| |
| has been relieved of the suspense of waiting for
| |
| an answer, which is a psychological gain of great
| |
| importance. It receives its reply at once and is
| |
| set free to consider other matters. There is less
| |
| burden upon the memory and the WHOLE MIND can
| |
| be given to each new proposition.
| |
|
| |
| A new instinct of speed has been developed,
| |
| much more fully in the United States than
| |
| elsewhere. "No American goes slow," said Ian
| |
| Maclaren, "if he has the chance of going fast;
| |
| he does not stop to talk if he can talk walking;
| |
| and he does not walk if he can ride." He is as
| |
| pleased as a child with a new toy when some
| |
| speed record is broken, when a pair of shoes is
| |
| made in eleven minutes, when a man lays twelve
| |
| hundred bricks in an hour, or when a ship crosses
| |
| the Atlantic in four and a half days. Even seconds
| |
| are now counted and split up into fractions.
| |
| The average time, for instance, taken to reply
| |
| to a telephone call by a New York operator, is
| |
| now three and two-fifth seconds; and even this
| |
| tiny atom of time is being strenuously worn
| |
| down.
| |
|
| |
| As a witty Frenchman has said, one of our
| |
| most lively regrets is that while we are at the
| |
| telephone we cannot do business with our feet.
| |
| We regard it as a victory over the hostility of
| |
| nature when we do an hour's work in a minute
| |
| or a minute's work in a second. Instead of saying,
| |
| as the Spanish do, "Life is too short; what
| |
| can one person do?" an American is more apt to
| |
| say, "Life is too short; therefore I must do to-
| |
| day's work to-day." To pack a lifetime with
| |
| energy--that is the American plan, and so to
| |
| economize that energy as to get the largest results.
| |
| To get a question asked and answered in
| |
| five minutes by means of an electric wire, instead
| |
| of in two hours by the slow trudging of a messenger
| |
| boy--that is the method that best suits
| |
| our passion for instantaneous service.
| |
|
| |
| It is one of the few social laws of which we are
| |
| fairly sure, that a nation organizes in proportion
| |
| to its velocity. We know that a four-mile-an-
| |
| hour nation must remain a huge inert mass of
| |
| peasants and villagers; or if, after centuries of
| |
| slow toil, it should pile up a great city, the city
| |
| will sooner or later fall to pieces of its own
| |
| weight. In such a way Babylon rose and fell,
| |
| and Nineveh, and Thebes, and Carthage, and
| |
| Rome. Mere bulk, unorganized, becomes its
| |
| own destroyer. It dies of clogging and
| |
| congestion. But when Stephenson's Rocket ran
| |
| twenty-nine miles an hour, and Morse's telegraph
| |
| clicked its signals from Washington to
| |
| Baltimore, and Bell's telephone flashed the
| |
| vibrations of speech between Boston and Salem,
| |
| a new era began. In came the era of speed and
| |
| the finely organized nations. In came cities of
| |
| unprecedented bulk, but held together so closely
| |
| by a web-work of steel rails and copper wires
| |
| that they have become more alert and cooperative
| |
| than any tiny hamlet of mud huts on the
| |
| banks of the Congo.
| |
|
| |
| That the telephone is now doing most of all,
| |
| in this binding together of all manner of men,
| |
| is perhaps not too much to claim, when we remember
| |
| that there are now in the United States
| |
| seventy thousand holders of Bell telephone stock
| |
| and ten million users of telephone service.
| |
| There are two hundred and sixty-four wires
| |
| crossing the Mississippi, in the Bell system; and
| |
| five hundred and forty-four crossing Mason and
| |
| Dixon's Line. It is the telephone which does
| |
| most to link together cottage and skyscraper
| |
| and mansion and factory and farm. It is not
| |
| limited to experts or college graduates. It
| |
| reaches the man with a nickel as well as the man
| |
| with a million. It speaks all languages and
| |
| serves all trades. It helps to prevent sectionalism
| |
| and race feuds. It gives a common meeting
| |
| place to capitalists and wage-workers. It
| |
| is so essentially the instrument of all the people,
| |
| in fact, that we might almost point to it as a
| |
| national emblem, as the trade-mark of democracy
| |
| and the American spirit.
| |
|
| |
| In a country like ours, where there are eighty
| |
| nationalities in the public schools, the telephone
| |
| has a peculiar value as a part of the national
| |
| digestive apparatus. It prevents the growth of
| |
| dialects and helps on the process of assimilation.
| |
| Such is the push of American life, that the humble
| |
| immigrants from Southern Europe, before
| |
| they have been here half a dozen years, have
| |
| acquired the telephone habit and have linked on
| |
| their small shops to the great wire network of
| |
| intercommunication. In the one community of
| |
| Brownsville, for example, settled several years
| |
| ago by an overflow of Russian Jews from the
| |
| East Side of New York, there are now as many
| |
| telephones as in the kingdom of Greece. And
| |
| in the swarming East Side itself, there is a single
| |
| exchange in Orchard Street which has more
| |
| wires than there are in all the exchanges of
| |
| Egypt.
| |
|
| |
| There can be few higher ideals of practical
| |
| democracy than that which comes to us from the
| |
| telephone engineer. His purpose is much more
| |
| comprehensive than the supplying of telephones
| |
| to those who want them. It is rather to make
| |
| the telephone as universal as the water faucet,
| |
| to bring within speaking distance every economic
| |
| unit, to connect to the social organism every person
| |
| who may at any time be needed. Just as the
| |
| click of the reaper means bread, and the purr
| |
| of the sewing-machine means clothes, and the
| |
| roar of the Bessemer converter means steel, and
| |
| the rattle of the press means education, so the
| |
| ring of the telephone bell has come to mean unity
| |
| and organization.
| |
|
| |
| Already, by cable, telegraph, and telephone,
| |
| no two towns in the civilized world are more
| |
| than one hour apart. We have even girdled the
| |
| earth with a cablegram in twelve minutes. We
| |
| have made it possible for any man in New York
| |
| City to enter into conversation with any other
| |
| New Yorker in twenty-one seconds. We have
| |
| not been satisfied with establishing such a system
| |
| of transportation that we can start any day for
| |
| anywhere from anywhere else; neither have we
| |
| been satisfied with establishing such a system
| |
| of communication that news and gossip are the
| |
| common property of all nations. We have gone
| |
| farther. We have established in every large
| |
| region of population a system of voice-nerves
| |
| that puts every man at every other man's ear,
| |
| and which so magically eliminates the factor of
| |
| distance that the United States becomes three
| |
| thousand miles of neighbors, side by side.
| |
|
| |
| This effort to conquer Time and Space is
| |
| above all else the instinct of material progress.
| |
| To shrivel up the miles and to stretch out the
| |
| minutes--this has been one of the master passions
| |
| of the human race. And thus the larger
| |
| truth about the telephone is that it is vastly more
| |
| than a mere convenience. It is not to be classed
| |
| with safety razors and piano players and fountain
| |
| pens. It is nothing less than the high-speed
| |
| tool of civilization, gearing up the whole mechanism
| |
| to more effective social service. It is the
| |
| symbol of national efficiency and coperation.
| |
|
| |
| All this the telephone is doing, at a total cost
| |
| to the nation of probably $200,000,000 a year--
| |
| no more than American farmers earn in ten days.
| |
| We pay the same price for it as we do for the
| |
| potatoes, or for one-third of the hay crop, or for
| |
| one-eighth of the corn. Out of every nickel
| |
| spent for electrical service, one cent goes to the
| |
| telephone. We could settle our telephone bill,
| |
| and have several millions left over, if we cut off
| |
| every fourth glass of liquor and smoke of tobacco.
| |
| Whoever rents a typewriting machine,
| |
| or uses a street car twice a day, or has his shoes
| |
| polished once a day, may for the same expense
| |
| have a very good telephone service. Merely to
| |
| shovel away the snow of a single storm in 1910
| |
| cost the city government of New York as much
| |
| as it will pay for five or six years of telephoning.
| |
|
| |
| This almost incredible cheapness of telephony
| |
| is still far from being generally perceived, mainly
| |
| for psychological reasons. A telephone is not
| |
| impressive. It has no bulk. It is not like the
| |
| Singer Building or the Lusitania. Its wires and
| |
| switchboards and batteries are scattered and
| |
| hidden, and few have sufficient imagination to
| |
| picture them in all their complexity. If only it
| |
| were possible to assemble the hundred or more
| |
| telephone buildings of New York in one vast
| |
| plaza, and if the two thousand clerks and three
| |
| thousand maintenance men and six thousand
| |
| girl operators were to march to work each morning
| |
| with bands and banners, then, perhaps, there
| |
| might be the necessary quality of impressiveness
| |
| by which any large idea must always be imparted
| |
| to the public mind.
| |
|
| |
| For lack of a seven and one-half cent coin,
| |
| there is now five-cent telephony even in the
| |
| largest American cities. For five cents whoever
| |
| wishes has an entire wire-system at his service,
| |
| a system that is kept waiting by day and night,
| |
| so that it will be ready the instant he needs it.
| |
| This system may have cost from twenty to fifty
| |
| millions, yet it may be hired for one-eighth the
| |
| cost of renting an automobile. Even in long-
| |
| distance telephony, the expense of a message
| |
| dwindles when it is compared with the price of a
| |
| return railway ticket. A talk from New York
| |
| to Philadelphia, for instance, costs seventy-five
| |
| cents, while the railway fare would be four dollars.
| |
| From New York to Chicago a talk costs
| |
| five dollars as against seventy dollars by rail.
| |
| As Harriman once said, "I can't get from my
| |
| home to the depot for the price of a talk to
| |
| Omaha."
| |
|
| |
| To say what the net profits have been, to the
| |
| entire body of people who have invested money
| |
| in the telephone, will always be more or less of
| |
| a guess. The general belief that immense fortunes
| |
| were made by the lucky holders of Bell
| |
| stock, is an exaggeration that has been kept alive
| |
| by the promoters of wildcat companies. No
| |
| such fortunes were made. "I do not believe,"
| |
| says Theodore Vail, "that any one man ever
| |
| made a clear million out of the telephone."
| |
| There are not apt to be any get-rich-quick for-
| |
| tunes made in corporations that issue no watered
| |
| stock and do not capitalize their franchises. On
| |
| the contrary, up to 1897, the holders of stock in
| |
| the Bell Companies had paid in four million,
| |
| seven hundred thousand dollars more than the
| |
| par value; and in the recent consolidation of
| |
| Eastern companies, under the presidency of
| |
| Union N. Bethell, the new stock was actually
| |
| eight millions less than the stock that was retired.
| |
|
| |
| Few telephone companies paid any profits at
| |
| first. They had undervalued the cost of building
| |
| and maintenance. Denver expected the cost to
| |
| be two thousand, five hundred dollars and spent
| |
| sixty thousand dollars. Buffalo expected to pay
| |
| three thousand dollars and had to pay one hundred
| |
| and fifty thousand dollars. Also, they made
| |
| the unwelcome discovery that an exchange of
| |
| two hundred costs more than twice as much as
| |
| an exchange of one hundred, because of the
| |
| greater amount of traffic. Usually a dollar that
| |
| is paid to a telephone company is divided as follows:
| |
|
| |
| Rent ............ 4c
| |
| Taxes ........... 4c
| |
| Interest ........ 6c
| |
| Surplus ......... 8c
| |
| Maintenance .... 16c
| |
| Dividends ...... 18c
| |
| Labor .......... 44c
| |
| ----
| |
| $1.00
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| Most of the rate troubles (and their name has
| |
| been legion) have arisen because the telephone
| |
| business was not understood. In fact, until recently,
| |
| it did not understand itself. It persisted
| |
| in holding to a local and individualistic view of
| |
| its business. It was slow to put telephones in
| |
| unprofitable places. It expected every instrument
| |
| to pay its way. In many States, both the
| |
| telephone men and the public overlooked the
| |
| most vital fact in the case, which is that the
| |
| members of a telephone system are above all else
| |
| INTERDEPENDENT.
| |
|
| |
| One telephone by itself has no value. It is
| |
| as useless as a reed cut out of an organ or a
| |
| finger that is severed from a hand. It is not
| |
| even ornamental or adaptable to any other pur-
| |
| pose. It is not at all like a piano or a talking-
| |
| machine, which has a separate existence. It is
| |
| useful only in proportion to the number of other
| |
| telephones it reaches. AND EVERY TELEPHONE ANYWHERE
| |
| ADDS VALUE TO EVERY OTHER TELEPHONE ON THE
| |
| SAME SYSTEM OF WIRES. That, in a sentence, is
| |
| the keynote of equitable rates.
| |
|
| |
| Many a telephone, for the general good, must
| |
| be put where it does not earn its own living.
| |
| At any time some sudden emergency may arise
| |
| that will make it for the moment priceless. Especially
| |
| since the advent of the automobile, there
| |
| is no nook or corner from which it may not be
| |
| supremely necessary, now and then, to send a
| |
| message. This principle was acted upon recently
| |
| in a most practical way by the Pennsylvania
| |
| Railroad, which at its own expense
| |
| installed five hundred and twenty-five telephones
| |
| in the homes of its workmen in Altoona. In
| |
| the same way, it is clearly the social duty of the
| |
| telephone company to widen out its system until
| |
| every point is covered, and then to distribute its
| |
| gross charges as fairly as it can. The whole
| |
| must carry the whole--that is the philosophy
| |
| of rates which must finally be recognized by
| |
| legislatures and telephone companies alike. It
| |
| can never, of course, be reduced to a system or
| |
| formula. It will always be a matter of opinion
| |
| and compromise, requiring much skill and much
| |
| patience. But there will seldom be any serious
| |
| trouble when once its basic principles are
| |
| understood.
| |
|
| |
| Like all time-saving inventions, like the railroad,
| |
| the reaper, and the Bessemer converter,
| |
| the telephone, in the last analysis, COSTS NOTHING;
| |
| IT IS THE LACK OF IT THAT COSTS. THE NATION THAT
| |
| MOST IS THE NATION WITHOUT IT.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| ==CHAPTER VIII - THE TELEPHONE IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES==
| |
|
| |
| The telephone was nearly a year old before
| |
| Europe was aware of its existence. It
| |
| received no public notice of any kind whatever
| |
| until March 3, 1877, when the London Athenaeum
| |
| mentioned it in a few careful sentences.
| |
| It was not welcomed, except by those who wished
| |
| an evening's entertainment. And to the entire
| |
| commercial world it was for four or five years
| |
| a sort of scientific Billiken, that never could be
| |
| of any service to serious people.
| |
|
| |
| One after another, several American enthusiasts
| |
| rushed posthaste to Europe, with dreams
| |
| of eager nations clamoring for telephone systems,
| |
| and one after another they failed. Frederick
| |
| A. Gower was the first of these. He was
| |
| an adventurous chevalier of business who gave
| |
| up an agent's contract in return for a right to
| |
| become a roving propagandist. Later he met
| |
| a prima donna, fell in love with and married her,
| |
| forsook telephony for ballooning, and lost his
| |
| life in attempting to fly across the English
| |
| Channel.
| |
|
| |
| Next went William H. Reynolds, of Providence,
| |
| who had bought five-eights of the British
| |
| patent for five thousand dollars, and half the
| |
| right to Russia, Spain, Portugal, and Italy for
| |
| two thousand, five hundred dollars. How he was
| |
| received may be seen from a letter of his which
| |
| has been preserved. "I have been working in
| |
| London for four months," he writes; "I have
| |
| been to the Bank of England and elsewhere; and
| |
| I have not found one man who will put one shilling
| |
| into the telephone."
| |
|
| |
| Bell himself hurried to England and Scotland
| |
| on his wedding tour in 1878, with great expectations
| |
| of having his invention appreciated in
| |
| his native land. But from a business point of
| |
| view, his mission was a total failure. He received
| |
| dinners a-plenty, but no contracts; and
| |
| came back to the United States an impoverished
| |
| and disheartened man. Then the optimistic
| |
| Gardiner G. Hubbard, Bell's father-in-law,
| |
| threw himself against the European inertia and
| |
| organized the International and Oriental Telephone
| |
| Companies, which came to nothing of any
| |
| importance. In the same year even Enos M.
| |
| Barton, the sagacious founder of the Western
| |
| Electric, went to France and England to establish
| |
| an export trade in telephones, and failed.
| |
|
| |
| These able men found their plans thwarted
| |
| by the indifference of the public, and often by
| |
| open hostility. "The telephone is little better
| |
| than a toy," said the Saturday Review; "it
| |
| amazes ignorant people for a moment, but it is
| |
| inferior to the well-established system of air-
| |
| tubes." "What will become of the privacy of
| |
| life?" asked another London editor. "What
| |
| will become of the sanctity of the domestic
| |
| hearth?" Writers vied with each other in
| |
| inventing methods of pooh-poohing Bell and his
| |
| invention. "It is ridiculously simple," said one.
| |
| "It is only an electrical speaking-tube," said
| |
| another. "It is a complicated form of speaking-
| |
| trumpet," said a third. No British editor could
| |
| at first conceive of any use for the telephone,
| |
| except for divers and coal miners. The price,
| |
| too, created a general outcry. Floods of toy
| |
| telephones were being sold on the streets at a
| |
| shilling apiece; and although the Government
| |
| was charging sixty dollars a year for the use of
| |
| its printing-telegraphs, people protested loudly
| |
| against paying half as much for telephones.
| |
| As late as 1882, Herbert Spencer writes: "The
| |
| telephone is scarcely used at all in London, and
| |
| is unknown in the other English cities."
| |
|
| |
| The first man of consequence to befriend
| |
| the telephone was Lord Kelvin, then an untitled
| |
| young scientist. He had seen the original telephones
| |
| at the Centennial in Philadelphia, and
| |
| was so fascinated with them that the impulsive
| |
| Bell had thrust them into his hands as a gift.
| |
| At the next meeting of the British Association
| |
| for the Advancement of Science, Lord Kelvin
| |
| exhibited these. He did more. He became the
| |
| champion of the telephone. He staked his reputation
| |
| upon it. He told the story of the tests
| |
| made at the Centennial, and assured the sceptical
| |
| scientists that he had not been deceived. "All
| |
| this my own ears heard," he said, "spoken to
| |
| me with unmistakable distinctness by this circular
| |
| disc of iron."
| |
|
| |
| The scientists and electrical experts were, for
| |
| the most part, split up into two camps. Some
| |
| of them said the telephone was impossible, while
| |
| others said that "nothing could be simpler."
| |
| Almost all were agreed that what Bell had done
| |
| was a humorous trifle. But Lord Kelvin persisted.
| |
| He hammered the truth home that the
| |
| telephone was "one of the most interesting
| |
| inventions that has ever been made in the history
| |
| of science." He gave a demonstration with one
| |
| end of the wire in a coal mine. He stood side
| |
| by side with Bell at a public meeting in Glasgow,
| |
| and declared:
| |
|
| |
| "The things that were called telephones before
| |
| Bell were as different from Bell's telephone as a
| |
| series of hand-claps are different from the human
| |
| voice. They were in fact electrical claps; while
| |
| Bell conceived the idea--THE WHOLLY ORIGINAL AND
| |
| NOVEL IDEA--of giving continuity to the shocks,
| |
| so as to perfectly reproduce the human voice."
| |
|
| |
| One by one the scientists were forced to take
| |
| the telephone seriously. At a public test there
| |
| was one noted professor who still stood in the
| |
| ranks of the doubters. He was asked to send
| |
| a message. He went to the instrument with a
| |
| grin of incredulity, and thinking the whole
| |
| exhibition a joke, shouted into the mouthpiece:
| |
| "Hi diddle diddle--follow up that." Then he
| |
| listened for an answer. The look on his face
| |
| changed to one of the utmost amazement. "It
| |
| says--`The cat and the fiddle,'" he gasped, and
| |
| forthwith he became a convert to telephony. By
| |
| such tests the men of science were won over, and
| |
| by the middle of 1877 Bell received a "vociferous
| |
| welcome" when he addressed them at their annual
| |
| convention at Plymouth.
| |
|
| |
| Soon afterwards, The London Times surrendered.
| |
| It whirled right-about-face and praised
| |
| the telephone to the skies. "Suddenly and
| |
| quietly the whole human race is brought within
| |
| speaking and hearing distance," it exclaimed;
| |
| "scarcely anything was more desired and more
| |
| impossible." The next paper to quit the mob
| |
| of scoffers was the Tatler, which said in an
| |
| editorial peroration, "We cannot but feel im-
| |
| pressed by the picture of a human child commanding
| |
| the subtlest and strongest force in Nature
| |
| to carry, like a slave, some whisper around
| |
| the world."
| |
|
| |
| Closely after the scientists and editors came
| |
| the nobility. The Earl of Caithness led the
| |
| way. He declared in public that "the telephone
| |
| is the most extraordinary thing I ever saw in
| |
| my life." And one wintry morning in 1878
| |
| Queen Victoria drove to the house of Sir Thomas
| |
| Biddulph, in London, and for an hour talked
| |
| and listened by telephone to Kate Field, who sat
| |
| in a Downing Street office. Miss Field sang
| |
| "Kathleen Mavourneen," and the Queen thanked
| |
| her by telephone, saying she was "immensely
| |
| pleased." She congratulated Bell himself, who
| |
| was present, and asked if she might be permitted
| |
| to buy the two telephones; whereupon Bell presented
| |
| her with a pair done in ivory.
| |
|
| |
| This incident, as may be imagined, did much
| |
| to establish the reputation of telephony in Great
| |
| Britain. A wire was at once strung to Windsor
| |
| Castle. Others were ordered by the Daily
| |
| News, the Persian Ambassador, and five or six
| |
| lords and baronets. Then came an order which
| |
| raised the hopes of the telephone men to the
| |
| highest heaven, from the banking house of J.
| |
| S. Morgan & Co. It was the first recognition
| |
| from the "seats of the mighty" in the business
| |
| and financial world. A tiny exchange,
| |
| with ten wires, was promptly started in London;
| |
| and on April 2d, 1879, Theodore Vail, the
| |
| young manager of the Bell Company, sent an order
| |
| to the factory in Boston, "Please make one
| |
| hundred hand telephones for export trade as early
| |
| as possible." The foreign trade had begun.
| |
|
| |
| Then there came a thunderbolt out of a blue
| |
| sky, a wholly unforeseen disaster. Just as a few
| |
| energetic companies were sprouting up, the
| |
| Postmaster General suddenly proclaimed that
| |
| the telephone was a species of telegraph. According
| |
| to a British law the telegraph was required
| |
| to be a Government monopoly. This law
| |
| had been passed six years before the telephone
| |
| was born, but no matter. The telephone men
| |
| protested and argued. Tyndall and Lord Kelvin
| |
| warned the Government that it was making
| |
| an indefensible mistake. But nothing could
| |
| be done. Just as the first railways had been
| |
| called toll-roads, so the telephone was solemnly
| |
| declared to be a telegraph. Also, to add to the
| |
| absurd humor of the situation, Judge Stephen,
| |
| of the High Court of Justice, spoke the final
| |
| word that compelled the telephone legally to be
| |
| a telegraph, and sustained his opinion by a
| |
| quotation from Webster's Dictionary, which was
| |
| published twenty years before the telephone was
| |
| invented.
| |
|
| |
| Having captured this new rival, what next?
| |
| The Postmaster General did not know. He
| |
| had, of course, no experience in telephony, and
| |
| neither had any of his officials in the telegraph
| |
| department. There was no book and no college
| |
| to instruct him. His telegraph was then, as it
| |
| is to-day, a business failure. It was not earning
| |
| its keep. Therefore he did not dare to shoulder
| |
| the risk of constructing a second system of wires,
| |
| and at last consented to give licenses to private
| |
| companies.
| |
|
| |
| But the muddle continued. In order to compel
| |
| competition, according to the academic
| |
| theories of the day, licenses were given to thir-
| |
| teen private companies. As might have been
| |
| expected, the ablest company quickly swallowed
| |
| the other twelve. If it had been let alone, this
| |
| company might have given good service, but it
| |
| was hobbled and fenced in by jealous regulations.
| |
| It was compelled to pay one-tenth of its
| |
| gross earnings to the Post Office. It was to hold
| |
| itself ready to sell out at six months' notice.
| |
| And as soon as it had strung a long-distance
| |
| system of wires, the Postmaster General pounced
| |
| down upon it and took it away.
| |
|
| |
| Then, in 1900, the Post Office tossed aside all
| |
| obligations to the licensed company, and threw
| |
| open the door to a free-for-all competition. It
| |
| undertook to start a second system in London,
| |
| and in two years discovered its blunder and proposed
| |
| to cooperate. It granted licenses to five
| |
| cities that demanded municipal ownership.
| |
| These cities set out bravely, with loud beating of
| |
| drums, plunged from one mishap to another, and
| |
| finally quit. Even Glasgow, the premier city
| |
| of municipal ownership, met its Waterloo in the
| |
| telephone. It spent one million, eight hundred
| |
| thousand dollars on a plant that was obsolete
| |
| when it was new, ran it for a time at a loss, and
| |
| then sold it to the Post Office in 1906 for one
| |
| million, five hundred and twenty-five thousand
| |
| dollars.
| |
|
| |
| So, from first to last, the story of the telephone
| |
| in Great Britain has been a "comedy of errors."
| |
| There are now, in the two islands, not six hundred
| |
| thousand telephones in use. London, with
| |
| its six hundred and forty square miles of houses,
| |
| has one-quarter of these, and is gaining at the
| |
| rate of ten thousand a year. No large
| |
| improvements are under way, as the Post Office
| |
| has given notice that it will take over and operate
| |
| all private companies on New Year's Day, 1912.
| |
| The bureaucratic muddle, so it seems, is to continue
| |
| indefinitely.
| |
|
| |
| In Germany there has been the same burden
| |
| of bureaucracy, but less backing and filling.
| |
| There is a complete government monopoly.
| |
| Whoever commits the crime of leasing telephone
| |
| service to his neighbors may be sent to jail for
| |
| six months. Here, too, the Postmaster General
| |
| has been supreme. He has forced the telephone
| |
| business into a postal mould. The man in a
| |
| small city must pay as high a rate for a small
| |
| service, as the man in a large city pays for a
| |
| large service. There is a fair degree of
| |
| efficiency, but no high speed or record-breaking.
| |
| The German engineers have not kept in close
| |
| touch with the progress of telephony in the
| |
| United States. They have preferred to devise
| |
| methods of their own, and so have created a
| |
| miscellaneous assortment of systems, good, bad, and
| |
| indifferent. All told, there is probably an
| |
| investment of seventy-five million dollars and a
| |
| total of nine hundred thousand telephones.
| |
|
| |
| Telephony has always been in high favor with
| |
| the Kaiser. It is his custom, when planning a
| |
| hunting party, to have a special wire strung to
| |
| the forest headquarters, so that he can converse
| |
| every morning with his Cabinet. He has conferred
| |
| degrees and honors by telephone. Even
| |
| his former Chancellor, Von Buelow, received his
| |
| title of Count in this informal way. But the
| |
| first friend of the telephone in Germany was
| |
| Bismarck. The old Unifier saw instantly its
| |
| value in holding a nation together, and ordered
| |
| a line between his palace in Berlin and his farm
| |
| at Varzin, which lay two hundred and thirty
| |
| miles apart. This was as early as the Fall of
| |
| 1877, and was thus the first long-distance line in
| |
| Europe.
| |
|
| |
| In France, as in England, the Government
| |
| seized upon the telephone business as soon as the
| |
| pioneer work had been done by private citizens.
| |
| In 1889 it practically confiscated the Paris system,
| |
| and after nine years of litigation paid five
| |
| million francs to its owners. With this reckless
| |
| beginning, it floundered from bad to worse.
| |
| It assembled the most complete assortment of
| |
| other nations' mistakes, and invented several of
| |
| its own. Almost every known evil of bureaucracy
| |
| was developed. The system of rates was
| |
| turned upside down; the flat rate, which can be
| |
| profitably permitted in small cities only, was
| |
| put in force in the large cities, and the message
| |
| rate, which is applicable only to large cities, was
| |
| put in force in small places. The girl operators
| |
| were entangled in a maze of civil service rules.
| |
| They were not allowed to marry without the
| |
| permission of the Postmaster General; and on
| |
| no account might they dare to marry a mayor,
| |
| a policeman, a cashier, or a foreigner, lest they
| |
| betray the secrets of the switchboard.
| |
|
| |
| There was no national plan, no standardization,
| |
| no staff of inventors and improvers. Every
| |
| user was required to buy his own telephone. As
| |
| George Ade has said, "Anything attached to
| |
| a wall is liable to be a telephone in Paris." And
| |
| so, what with poor equipment and red tape, the
| |
| French system became what it remains to-day,
| |
| the most conspicuous example of what NOT to do
| |
| in telephony.
| |
|
| |
| There are barely as many telephones in the
| |
| whole of France as ought normally to be in the
| |
| city of Paris. There are not as many as are
| |
| now in use in Chicago. The exasperated Parisians
| |
| have protested. They have presented a
| |
| petition with thirty-two thousand names. They
| |
| have even organized a "Kickers' League"--the
| |
| only body of its kind in any country--to demand
| |
| good service at a fair price. The daily
| |
| loss from bureaucratic telephony has become
| |
| enormous. "One blundering girl in a telephone
| |
| exchange cost me five thousand dollars on the
| |
| day of the panic in 1907," said George Kessler.
| |
| But the Government clears a net profit of three
| |
| million dollars a year from its telephone monopoly;
| |
| and until 1910, when a committee of betterment
| |
| was appointed, it showed no concern at
| |
| the discomfort of the public.
| |
|
| |
| There was one striking lesson in telephone
| |
| efficiency which Paris received in 1908, when its
| |
| main exchange was totally destroyed by fire.
| |
| "To build a new switchboard," said European
| |
| manufacturers, "will require four or five months."
| |
| A hustling young Chicagoan appeared on the
| |
| scene. "We 'll put in a new switchboard in sixty
| |
| days," he said; "and agree to forfeit six hundred
| |
| dollars a day for delay." Such quick work had
| |
| never been known. But it was Chicago's chance
| |
| to show what she could do. Paris and Chicago
| |
| are four thousand, five hundred miles apart, a
| |
| twelve days' journey. The switchboard was to
| |
| be a hundred and eighty feet in length, with
| |
| ten thousand wires. Yet the Western Electric
| |
| finished it in three weeks. It was rushed on six
| |
| freight-cars to New York, loaded on the French
| |
| steamer La Provence, and deposited at Paris in
| |
| thirty-six days; so that by the time the sixty days
| |
| had expired, it was running full speed with a
| |
| staff of ninety operators.
| |
|
| |
| Russia and Austria-Hungary have now about
| |
| one hundred and twenty-five thousand telephones
| |
| apiece. They are neck and neck in a race that
| |
| has not at any time been a fast one. In each
| |
| country the Government has been a neglectful
| |
| stepmother to the telephone. It has starved the
| |
| business with a lack of capital and used no
| |
| enterprise in expanding it. Outside of Vienna,
| |
| Budapest, St. Petersburg, and Moscow there are
| |
| no wire-systems of any consequence. The political
| |
| deadlock between Austria and Hungary
| |
| shuts out any immediate hope of a happier life
| |
| for the telephone in those countries; but in Russia
| |
| there has recently been a change in policy
| |
| that may open up a new era. Permits are now
| |
| being offered to one private company in each
| |
| city, in return for three per cent of the revenue.
| |
| By this step Russia has unexpectedly swept to
| |
| the front and is now, to telephone men, the freest
| |
| country in Europe.
| |
|
| |
| In tiny Switzerland there has been government
| |
| ownership from the first, but with less
| |
| detriment to the business than elsewhere. Here
| |
| the officials have actually jilted the telegraph for
| |
| the telephone. They have seen the value of the
| |
| talking wire to hold their valley villages together;
| |
| and so have cries-crossed the Alps with a cheap
| |
| and somewhat flimsy system of telephony that
| |
| carries sixty million conversations a year. Even
| |
| the monks of St. Bernard, who rescue snowbound
| |
| travellers, have now equipped their mountain
| |
| with a series of telephone booths.
| |
|
| |
| The highest telephone in the world is on the
| |
| peak of Monte Rosa, in the Italian Alps, very
| |
| nearly three miles above the level of the sea. It
| |
| is linked to a line that runs to Rome, in order
| |
| that a queen may talk to a professor. In this
| |
| case the Queen is Margherita of Italy and the
| |
| professor is Signor Mosso, the astronomer, who
| |
| studies the heavens from an observatory on
| |
| Monte Rosa. At her own expense, the Queen
| |
| had this wire strung by a crew of linemen, who
| |
| slipped and floundered on the mountain for six
| |
| years before they had it pegged in place. The
| |
| general situation in Italy is like that in Great
| |
| Britain. The Government has always monop-
| |
| olized the long-distance lines, and is now about
| |
| to buy out all private companies. There are
| |
| only fifty-five thousand telephones to thirty-two
| |
| million people--as many as in Norway and less
| |
| than in Denmark. And in many of the southern
| |
| and Sicilian provinces the jingle of the telephone
| |
| bell is still an unfamiliar sound.
| |
|
| |
| The main peculiarity in Holland is that there
| |
| is no national plan, but rather a patchwork, that
| |
| resembles Joseph's coat of many colors. Each
| |
| city engineer has designed his own type of apparatus
| |
| and had it made to order. Also, each
| |
| company is fenced in by law within a six-mile
| |
| circle, so that Holland is dotted with thumb-nail
| |
| systems, no two of which are alike. In Belgium
| |
| there has been a government system since 1893,
| |
| hence there is unity, but no enterprise. The
| |
| plant is old-fashioned and too small. Spain has
| |
| private companies, which give fairly good service
| |
| to twenty thousand people. Roumania has
| |
| half as many. Portugal has two small companies
| |
| in Lisbon and Oporto. Greece, Servia,
| |
| and Bulgaria have a scanty two thousand apiece.
| |
| The frozen little isle of Iceland has one-quarter
| |
| as many; and even into Turkey, which was a forbidden
| |
| land under the regime of the old Sultan,
| |
| the Young Turks are importing boxes of telephones
| |
| and coils of copper wire.
| |
|
| |
| There is one European country, and only one,
| |
| which has caught the telephone spirit--Sweden.
| |
| Here telephony had a free swinging start. It
| |
| was let alone by the Post Office; and better still,
| |
| it had a Man, a business-builder of remarkable
| |
| force and ability, named Henry Cedergren.
| |
| Had this man been made the Telephone-Master
| |
| of Europe, there would have been a different
| |
| story to tell. By his insistent enterprise he made
| |
| Stockholm the best telephoned city outside of
| |
| the United States. He pushed his country forward
| |
| until, having one hundred and sixty-five
| |
| thousand telephones, it stood fourth among the
| |
| European nations. Since his death the Government
| |
| has entered the field with a duplicate system,
| |
| and a war has been begun which grows
| |
| yearly more costly and absurd.
| |
|
| |
| Asia, as yet, with her eight hundred and fifty
| |
| million people, has fewer telephones than Philadelphia,
| |
| and three-fourths of them are in the
| |
| tiny island of Japan. The Japanese were enthusiastic
| |
| telephonists from the first. They had
| |
| a busy exchange in Tokio in 1883. This has
| |
| now grown to have twenty-five thousand users,
| |
| and might have more, if it had not been stunted
| |
| by the peculiar policy of the Government. The
| |
| public officials who operate the system are able
| |
| men. They charge a fair price and make ten
| |
| per cent profit for the State. But they do not
| |
| keep pace with the demand. It is one of the
| |
| oddest vagaries of public ownership that there
| |
| is now in Tokio a WAITING LIST of eight thousand
| |
| citizens, who are offering to pay for telephones
| |
| and cannot get them. And when a Tokian dies,
| |
| his franchise to a telephone, if he has one, is
| |
| usually itemized in his will as a four-hundred-
| |
| dollar property.
| |
|
| |
| India, which is second on the Asiatic list, has
| |
| no more than nine thousand telephones--one to
| |
| every thirty-three thousand of her population!
| |
| Not quite so many, in fact, as there are in five
| |
| of the skyscrapers of New York. The Dutch
| |
| East Indies and China have only seven thousand
| |
| apiece, but in China there has recently
| |
| come a forward movement. A fund of twenty
| |
| million dollars is to be spent in constructing a
| |
| national system of telephone and telegraph.
| |
| Peking is now pointing with wonder and delight
| |
| to a new exchange, spick and span, with
| |
| a couple of ten-thousand-wire switchboards.
| |
| Others are being built in Canton, Hankow, and
| |
| Tien-Tsin. Ultimately, the telephone will flourish
| |
| in China, as it has done in the Chinese quarter
| |
| in San Francisco. The Empress of China, after
| |
| the siege of Peking, commanded that a telephone
| |
| should be hung in her palace, within reach of her
| |
| dragon throne; and she was very friendly with
| |
| any representative of the "Speaking Lightning
| |
| Sounds" business, as the Chinese term telephony.
| |
|
| |
| In Persia the telephone made its entry recently
| |
| in true comic-opera fashion. A new Shah, in an
| |
| outburst of confidence, set up a wire between
| |
| his palace and the market-place in Teheran, and
| |
| invited his people to talk to him whenever they
| |
| had grievances. And they talked! They talked
| |
| so freely and used such language, that the Shah
| |
| ordered out his soldiers and attacked them. He
| |
| fired upon the new Parliament, and was at once
| |
| chased out of Persia by the enraged people.
| |
| From this it would appear that the telephone
| |
| ought to be popular in Persia, although at present
| |
| there are not more than twenty in use.
| |
|
| |
| South America, outside of Buenos Ayres, has
| |
| few telephones, probably not more than thirty
| |
| thousand. Dom Pedro of Brazil, who befriended
| |
| Bell at the Centennial, introduced telephony
| |
| into his country in 1881; but it has not
| |
| in thirty years been able to obtain ten thousand
| |
| users. Canada has exactly the same number as
| |
| Sweden--one hundred and sixty-five thousand.
| |
| Mexico has perhaps ten thousand; New Zealand
| |
| twenty-six thousand; and Australia fifty-
| |
| five thousand.
| |
|
| |
| Far down in the list of continents stands
| |
| Africa. Egypt and Algeria have twelve thousand
| |
| at the north; British South Africa has as
| |
| many at the south; and in the vast stretches
| |
| between there are barely a thousand more.
| |
| Whoever pushes into Central Africa will still
| |
| hear the beat of the wooden drum, which is the
| |
| clattering sign-language of the natives. One
| |
| strand of copper wire there is, through the Congo
| |
| region, placed there by order of the late King
| |
| of Belgium. To string it was probably the most
| |
| adventurous piece of work in the history of
| |
| telephone linemen. There was one seven hundred
| |
| and fifty mile stretch of the central jungle.
| |
| There were white ants that ate the wooden poles,
| |
| and wild elephants that pulled up the iron poles.
| |
| There were monkeys that played tag on the
| |
| lines, and savages that stole the wire for arrow-
| |
| heads. But the line was carried through, and
| |
| to-day is alive with conversations concerning
| |
| rubber and ivory.
| |
|
| |
| So, we may almost say of the telephone that
| |
| "there is no speech nor language where its voice
| |
| is not heard." There are even a thousand miles
| |
| of its wire in Abyssinia and one hundred and
| |
| fifty miles in the Fiji Islands. Roughly speaking,
| |
| there are now ten million telephones in all
| |
| countries, employing two hundred and fifty thousand
| |
| people, requiring twenty-one million miles
| |
| of wire, representing a cost of fifteen hundred
| |
| million dollars, and carrying fourteen thousand
| |
| million conversations a year. All this, and yet
| |
| the men who heard the first feeble cry of the in-
| |
| fant telephone are still alive, and not by any
| |
| means old.
| |
|
| |
| No foreign country has reached the high
| |
| American level of telephony. The United
| |
| States has eight telephones per hundred of
| |
| population, while no other country has one-half as
| |
| many. Canada stands second, with almost four
| |
| per hundred; and Sweden is third. Germany
| |
| has as many telephones as the State of New
| |
| York; and Great Britain as many as Ohio.
| |
| Chicago has more than London; and Boston
| |
| twice as many as Paris. In the whole of
| |
| Europe, with her twenty nations, there are one-
| |
| third as many telephones as in the United States.
| |
| In proportion to her population, Europe has only
| |
| one-thirteenth as many.
| |
|
| |
| The United States writes half as many letters
| |
| as Europe, sends one-third as many telegrams,
| |
| and talks twice as much at the telephone. The
| |
| average European family sends three telegrams
| |
| a year, and three letters and one telephone message
| |
| a week; while the average American family
| |
| sends five telegrams a year, and seven letters and
| |
| eleven telephone messages a week. This one na-
| |
| tion, which owns six per cent of the earth and is
| |
| five per cent of the human race, has SEVENTY
| |
| per cent of the telephones. And fifty per cent,
| |
| or one-half, of the telephony of the world, is now
| |
| comprised in the Bell System of this country.
| |
|
| |
| There are only six nations in Europe that make
| |
| a fair showing--the Germans, British, Swedish,
| |
| Danes, Norwegians, and Swiss. The others have
| |
| less than one telephone per hundred. Little
| |
| Denmark has more than Austria. Little Finland has
| |
| better service than France. The Belgian telephones
| |
| have cost the most--two hundred and
| |
| seventy-three dollars apiece; and the Finnish
| |
| telephones the least--eighty-one dollars. But a
| |
| telephone in Belgium earns three times as much
| |
| as one in Norway. In general, the lesson in
| |
| Europe is this, that the telephone is what a nation
| |
| makes it. Its usefulness depends upon the sense
| |
| and enterprise with which it is handled. It may
| |
| be either an invaluable asset or a nuisance.
| |
|
| |
| Too much government! That has been the
| |
| basic reason for failure in most countries. Before
| |
| the telephone was invented, the telegraph
| |
| had been made a State monopoly; and the tele-
| |
| phone was regarded as a species of telegraph.
| |
| The public officials did not see that a telephone
| |
| system is a highly complex and technical problem,
| |
| much more like a piano factory or a steel-
| |
| mill. And so, wherever a group of citizens
| |
| established a telephone service, the government
| |
| officials looked upon it with jealous eyes, and
| |
| usually snatched it away. The telephone thus
| |
| became a part of the telegraph, which is a part
| |
| of the post office, which is a part of the government.
| |
| It is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction
| |
| --a mere twig of bureaucracy. Under such
| |
| conditions the telephone could not prosper. The
| |
| wonder is that it survived.
| |
|
| |
| Handled on the American plan, the telephone
| |
| abroad may be raised to American levels. There
| |
| is no racial reason for failure. The slow service
| |
| and the bungling are the natural results of treating
| |
| the telephone as though it were a road or a
| |
| fire department; and any nation that rises to a
| |
| proper conception of the telephone, that dares to
| |
| put it into competent hands and to strengthen
| |
| it with enough capital, can secure as alert and
| |
| brisk a service as heart can wish. Some nations
| |
| are already on the way. China, Japan, and
| |
| France have sent delegations to New York City
| |
| --"the Mecca of telephone men," to learn the
| |
| art of telephony in its highest development.
| |
| Even Russia has rescued the telephone from her
| |
| bureaucrats and is now offering it freely to men
| |
| of enterprise.
| |
|
| |
| In most foreign countries telephone service is
| |
| being steadily geared up to a faster pace. The
| |
| craze for "cheap and nasty" telephony is passing;
| |
| and the idea that the telephone is above all else
| |
| a SPEED instrument, is gaining ground. A faster
| |
| long-distance service, at double rates, is being
| |
| well patronized. Slow-moving races are learning
| |
| the value of time, which is the first lesson in
| |
| telephony. Our reapers and mowers now go to
| |
| seventy-five nations. Our street cars run in all
| |
| great cities. Morocco is importing our dollar
| |
| watches; Korea is learning the waste of allowing
| |
| nine men to dig with one spade. And all this
| |
| means telephones.
| |
|
| |
| In thirty years, the Western Electric has sold
| |
| sixty-seven million dollars' worth of telephonic
| |
| apparatus to foreign countries. But this is no
| |
| more than a fair beginning. To put one telephone
| |
| in China to every hundred people will
| |
| mean an outlay of three hundred million dollars.
| |
| To give Europe as fit an equipment as the
| |
| United States now has, will mean thirty million
| |
| telephones, with proper wire and switchboards
| |
| to match. And while telephony for the masses
| |
| is not yet a live question in many countries,
| |
| sooner or later, in the relentless push of civilization,
| |
| it must come.
| |
|
| |
| Possibly, in that far future of peace and goodwill
| |
| among nations, when each country does for
| |
| all the others what it can do best, the United
| |
| States may be generally recognized as the source
| |
| of skill and authority on telephony. It may be
| |
| called in to rebuild or operate the telephone
| |
| systems of other countries, in the same way that
| |
| it is now supplying oil and steel rails and
| |
| farm machinery. Just as the wise buyer of
| |
| to-day asks France for champagne, Germany
| |
| for toys, England for cottons, and the Orient
| |
| for rugs, so he will learn to look upon the United
| |
| States as the natural home and headquarters of
| |
| the telephone.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| ==CHAPTER IX - THE FUTURE OF THE TELEPHONE==
| |
|
| |
| In the Spring of 1907 Theodore N. Vail, a
| |
| rugged, ruddy, white-haired man, was superintending
| |
| the building of a big barn in northern
| |
| Vermont. His house stood near-by, on a balcony
| |
| of rolling land that overlooked the town of
| |
| Lyndon and far beyond, across evergreen forests
| |
| to the massive bulk of Burke Mountain. His
| |
| farm, very nearly ten square miles in area, lay
| |
| back of the house in a great oval of field and
| |
| woodland, with several dozen cottages in the
| |
| clearings. His Welsh ponies and Swiss cattle
| |
| were grazing on the May grass, and the men
| |
| were busy with the ploughs and harrows and
| |
| seeders. It was almost thirty years since he
| |
| had been called in to create the business structure
| |
| of telephony, and to shape the general plan
| |
| of its development. Since then he had done
| |
| many other things. The one city of Buenos
| |
| Ayres had paid him more, merely for giving it a
| |
| system of trolleys and electric lights, than the
| |
| United States had paid him for putting the
| |
| telephone on a business basis. He was now rich
| |
| and retired, free to enjoy his play-work of the
| |
| farm and to forget the troubles of the city and
| |
| the telephone
| |
|
| |
| But, as he stood among his barn-builders, there
| |
| arrived from Boston and New York a delegation
| |
| of telephone directors. Most of them belonged
| |
| to the "Old Guard" of telephony. They had
| |
| fought under Vail in the pioneer days; and now
| |
| they had come to ask him to return to the telephone
| |
| business, after twenty years of absence.
| |
| Vail laughed at the suggestion.
| |
|
| |
| "Nonsense," he said, "I'm too old. I'm sixty-
| |
| two years of age." The directors persisted.
| |
| They spoke of the approaching storm-cloud of
| |
| panic and the need of another strong hand at the
| |
| wheel until the crisis was over, but Vail still refused.
| |
| They spoke of old times and old memories,
| |
| but he shook his head. "All my life," he
| |
| said, "I have wanted to be a farmer."
| |
|
| |
| Then they drew a picture of the telephone
| |
| situation. They showed him that the "grand
| |
| telephonic system" which he had planned was
| |
| unfinished. He was its architect, and it was undone.
| |
| The telephone business was energetic and
| |
| prosperous. Under the brilliant leadership of
| |
| Frederick P. Fish, it had grown by leaps and
| |
| bounds. But it was still far from being the
| |
| SYSTEM that Vail had dreamed of in his younger
| |
| days; and so, when the directors put before him
| |
| his unfinished plan, he surrendered. The instinct
| |
| for completeness, which is one of the
| |
| dominating characteristics of his mind, compelled
| |
| him to consent. It was the call of the
| |
| telephone.
| |
|
| |
| Since that May morning, 1907, great things
| |
| have been done by the men of the telephone and
| |
| telegraph world. The Bell System was brought
| |
| through the panic without a scratch. When the
| |
| doubt and confusion were at their worst, Vail
| |
| wrote an open letter to his stock-holders, in his
| |
| practical, farmer-like way. He said:
| |
|
| |
| "Our net earnings for the last ten months were
| |
| $13,715,000, as against $11,579,000 for the same
| |
| period in 1906. We have now in the banks over
| |
| $18,000,000; and we will not need to borrow any
| |
| money for two years."
| |
|
| |
| Soon afterwards, the work of consolidation
| |
| began. Companies that overlapped were united.
| |
| Small local wire-clusters, several thousands of
| |
| them, were linked to the national lines. A policy
| |
| of publicity superseded the secrecy which had
| |
| naturally grown to be a habit in the days of
| |
| patent litigation. Visitors and reporters found
| |
| an open door. Educational advertisements were
| |
| published in the most popular magazines. The
| |
| corps of inventors was spurred up to conquer
| |
| the long-distance problems. And in return for
| |
| a thirty million check, the control of the historic
| |
| Western Union was transferred from the
| |
| children of Jay Gould to the thirty thousand
| |
| stock-holders of the American Telephone and
| |
| Telegraph Company.
| |
|
| |
| From what has been done, therefore, we may
| |
| venture a guess as to the future of the telephone.
| |
| This "grand telephonic system" which had no
| |
| existence thirty years ago, except in the imagination
| |
| of Vail, seems to be at hand. The very
| |
| newsboys in the streets are crying it. And while
| |
| there is, of course, no exact blueprint of a best
| |
| possible telephone system, we can now see the
| |
| general outlines of Vail's plan.
| |
|
| |
| There is nothing mysterious or ominous in this
| |
| plan. It has nothing to do with the pools and
| |
| conspiracies of Wall Street. No one will be
| |
| squeezed out except the promoters of paper
| |
| companies. The simple fact is that Vail is
| |
| organizing a complete Bell System for the same
| |
| reason that he built one big comfortable barn for
| |
| his Swiss cattle and his Welsh ponies, instead of
| |
| half a dozen small uncomfortable sheds. He has
| |
| never been a "high financier" to juggle profits
| |
| out of other men's losses. He is merely applying
| |
| to the telephone business the same hard sense
| |
| that any farmer uses in the management of his
| |
| farm. He is building a Big Barn, metaphorically,
| |
| for the telephone and telegraph.
| |
|
| |
| Plainly, the telephone system of the future
| |
| will be national, so that any two people in the
| |
| same country will be able to talk to one another.
| |
| It will not be competitive, for the reason that no
| |
| farmer would think for a moment of running his
| |
| farm on competitive lines. It will have a staff-
| |
| and-line organization, to use a military phrase.
| |
| Each local company will continue to handle its
| |
| own local affairs, and exercise to the full the
| |
| basic virtue of self-help. But there will also be,
| |
| as now, a central body of experts to handle the
| |
| larger affairs that are common to all companies.
| |
| No separateness or secession on the one side, nor
| |
| bureaucracy on the other--that is the typically
| |
| American idea that underlies the ideal telephone
| |
| system.
| |
|
| |
| The line of authority, in such a system, will
| |
| begin with the local manager. From him it will
| |
| rise to the directors of the State company; then
| |
| higher still to the directors of the national company;
| |
| and finally, above all corporate leaders to
| |
| the Federal Government itself. The failure
| |
| of government ownership of the telephone in so
| |
| many foreign countries does not mean that the
| |
| private companies will have absolute power.
| |
| Quite the reverse. The lesson of thirty years'
| |
| experience shows that a private telephone company
| |
| is apt to be much more obedient to the will
| |
| of the people than if it were a Government de-
| |
| partment. But it is an axiom of democracy that
| |
| no company, however well conducted, will be
| |
| permitted to control a public convenience without
| |
| being held strictly responsible for its own acts.
| |
| As politics becomes less of a game and more of
| |
| a responsibility, the telephone of the future will
| |
| doubtless be supervised by some sort of public
| |
| committee, which will have power to pass upon
| |
| complaints, and to prevent the nuisance of
| |
| duplication and the swindle of watering stock.
| |
|
| |
| As this Federal supervision becomes more and
| |
| more efficient, the present fear of monopoly will
| |
| decrease, just as it did in the case of the railways.
| |
| It is a fact, although now generally forgotten,
| |
| that the first railways of the United States were
| |
| run for ten years or more on an anti-monopoly
| |
| plan. The tracks were free to all. Any one
| |
| who owned a cart with flanged wheels could drive
| |
| it on the rails and compete with the locomotives.
| |
| There was a happy-go-lucky jumble of trains
| |
| and wagons, all held back by the slowest team;
| |
| and this continued on some railways until as late
| |
| as 1857. By that time the people saw that com-
| |
| petition on a railway track was absurd. They
| |
| allowed each track to be monopolized by one
| |
| company, and the era of expansion began.
| |
|
| |
| No one, certainly, at the present time, regrets
| |
| the passing of the independent teamster. He
| |
| was much more arbitrary and expensive than
| |
| any railroad has ever dared to be; and as the
| |
| country grew, he became impossible. He was
| |
| not the fittest to survive. For the general good,
| |
| he was held back from competing with the railroad,
| |
| and taught to cooperate with it by hauling
| |
| freight to and from the depots. This, to his surprise,
| |
| he found much more profitable and pleasant.
| |
| He had been squeezed out of a bad job
| |
| into a good one. And by a similar process of
| |
| evolution, the United States is rapidly outgrowing
| |
| the small independent telephone companies.
| |
| These will eventually, one by one, rise as the
| |
| teamster did to a higher social value, by clasping
| |
| wires with the main system of telephony.
| |
|
| |
| Until 1881 the Bell System was in the hands
| |
| of a family group. It was a strictly private
| |
| enterprise. The public had been asked to help
| |
| in its launching, and had refused. But after
| |
| 1881 it passed into the control of the small
| |
| stock-holders, and has remained there without a
| |
| break. It is now one of our most democratized
| |
| businesses, scattering either wages or dividends
| |
| into more than a hundred thousand homes.
| |
| It has at times been exclusive, but never sordid.
| |
| It has never been dollar-mad, nor frenzied by the
| |
| virus of stock-gambling. There has always been
| |
| a vein of sentiment in it that kept it in touch with
| |
| human nature. Even at the present time, each
| |
| check of the American Telephone and Telegraph
| |
| Company carries on it a picture of a pretty
| |
| Cupid, sitting on a chair upon which he has
| |
| placed a thick book, and gayly prattling into a
| |
| telephone.
| |
|
| |
| Several sweeping changes may be expected in
| |
| the near future, now that there is team-play
| |
| between the Bell System and the Western Union.
| |
| Already, by a stroke of the pen, five million
| |
| users of telephones have been put on the credit
| |
| books of the Western Union; and every Bell
| |
| telephone office is now a telegraph office. Three
| |
| telephone messages and eight telegrams may be
| |
| sent AT THE SAME TIME over two pairs of wires:
| |
| that is one of the recent miracles of science, and
| |
| is now to be tried out upon a gigantic scale.
| |
| Most of the long-distance telephone wires, fully
| |
| two million miles, can be used for telegraphic
| |
| purposes; and a third of the Western Union
| |
| wires, five hundred thousand miles, may with a
| |
| few changes be used for talking.
| |
|
| |
| The Western Union is paying rent for twenty-
| |
| two thousand, five hundred offices, all of which
| |
| helps to make telegraphy a luxury of the few.
| |
| It is employing as large a force of messenger-
| |
| boys as the army that marched with General
| |
| Sherman from Atlanta to the sea. Both of
| |
| these items of expense will dwindle when a Bell
| |
| wire and a Morse wire can be brought to a
| |
| common terminal; and when a telegram can be
| |
| received or delivered by telephone. There will
| |
| also be a gain, perhaps the largest of all, in
| |
| removing the trudging little messenger-boy from
| |
| the streets and sending him either to school or
| |
| to learn some useful trade.
| |
|
| |
| The fact is that the United States is the first
| |
| country that has succeeded in putting both telephone
| |
| and telegraph upon the proper basis.
| |
|
| |
| Elsewhere either the two are widely apart, or the
| |
| telephone is a mere adjunct of a telegraphic
| |
| department. According to the new American
| |
| plan, the two are not competitive, but complementary.
| |
| The one is a supplement to the other.
| |
| The post office sends a package; the telegraph
| |
| sends the contents of the package; but the
| |
| telephone sends nothing. It is an apparatus that
| |
| makes conversation possible between two separated
| |
| people. Each of the three has a distinct
| |
| field of its own, so that there has never been any
| |
| cause for jealousy among them.
| |
|
| |
| To make the telephone an annex of the post
| |
| office or the telegraph has become absurd.
| |
| There are now in the whole world very nearly
| |
| as many messages sent by telephone as by letter;
| |
| and there are THIRT-TWO TIMES as many telephone
| |
| calls as telegrams. In the United States, the
| |
| telephone has grown to be the big brother of the
| |
| telegraph. It has six times the net earnings and
| |
| eight times the wire. And it transmits as many
| |
| messages as the combined total of telegrams,
| |
| letters, and railroad passengers.
| |
|
| |
| This universal trend toward consolidation has
| |
| introduced a variety of problems that will engage
| |
| the ablest brains in the telephone world for many
| |
| years to come. How to get the benefits of
| |
| organization without its losses, to become strong
| |
| without losing quickness, to become systematic
| |
| without losing the dash and dare of earlier days,
| |
| to develop the working force into an army of
| |
| high-speed specialists without losing the bird's-
| |
| eye view of the whole situation,--these are the
| |
| riddles of the new type, for which the telephonists
| |
| of the next generation must find the
| |
| answers. They illustrate the nature of the big
| |
| jobs that the telephone has to offer to an ambitious
| |
| and gifted young man of to-day.
| |
|
| |
| "The problems never were as large or as complex
| |
| as they are right now," says J. J. Carty, the
| |
| chief of the telephone engineers. The eternal
| |
| struggle remains between the large and little
| |
| ideas--between the men who see what might be
| |
| and the men who only see what IS. There is
| |
| still the race to break records. Already the girl
| |
| at the switchboard can find the person wanted
| |
| in thirty seconds. This is one-tenth of the time
| |
| that was taken in the early centrals; but it is
| |
| still too long. It is one-half of a valuable minute.
| |
| It must be cut to twenty-five seconds, or
| |
| twenty or fifteen.
| |
|
| |
| There is still the inventors' battle to gain
| |
| miles. The distance over which conversations
| |
| can be held has been increased from twenty miles
| |
| to twenty-five hundred. But this is not far
| |
| enough. There are some civilized human beings
| |
| who are twelve thousand miles apart, and who
| |
| have interests in common. During the Boxer
| |
| Rebellion in China, for instance, there were
| |
| Americans in Peking who would gladly have
| |
| given half of their fortune for the use of a pair
| |
| of wires to New York.
| |
|
| |
| In the earliest days of the telephone, Bell was
| |
| fond of prophesying that "the time will come
| |
| when we will talk across the Atlantic Ocean";
| |
| but this was regarded as a poetical fancy until
| |
| Pupin invented his method of automatically
| |
| propelling the electric current. Since then the
| |
| most conservative engineer will discuss the problem
| |
| of transatlantic telephony. And as for the
| |
| poets, they are now dreaming of the time when
| |
| a man may speak and hear his own voice come
| |
| back to him around the world.
| |
|
| |
| The immediate long-distance problem is, of
| |
| course, to talk from New York to the Pacific.
| |
| The two oceans are now only three and a half
| |
| days apart by rail. Seattle is clamoring for a
| |
| wire to the East. San Diego wants one in time
| |
| for her Panama Canal Exposition in 1915.
| |
| The wires are already strung to San Francisco,
| |
| but cannot be used in the present stage of the art.
| |
| And Vail's captains are working now with almost
| |
| breathless haste to give him a birthday present of
| |
| a talk across the continent from his farm in
| |
| Vermont.
| |
|
| |
| "I can see a universal system of telephony for
| |
| the United States in the very near future," says
| |
| Carty. "There is a statue of Seward standing
| |
| in one of the streets of Seattle. The inscription
| |
| upon it is, `To a United Country.' But as
| |
| an Easterner stands there, he feels the isolation
| |
| of that Far Western State, and he will always
| |
| feel it, until he can talk from one side of the
| |
| United States to the other. For my part," con-
| |
| tinues Carty, "I believe we will talk across
| |
| continents and across oceans. Why not? Are
| |
| there not more cells in one human body than there
| |
| are people in the whole earth?"
| |
|
| |
| Some future Carty may solve the abandoned
| |
| problem of the single wire, and cut the copper
| |
| bill in two by restoring the grounded circuit.
| |
| He may transmit vision as well as speech. He
| |
| may perfect a third-rail system for use on
| |
| moving trains. He may conceive of an ideal insulating
| |
| material to supersede glass, mica, paper,
| |
| and enamel. He may establish a universal code,
| |
| so that all persons of importance in the United
| |
| States shall have call-numbers by which they may
| |
| instantly be located, as books are in a library.
| |
|
| |
| Some other young man may create a commercial
| |
| department on wide lines, a work which
| |
| telephone men have as yet been too specialized to
| |
| do. Whoever does this will be a man of comprehensive
| |
| brain. He will be as closely in touch
| |
| with the average man as with the art of telephony.
| |
| He will know the gossip of the street,
| |
| the demands of the labor unions, and the
| |
| policies of governors and presidents. The psy-
| |
| chology of the Western farmer will concern him,
| |
| and the tone of the daily press, and the methods
| |
| of department stores. It will be his aim to
| |
| know the subtle chemistry of public opinion, and
| |
| to adapt the telephone service to the shifting
| |
| moods and necessities of the times. HE WILL FIT
| |
| TELEPHONY LIKE A GARMENT AROUND THE HABITS OF THE
| |
| PEOPLE.
| |
|
| |
| Also, now that the telephone business has
| |
| become strong, its next anxiety must be to develop
| |
| the virtues, and not the defects, of strength.
| |
| Its motto must be "Ich dien"--I serve; and it
| |
| will be the work of the future statesmen of the
| |
| telephone to illustrate this motto in all its
| |
| practical variations. They will cater and explain,
| |
| and explain and cater. They will educate and
| |
| educate, until they have created an expert public.
| |
| They will teach by pictures and lectures
| |
| and exhibitions. They will have charts and diagrams
| |
| hung in the telephone booths, so that the
| |
| person who is waiting for a call may learn a little
| |
| and pass the time more pleasantly. They will,
| |
| in a word, attend to those innumerable trifles that
| |
| make the perfection of public service.
| |
|
| |
| Already the Bell System has gone far in
| |
| this direction by organizing what might fairly
| |
| be called a foresight department. Here is
| |
| where the fortune-tellers of the business sit.
| |
| When new lines or exchanges are to be built,
| |
| these men study the situation with an eye to
| |
| the future. They prepare a "fundamental
| |
| plan," outlining what may reasonably be
| |
| expected to happen in fifteen or twenty years.
| |
| Invariably they are optimists. They make provision
| |
| for growth, but none at all for shrinkage.
| |
| By their advice, there is now twenty-five million
| |
| dollars' worth of reserve plant in the various
| |
| Bell Companies, waiting for the country
| |
| to grow up to it. Even in the city of New
| |
| York, one-half of the cable ducts are empty,
| |
| in expectation of the greater city of eight million
| |
| population which is scheduled to arrive in 1928.
| |
| There are perhaps few more impressive evidences
| |
| of practical optimism and confidence than a new
| |
| telephone exchange, with two-thirds of its wires
| |
| waiting for the business of the future.
| |
|
| |
| Eventually, this foresight department will
| |
| expand. It may, if a leader of genius appear,
| |
| become the first real corps of practical sociologists,
| |
| which will substitute facts for the present
| |
| hotch-potch of theories. It will prepare a
| |
| "fundamental plan" of the whole United States,
| |
| showing the centre of each industry and the
| |
| main runways of traffic. It will act upon the
| |
| basic fact that WHEREVER THERE IS INTERDEPENDENCE,
| |
| THERE IS BOUND TO BE TELEPHONY; and it will therefore
| |
| prepare maps of interdependence, showing
| |
| the widely scattered groups of industry and
| |
| finance, and the lines that weave them into a
| |
| pattern of national cooperation.
| |
|
| |
| As yet, no nation, not even our own, has seen
| |
| the full value of the long-distance telephone.
| |
| Few have the imagination to see what has been
| |
| made possible, and to realize that an actual face-
| |
| to-face conversation may take place, even though
| |
| there be a thousand miles between. Neither can
| |
| it seem credible that a man in a distant city may
| |
| be located as readily as though he were close at
| |
| hand. It is too amazing to be true, and possibly
| |
| a new generation will have to arrive before
| |
| it will be taken for granted and acted upon
| |
| freely. Ultimately, there can be no doubt that
| |
| long-distance telephony will be regarded as a
| |
| national asset of the highest value, for the reason
| |
| that it can prevent so much of the enormous
| |
| economic waste of travel.
| |
|
| |
| Nothing that science can say will ever decrease
| |
| the marvel of a long-distance conversation, and
| |
| there may come in the future an Interpreter
| |
| who will put it before our eyes in the form of a
| |
| moving-picture. He will enable us to follow the
| |
| flying words in a talk from Boston to Denver.
| |
| We will flash first to Worcester, cross the Hudson
| |
| on the high bridge at Poughkeepsie, swing
| |
| southwest through a dozen coal towns to the outskirts
| |
| of Philadelphia, leap across the Susquehanna,
| |
| zigzag up and down the Alleghenies into
| |
| the murk of Pittsburg, cross the Ohio at Wheeling,
| |
| glance past Columbus and Indianapolis,
| |
| over the Wabash at Terre Haute, into St. Louis
| |
| by the Eads bridge, through Kansas City, across
| |
| the Missouri, along the corn-fields of Kansas,
| |
| and then on--on--on with the Sante Fe
| |
| Railway, across vast plains and past the brink of
| |
| the Grand Canyon, to Pueblo and the lofty city
| |
| of Denver. Twenty-five hundred miles along
| |
| a thousand tons of copper wire! From Bunker
| |
| Hill to Pike's Peak IN A SECOND!
| |
|
| |
| Herbert Spencer, in his autobiography, alludes
| |
| to the impressive fact that while the eye
| |
| is reading a single line of type, the earth has
| |
| travelled thirty miles through space. But this,
| |
| in telephony, would be slow travelling. It is
| |
| simple everyday truth to say that while your eye
| |
| is reading this dash,--, a telephone sound can be
| |
| carried from New York to Chicago.
| |
|
| |
| There are many reasons to believe that for the
| |
| practical idealists of the future, the supreme
| |
| study will be the force that makes such miracles
| |
| possible. Six thousand million dollars--one-
| |
| twentieth of our national wealth--is at the present
| |
| time invested in electrical development. The
| |
| Electrical Age has not yet arrived; but it is at
| |
| hand; and no one can tell how brilliant the result
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| may be, when the creative minds of a nation are
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| focussed upon the subdual of this mysterious
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| force, which has more power and more delicacy
| |
| than any other force that man has been able to
| |
| harness.
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|
| |
| As a tame and tractable energy, Electricity is
| |
| new. It has no past and no pedigree. It is
| |
| younger than many people who are now alive.
| |
| Among the wise men of Greece and Rome, few
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| knew its existence, and none put it to any
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| practical use. The wisest knew that a piece of
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| amber, when rubbed, will attract feathery substances.
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| But they regarded this as poetry rather
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| than science. There was a pretty legend among
| |
| the Phoenicians that the pieces of amber were the
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| petrified tears of maidens who had thrown themselves
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| into the sea because of unrequited love,
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| and each bead of amber was highly prized. It
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| was worn as an amulet and a symbol of purity.
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| Not for two thousand years did any one dream
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| that within its golden heart lay hidden the secret
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| of a new electrical civilization.
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|
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| Not even in 1752, when Benjamin Franklin
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| flew his famous kite on the banks of the Schuylkill
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| River, and captured the first CANNED LIGHTNING,
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| was there any definite knowledge of electrical
| |
| energy. His lightning-rod was regarded
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| as an insult to the deity of Heaven. It was
| |
| blamed for the earthquake of 1755. And not
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| until the telegraph of Morse came into general
| |
| use, did men dare to think of the thunder-bolt of
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| Jove as a possible servant of the human race.
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|
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| Thus it happened that when Bell invented the
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| telephone, he surprised the world with a new
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| idea. He had to make the thought as well as
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| the thing. No Jules Verne or H. G. Wells had
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| foreseen it. The author of the Arabian Nights
| |
| fantasies had conceived of a flying carpet, but
| |
| neither he nor any one else had conceived of
| |
| flying conversation. In all the literature of
| |
| ancient days, there is not a line that will apply
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| to the telephone, except possibly that expressive
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| phrase in the Bible, "And there came a voice."
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| In these more privileged days, the telephone has
| |
| come to be regarded as a commonplace fact of
| |
| everyday life; and we are apt to forget that the
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| wonder of it has become greater and not less;
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| and that there are still honor and profit, plenty
| |
| of both, to be won by the inventor and the
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| scientist.
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|
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|
| The flood of electrical patents was never higher
| |
| than now. There are literally more in a single
| |
| month than the total number issued by the Patent
| |
| Office up to 1859. The Bell System has three
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| hundred experts who are paid to do nothing else
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| but try out all new ideas and inventions; and
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| before these words can pass into the printed
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| book, new uses and new methods will have
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| been discovered. There is therefore no immediate
| |
| danger that the art of telephony will be
| |
| less fascinating in the future than it has been in
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| the past. It will still be the most alluring and
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| elusive sprite that ever led the way through a
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| Dark Continent of mysterious phenomena.
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|
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|
| There still remains for some future scientist
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| the task of showing us in detail exactly what the
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| telephone current does. Such a man will study
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| vibrations as Darwin studied the differentiation
| |
| of species. He will investigate how a child's
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| voice, speaking from Boston to Omaha, can
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| vibrate more than a million pounds of copper
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| wire; and he will invent a finer system of time to
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| fit the telephone, which can do as many different
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| things in a second as a man can do in a day,
| |
| transmitting with every tick of the clock from twenty-
| |
| five to eighty thousand vibrations. He will deal
| |
| with the various vibrations of nerves and wires
| |
| and wireless air, that are necessary in conveying
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| thought between two separated minds. He will
| |
| make clear how a thought, originating in the
| |
| brain, passes along the nerve-wires to the vocal
| |
| chords, and then in wireless vibration of air to
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| the disc of the transmitter. At the other end
| |
| of the line the second disc re-creates these
| |
| vibrations, which impinge upon the nerve-wires of an
| |
| ear, and are thus carried to the consciousness of
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| another brain.
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|
| |
|
| And so, notwithstanding all that has been done
| |
| since Bell opened up the way, the telephone remains
| |
| the acme of electrical marvels. No other
| |
| thing does so much with so little energy. No
| |
| other thing is more enswathed in the unknown.
| |
| Not even the gray-haired pioneers who have lived
| |
| with the telephone since its birth, can understand
| |
| their protege. As to the why and the how, there
| |
| is as yet no answer. It is as true of telephony
| |
| to-day as it was in 1876, that a child can use
| |
| what the wisest sages cannot comprehend.
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|
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|
| Here is a tiny disc of sheet-iron. I speak--it
| |
| shudders. It has a different shudder for every
| |
| sound. It has thousands of millions of different
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| shudders. There is a second disc many miles
| |
| away, perhaps twenty-five hundred miles away.
| |
| Between the two discs runs a copper wire. As
| |
| I speak, a thrill of electricity flits along the wire.
| |
| This thrill is moulded by the shudder of the disc.
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| It makes the second disc shudder. And the
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| shudder of the second disc reproduces my voice.
| |
| That is what happens. But how--not all the
| |
| scientists of the world can tell.
| |
|
| |
|
| The telephone current is a phenomenon of the
| |
| ether, say the theorists. But what is ether? No
| |
| one knows. Sir Oliver Lodge has guessed that
| |
| it is "perhaps the only substantial thing in the
| |
| material universe"; but no one knows. There
| |
| is nothing to guide us in that unknown country
| |
| except a sign-post that points upwards and bears
| |
| the one word--"Perhaps." The ether of space!
| |
| Here is an Eldorado for the scientists of the
| |
| future, and whoever can first map it out will go
| |
| far toward discovering the secret of telephony.
| |
|
| |
|
| Some day--who knows?--there may come
| |
| the poetry and grand opera of the telephone.
| |
| Artists may come who will portray the marvel
| |
| of the wires that quiver with electrified words,
| |
| and the romance of the switchboards that trem-
| |
| ble with the secrets of a great city. Already
| |
| Puvis de Chavannes, by one of his superb panels
| |
| in the Boston Library, has admitted the telephone
| |
| and the telegraph to the world of art.
| |
| He has embodied them as two flying figures,
| |
| poised above the electric wires, and with the
| |
| following inscription underneath: "By the
| |
| wondrous agency of electricity, speech dashes
| |
| through space and swift as lightning bears
| |
| tidings of good and evil."
| |
|
| |
|
| But these random guesses as to the future of
| |
| the telephone may fall far short of what the
| |
| reality will be. In these dazzling days it is idle
| |
| to predict. The inventor has everywhere put
| |
| the prophet out of business. Fact has outrun
| |
| Fancy. When Morse, for instance, was tacking
| |
| up his first little line of wire around the Speedwell
| |
| Iron Works, who could have foreseen two
| |
| hundred and fifty thousand miles of submarine
| |
| cables, by which the very oceans are all aquiver
| |
| with the news of the world? When Fulton's
| |
| tiny tea-kettle of a boat steamed up the Hudson
| |
| to Albany in two days, who could have foreseen
| |
| the steel leviathans, one-sixth of a mile in length,
| |
| that can in the same time cut the Atlantic Ocean
| |
| in halves? And when Bell stood in a dingy
| |
| workshop in Boston and heard the clang of a
| |
| clock-spring come over an electric wire, who
| |
| could have foreseen the massive structure of the
| |
| Bell System, built up by half the telephones of
| |
| the world, and by the investment of more actual
| |
| capital than has gone to the making of any other
| |
| industrial association? Who could have foreseen
| |
| what the telephone bells have done to ring
| |
| out the old ways and to ring in the new; to ring
| |
| out delay, and isolation and to ring in the efficiency
| |
| and the friendliness of a truly united people?
| |
|
| |
|
|
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|
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