|
|
| Zeile 104: |
Zeile 104: |
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
| |
| ==CHAPTER VI - NOTABLE USERS OF THE TELEPHONE==
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| What we might call the telephonization of
| |
| city life, for lack of a simpler word, has
| |
| remarkably altered our manner of living from
| |
| what it was in the days of Abraham Lincoln. It
| |
| has enabled us to be more social and cooperative.
| |
| It has literally abolished the isolation of separate
| |
| families, and has made us members of one great
| |
| family. It has become so truly an organ of the
| |
| social body that by telephone we now enter into
| |
| contracts, give evidence, try lawsuits, make
| |
| speeches, propose marriage, confer degrees,
| |
| appeal to voters, and do almost everything else
| |
| that is a matter of speech.
| |
|
| |
| In stores and hotels this wire traffic has grown
| |
| to an almost bewildering extent, as these are the
| |
| places where many interests meet. The hundred
| |
| largest hotels in New York City have twenty-one
| |
| thousand telephones--nearly as many as the
| |
| continent of Africa and more than the kingdom
| |
| of Spain. In an average year they send six
| |
| million messages. The Waldorf-Astoria alone
| |
| tops all residential buildings with eleven hundred
| |
| and twenty telephones and five hundred thousand
| |
| calls a year; while merely the Christmas
| |
| Eve orders that flash into Marshall Field's store,
| |
| or John Wanamaker's, have risen as high as the
| |
| three thousand mark.
| |
|
| |
| Whether the telephone does most to concentrate
| |
| population, or to scatter it, is a question
| |
| that has not yet been examined. It is certainly
| |
| true that it has made the skyscraper possible,
| |
| and thus helped to create an absolutely new type
| |
| of city, such as was never imagined even in the
| |
| fairy tales of ancient nations. The skyscraper
| |
| is ten years younger than the telephone. It is
| |
| now generally seen to be the ideal building for
| |
| business offices. It is one of the few types of
| |
| architecture that may fairly be called American.
| |
| And its efficiency is largely, if not mainly, due to
| |
| the fact that its inhabitants may run errands by
| |
| telephone as well as by elevator.
| |
|
| |
| There seems to be no sort of activity which is
| |
| not being made more convenient by the telephone.
| |
| It is used to call the duck-shooters in
| |
| Western Canada when a flock of birds has
| |
| arrived; and to direct the movements of the
| |
| Dragon in Wagner's grand opera "Siegfried."
| |
| At the last Yale-Harvard football game, it conveyed
| |
| almost instantaneous news to fifty thousand
| |
| people in various parts of New England.
| |
| At the Vanderbilt Cup Race its wires girdled the
| |
| track and reported every gain or mishap of the
| |
| racing autos. And at such expensive pageants
| |
| as that of the Quebec Tercentenary in 1908,
| |
| where four thousand actors came and went upon
| |
| a ten-acre stage, every order was given by
| |
| telephone.
| |
|
| |
| Public officials, even in the United States, have
| |
| been slow to change from the old-fashioned and
| |
| more dignified use of written documents and uniformed
| |
| messengers; but in the last ten years there
| |
| has been a sweeping revolution in this respect.
| |
| Government by telephone! This is a new idea
| |
| that has already arrived in the more efficient
| |
| departments of the Federal service. And as for
| |
| the present Congress, that body has gone so far
| |
| as to plan for a special system of its own, in both
| |
| Houses, so that all official announcements may
| |
| be heard by wire.
| |
|
| |
| Garfield was the first among American Presidents
| |
| to possess a telephone. An exhibition
| |
| instrument was placed in his house, without cost,
| |
| in 1878, while he was still a member of Congress.
| |
| Neither Cleveland nor Harrison, for temperamental
| |
| reasons, used the magic wire very often.
| |
| Under their regime, there was one lonely idle
| |
| telephone in the White House, used by the
| |
| servants several times a week. But with McKinley
| |
| came a new order of things. To him a
| |
| telephone was more than a necessity. It was a
| |
| pastime, an exhilarating sport. He was the one
| |
| President who really revelled in the comforts of
| |
| telephony. In 1895 he sat in his Canton home
| |
| and heard the cheers of the Chicago Convention.
| |
| Later he sat there and ran the first presidential
| |
| telephone campaign; talked to his managers in
| |
| thirty-eight States. Thus he came to regard the
| |
| telephone with a higher degree of appreciation
| |
| than any of his predecessors had done, and
| |
| eulogized it on many public occasions. "It is
| |
| bringing us all closer together," was his favorite
| |
| phrase.
| |
|
| |
| To Roosevelt the telephone was mainly for
| |
| emergencies. He used it to the full during the
| |
| Chicago Convention of 1907 and the Peace
| |
| Conference at Portsmouth. But with Taft the
| |
| telephone became again the common avenue of
| |
| conversation. He has introduced at least one
| |
| new telephonic custom a long-distance talk
| |
| with his family every evening, when he is away
| |
| from home. Instead of the solitary telephone of
| |
| Cleveland-Harrison days, the White House has
| |
| now a branch exchange of its own--Main 6--
| |
| with a sheaf of wires that branch out into every
| |
| room as well as to the nearest central.
| |
|
| |
| Next to public officials, bankers were perhaps
| |
| the last to accept the facilities of the telephone.
| |
| They were slow to abandon the fallacy that no
| |
| business can be done without a written record.
| |
| James Stillman, of New York, was first among
| |
| bankers to foresee the telephone era. As early
| |
| as 1875, while Bell was teaching his infant
| |
| telephone to talk, Stillman risked two thousand
| |
| dollars in a scheme to establish a crude dial
| |
| system of wire communication, which later grew
| |
| into New York's first telephone exchange. At
| |
| the present time, the banker who works closest to
| |
| his telephone is probably George W. Perkins, of
| |
| the J. P. Morgan group of bankers. "He is the
| |
| only man," says Morgan, "who can raise twenty
| |
| millions in twenty minutes." The Perkins plan
| |
| of rapid transit telephony is to prepare a list of
| |
| names, from ten to thirty, and to flash from one
| |
| to another as fast as the operator can ring them
| |
| up. Recently one of the other members of the
| |
| Morgan bank proposed to enlarge its telephone
| |
| equipment. "What will we gain by more wires?"
| |
| asked the operator. "If we were to put in a six-
| |
| hundred pair cable, Mr. Perkins would keep it
| |
| busy."
| |
|
| |
| The most brilliant feat of the telephone in the
| |
| financial world was done during the panic of
| |
| 1907. At the height of the storm, on a Saturday
| |
| evening, the New York bankers met in an almost
| |
| desperate conference. They decided, as an
| |
| emergency measure of self-protection, not to ship
| |
| cash to Western banks. At midnight they telephoned
| |
| this decision to the bankers of Chicago
| |
| and St. Louis. These men, in turn, conferred by
| |
| telephone, and on Sunday afternoon called up the
| |
| bankers of neighboring States. And so the news
| |
| went from 'phone to 'phone, until by Monday
| |
| morning all bankers and chief depositors were
| |
| aware of the situation, and prepared for the
| |
| team-play that prevented any general disaster.
| |
|
| |
| As for stockbrokers of the Wall Street species,
| |
| they transact practically all their business by
| |
| telephone. In their stock exchange stand six
| |
| hundred and forty one booths, each one the terminus
| |
| of a private wire. A firm of brokers will
| |
| count it an ordinary year's talking to send fifty
| |
| thousand messages; and there is one firm which
| |
| last year sent twice as many. Of all brokers,
| |
| the one who finally accomplished most by telephony
| |
| was unquestionably E. H. Harriman. In
| |
| the mansion that he built at Arden, there were
| |
| a hundred telephones, sixty of them linked to
| |
| the long-distance lines. What the brush is to
| |
| the artist, what the chisel is to the sculptor, the
| |
| telephone was to Harriman. He built his fortune
| |
| with it. It was in his library, his bathroom,
| |
| his private car, his camp in the Oregon wilder-
| |
| ness. No transaction was too large or too involved
| |
| to be settled over its wires. He saved
| |
| the credit of the Erie by telephone--lent it five
| |
| million dollars as he lay at home on a sickbed.
| |
| "He is a slave to the telephone," wrote a magazine
| |
| writer. "Nonsense," replied Harriman,
| |
| "it is a slave to me."
| |
|
| |
| The telephone arrived in time to prevent big
| |
| corporations from being unwieldy and aristocratic.
| |
| The foreman of a Pittsburg coal company
| |
| may now stand in his subterranean office
| |
| and talk to the president of the Steel Trust, who
| |
| sits on the twenty-first floor of a New York
| |
| skyscraper. The long-distance talks, especially,
| |
| have grown to be indispensable to the corporations
| |
| whose plants are scattered and geographically
| |
| misplaced--to the mills of New England,
| |
| for instance, that use the cotton of the South and
| |
| sell so much of their product to the Middle West.
| |
| To the companies that sell perishable commodities,
| |
| an instantaneous conversation with a
| |
| buyer in a distant city has often saved a carload
| |
| or a cargo. Such caterers as the meat-packers,
| |
| who were among the first to realize what Bell had
| |
| made possible, have greatly accelerated the
| |
| wheels of their business by inter-city conversations.
| |
| For ten years or longer the Cudahys have
| |
| talked every business morning between Omaha
| |
| and Boston, via fifteen hundred and seventy
| |
| miles of wire.
| |
|
| |
| In the refining of oil, the Standard Oil
| |
| Company alone, at its New York office, sends
| |
| two hundred and thirty thousand messages
| |
| a year. In the making of steel, a chemical
| |
| analysis is made of each caldron of molten
| |
| pig-iron, when it starts on its way to be refined,
| |
| and this analysis is sent by telephone
| |
| to the steelmaker, so that he will know exactly
| |
| how each potful is to be handled. In the floating
| |
| of logs down rivers, instead of having relays of
| |
| shouters to prevent the logs from jamming, there
| |
| is now a wire along the bank, with a telephone
| |
| linked on at every point of danger. In the rearing
| |
| of skyscrapers, it is now usual to have a
| |
| temporary wire strung vertically, so that the
| |
| architect may stand on the ground and confer
| |
| with a foreman who sits astride of a naked girder
| |
| three hundred feet up in the air. And in the
| |
| electric light business, the current is distributed
| |
| wholly by telephoned orders. To give New
| |
| York the seven million electric lights that have
| |
| abolished night in that city requires twelve
| |
| private exchanges and five hundred and twelve
| |
| telephones. All the power that creates this artificial
| |
| daylight is generated at a single station, and
| |
| let flow to twenty-five storage centres. Minute
| |
| by minute, its flow is guided by an expert, who
| |
| sits at a telephone exchange as though he were a
| |
| pilot at the wheel of an ocean liner.
| |
|
| |
| The first steamship line to take notice of the
| |
| telephone was the Clyde, which had a wire from
| |
| dock to office in 1877; and the first railway was
| |
| the Pennsylvania, which two years later was
| |
| persuaded by Professor Bell himself to give it a
| |
| trial in Altoona. Since then, this railroad has
| |
| become the chief beneficiary of the art of telephony.
| |
| It has one hundred and seventy-five exchanges,
| |
| four hundred operators, thirteen thousand
| |
| telephones, and twenty thousand miles of
| |
| wire--a more ample system than the city of
| |
| New York had in 1896.
| |
|
| |
| To-day the telephone goes to sea in the pas-
| |
| senger steamer and the warship. Its wires
| |
| are waiting at the dock and the depot, so that a
| |
| tourist may sit in his stateroom and talk with
| |
| a friend in some distant office. It is one of the
| |
| most incredible miracles of telephony that a
| |
| passenger at New York, who is about to start for
| |
| Chicago on a fast express, may telephone to
| |
| Chicago from the drawing-room of a Pullman.
| |
| He himself, on the swiftest of all trains, will not
| |
| arrive in Chicago for eighteen hours; but the
| |
| flying words can make the journey, and RETURN,
| |
| while his train is waiting for the signal to start.
| |
|
| |
| In the operation of trains, the railroads have
| |
| waited thirty years before they dared to trust the
| |
| telephone, just as they waited fifteen years before
| |
| they dared to trust the telegraph. In 1883 a few
| |
| railways used the telephone in a small way, but
| |
| in 1907, when a law was passed that made telegraphers
| |
| highly expensive, there was a general
| |
| swing to the telephone. Several dozen roads
| |
| have now put it in use, some employing it as an
| |
| associate of the Morse method and others as a
| |
| complete substitute. It has already been found
| |
| to be the quickest way of despatching trains. It
| |
| will do in five minutes what the telegraph did in
| |
| ten. And it has enabled railroads to hire more
| |
| suitable men for the smaller offices.
| |
|
| |
| In news-gathering, too, much more than in
| |
| railroading, the day of the telephone has arrived.
| |
| The Boston Globe was the first paper to receive
| |
| news by telephone. Later came The Washington
| |
| Star, which had a wire strung to the Capitol,
| |
| and thereby gained an hour over its competitors.
| |
| To-day the evening papers receive most of their
| |
| news over the wire a la Bell instead of a la Morse.
| |
| This has resulted in a specialization of reporters
| |
| --one man runs for the news and another man
| |
| writes it. Some of the runners never come to
| |
| the office. They receive their assignments by
| |
| telephone, and their salaries by mail. There
| |
| are even a few who are allowed to telephone
| |
| their news directly to a swift linotype operator,
| |
| who clicks it into type on his machine, without
| |
| the scratch of a pencil. This, of course, is the
| |
| ideal method of news-gathering, which is rarely
| |
| possible.
| |
|
| |
| A paper of the first class, such as The New
| |
| York World, has now an outfit of twenty trunk
| |
| lines and eighty telephones. Its outgoing calls
| |
| are two hundred thousand a year and its incoming
| |
| calls three hundred thousand, which means
| |
| that for every morning, evening, or Sunday
| |
| edition, there has been an average of seven hundred
| |
| and fifty messages. The ordinary newspaper
| |
| in a small town cannot afford such a service,
| |
| but recently the United Press has originated
| |
| a cooperative method. It telephones the news
| |
| over one wire to ten or twelve newspapers at one
| |
| time. In ten minutes a thousand words can in
| |
| this way be flung out to a dozen towns, as quickly
| |
| as by telegraph and much cheaper.
| |
|
| |
| But it is in a dangerous crisis, when safety
| |
| seems to hang upon a second, that the telephone
| |
| is at its best. It is the instrument of emergencies,
| |
| a sort of ubiquitous watchman. When
| |
| the girl operator in the exchange hears a cry for
| |
| help--"Quick! The hospital!" "The fire department!"
| |
| "The police!" she seldom waits to
| |
| hear the number. She knows it. She is trained
| |
| to save half-seconds. And it is at such moments,
| |
| if ever, that the users of a telephone can appreciate
| |
| its insurance value. No doubt, if a King
| |
| Richard III were worsted on a modern battlefield,
| |
| his instinctive cry would be, "My Kingdom
| |
| for a telephone!"
| |
|
| |
| When instant action is needed in the city of
| |
| New York, a General Alarm can in five minutes
| |
| be sent by the police wires over its whole vast
| |
| area of three hundred square miles. When,
| |
| recently, a gas main broke in Brooklyn, sixty girls
| |
| were at once called to the centrals in that part
| |
| of the city to warn the ten thousand families who
| |
| had been placed in danger. When the ill-fated
| |
| General Slocum caught fire, a mechanic in a
| |
| factory on the water-front saw the blaze, and had
| |
| the presence of mind to telephone the newspapers,
| |
| the hospitals, and the police. When a
| |
| small child is lost, or a convict has escaped from
| |
| prison, or the forest is on fire, or some menace
| |
| from the weather is at hand, the telephone bells
| |
| clang out the news, just as the nerves jangle the
| |
| bells of pain when the body is in danger. In one
| |
| tragic case, the operator in Folsom, New Mexico,
| |
| refused to quit her post until she had warned her
| |
| people of a flood that had broken loose in the
| |
| hills above the village. Because of her courage,
| |
| nearly all were saved, though she herself was
| |
| drowned at the switchboard. Her name--Mrs.
| |
| S. J. Rooke--deserves to be remembered.
| |
|
| |
| If a disaster cannot be prevented, it is the
| |
| telephone, usually, that brings first aid to the
| |
| injured. After the destruction of San Francisco,
| |
| Governor Guild, of Massachusetts, sent an
| |
| appeal for the stricken city to the three hundred
| |
| and fifty-four mayors of his State; and by the
| |
| courtesy of the Bell Company, which carried the
| |
| messages free, they were delivered to the last
| |
| and furthermost mayors in less than five hours.
| |
| After the destruction of Messina, an order for
| |
| enough lumber to build ten thousand new houses
| |
| was cabled to New York and telephoned to
| |
| Western lumbermen. So quickly was this order
| |
| filled that on the twelfth day after the arrival
| |
| of the cablegram, the ships were on their way
| |
| to Messina with the lumber. After the Kansas
| |
| City flood of 1903, when the drenched city was
| |
| without railways or street-cars or electric lights,
| |
| it was the telephone that held the city together
| |
| and brought help to the danger-spots. And
| |
| after the Baltimore fire, the telephone exchange
| |
| was the last force to quit and the first to recover.
| |
| Its girls sat on their stools at the switchboard
| |
| until the window-panes were broken by the heat.
| |
| Then they pulled the covers over the board and
| |
| walked out. Two hours later the building was
| |
| in ashes. Three hours later another building
| |
| was rented on the unburned rim of the city, and
| |
| the wire chiefs were at work. In one day there
| |
| was a system of wires for the use of the city
| |
| officials. In two days these were linked to long-
| |
| distance wires; and in eleven days a two-thousand-
| |
| line switchboard was in full working trim.
| |
| This feat still stands as the record in rebuilding.
| |
|
| |
| In the supreme emergency of war, the telephone
| |
| is as indispensable, very nearly, as the
| |
| cannon. This, at least, is the belief of the
| |
| Japanese, who handled their armies by telephone
| |
| when they drove back the Russians. Each body
| |
| of Japanese troops moved forward like a silkworm,
| |
| leaving behind it a glistening strand of
| |
| red copper wire. At the decisive battle of
| |
| Mukden, the silk-worm army, with a million
| |
| legs, crept against the Russian hosts in a vast
| |
| crescent, a hundred miles from end to end. By
| |
| means of this glistening red wire, the various
| |
| batteries and regiments were organized into
| |
| fifteen divisions. Each group of three divisions
| |
| was wired to a general, and the five generals
| |
| were wired to the great Oyama himself, who
| |
| sat ten miles back of the firing-line and sent
| |
| his orders. Whenever a regiment lunged forward,
| |
| one of the soldiers carried a telephone set.
| |
| If they held their position, two other soldiers ran
| |
| forward with a spool of wire. In this way and
| |
| under fire of the Russian cannon, one hundred
| |
| and fifty miles of wire were strung across the
| |
| battlefield. As the Japanese said, it was this
| |
| "flying telephone" that enabled Oyama to manipulate
| |
| his forces as handily as though he were
| |
| playing a game of chess. It was in this war, too,
| |
| that the Mikado's soldiers strung the costliest of
| |
| all telephone lines, at 203 Metre Hill. When
| |
| the wire had been basted up this hill to the summit,
| |
| the fortress of Port Arthur lay at their
| |
| mercy. But the climb had cost them twenty-
| |
| four thousand lives.
| |
|
| |
| Of the seven million telephones in the United
| |
| States, about two million are now in farmhouses.
| |
| Every fourth American farmer is in telephone
| |
| touch with his neighbors and the market. Iowa
| |
| leads, among the farming States. In Iowa, not
| |
| to have a telephone is to belong to what a Londoner
| |
| would call the "submerged tenth" of the
| |
| population. Second in line comes Illinois, with
| |
| Kansas, Nebraska, and Indiana following closely
| |
| behind; and at the foot of the list, in the matter of
| |
| farm telephones, are Connecticut and Louisiana.
| |
|
| |
| The first farmer who discovered the value of
| |
| the telephone was the market gardener. Next
| |
| came the bonanza farmer of the Red River
| |
| Valley--such a man, for instance, as Oliver
| |
| Dalrymple, of North Dakota, who found that by
| |
| the aid of the telephone he could plant and
| |
| harvest thirty thousand acres of wheat in a single
| |
| season. Then, not more than half a dozen years
| |
| ago, there arose a veritable Telephone Crusade
| |
| among the farmers of the Middle West. Cheap
| |
| telephones, yet fairly good, had by this time been
| |
| made possible by the improvements of the Bell
| |
| engineers; and stories of what could be done by
| |
| telephone became the favorite gossip of the day.
| |
| One farmer had kept his barn from being burned
| |
| down by telephoning for his neighbors; another
| |
| had cleared five hundred dollars extra profit on
| |
| the sale of his cattle, by telephoning to the best
| |
| market; a third had rescued a flock of sheep by
| |
| sending quick news of an approaching blizzard;
| |
| a fourth had saved his son's life by getting an
| |
| instantaneous message to the doctor; and so on.
| |
|
| |
| How the telephone saved a three million dollar
| |
| fruit crop in Colorado, in 1909, is the story that
| |
| is oftenest told in the West. Until that year, the
| |
| frosts in the Spring nipped the buds. No farmer
| |
| could be sure of his harvest. But in 1909, the
| |
| fruit-growers bought smudge-pots--three hundred
| |
| thousand or more. These were placed in
| |
| the orchards, ready to be lit at a moment's notice.
| |
| Next, an alliance was made with the United
| |
| States Weather Bureau so that whenever the
| |
| Frost King came down from the north, a warning
| |
| could be telephoned to the farmers. Just
| |
| when Colorado was pink with apple blossoms, the
| |
| first warning came. "Get ready to light up your
| |
| smudge-pots in half an hour." Then the farmers
| |
| telephoned to the nearest towns: "Frost is
| |
| coming; come and help us in the orchards."
| |
| Hundreds of men rushed out into the country on
| |
| horseback and in wagons. In half an hour the
| |
| last warning came: "Light up; the thermometer
| |
| registers twenty-nine." The smudge-pot artillery
| |
| was set ablaze, and kept blazing until the
| |
| news came that the icy forces had retreated.
| |
| And in this way every Colorado farmer who
| |
| had a telephone saved his fruit.
| |
|
| |
| In some farming States, the enthusiasm for the
| |
| telephone is running so high that mass meetings
| |
| are held, with lavish oratory on the general theme
| |
| of "Good Roads and Telephones." And as a
| |
| result of this Telephone Crusade, there are now
| |
| nearly twenty thousand groups of farmers, each
| |
| one with a mutual telephone system, and one-half
| |
| of them with sufficient enterprise to link their
| |
| little webs of wires to the vast Bell system, so that
| |
| at least a million farmers have been brought as
| |
| close to the great cities as they are to their own
| |
| barns.
| |
|
| |
| What telephones have done to bring in the
| |
| present era of big crops, is an interesting story
| |
| in itself. To compress it into a sentence, we
| |
| might say that the telephone has completed
| |
| the labor-saving movement which started with
| |
| the McCormick reaper in 1831. It has lifted the
| |
| farmer above the wastefulness of being his own
| |
| errand-boy. The average length of haul from
| |
| barn to market in the United States is nine and a
| |
| half miles, so that every trip saved means an
| |
| extra day's work for a man and team. Instead
| |
| of travelling back and forth, often to no purpose,
| |
| the farmer may now stay at home and attend to
| |
| his stock and his crops.
| |
|
| |
| As yet, few farmers have learned to appreciate
| |
| the value of quality in telephone service, as they
| |
| have in other lines. The same man who will pay
| |
| six prices for the best seed-corn, and who will
| |
| allow nothing but high-grade cattle in his barn,
| |
| will at the same time be content with the shabbiest
| |
| and flimsiest telephone service, without offering
| |
| any other excuse than that it is cheap. But
| |
| this is a transient phase of farm telephony. The
| |
| cost of an efficient farm system is now so little--
| |
| not more than two dollars a month, that the
| |
| present trashy lines are certain sooner or later to
| |
| go to the junk-heap with the sickle and the flail
| |
| and all the other cheap and unprofitable things.
| |
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
