Quelltext der Seite History of the Telephone Casson 1910 07 Efficiency and the Telephone

{{Werk
|Titel=History of the Telephone
|Autor=Casson-Herbert-N
|Copyright=Siehe eLib Lizenzen
|Auflage=1
|Kurzbeschreibung=Geschichte der Erfindung und Entwicklung des Telephons.
|Entstehungsjahr=1910
|Erscheinungsjahr=1910
|Sprache=English
|Verlag=
|Typ=Monographie
|ISBN=140653451X
|ISSN=9781406534511
|Fachgebiete=202 Elektrotechnik Elektronik Informationstechnik,508 Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften,601 Geschichte Archäologie
|Tags=Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Technikgeschichte, Telefon, Kommunikation, Erfindung
|Version=1
|Wikilink=Telephone_-_History_of_Telephone_-_Herbert_N_Casson_-_1910
|Searchlink=Telephone+History
|Personen=Bell-Alexander-Graham
}}

:History of the Telephone

:BY HERBERT N. CASSON
:1910


==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 &quot;Molly Maguires&quot;
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 &quot;too extensive to be governed
but by a despotic monarchy.&quot; 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 &quot;Washington's Tele-
graph,&quot; 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 &quot;men
cannot now be bound to men by brass collars;
you will have to bind them by other far nobler
and cunninger methods.&quot;

Railways and steamships had begun this work
of binding man to man by &quot;nobler and cunninger
methods.&quot; 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:


&quot;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.&quot;


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 &quot;Do It To-day&quot;; 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. &quot;No American goes slow,&quot; said Ian
Maclaren, &quot;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.&quot; 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, &quot;Life is too short; what
can one person do?&quot; an American is more apt to
say, &quot;Life is too short; therefore I must do to-
day's work to-day.&quot; 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, &quot;I can't get from my
home to the depot for the price of a talk to
Omaha.&quot;

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. &quot;I do not believe,&quot;
says Theodore Vail, &quot;that any one man ever
made a clear million out of the telephone.&quot;
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.


*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 08 Telephone worldwide|CHAPTER VIII - THE TELEPHONE IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES]]

==CONTENT==

*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910|PREFACE]]
*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 01 Birth of the Telephone|CHAPTER I - THE BIRTH OF THE TELEPHONE]]
*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 02 Telephone as Business|CHAPTER II - THE BUILDING OF THE BUSINESS]]
*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 03 Business Development|CHAPTER III - THE HOLDING OF THE BUSINESS]]
*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 04 Art of Telephone|CHAPTER IV - THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ART]]
*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 05 Telephone Expansion|CHAPTER V - THE EXPANSION OF THE BUSINESS]]
*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 06 Telephone Users|CHAPTER VI - NOTABLE USERS OF THE TELEPHONE]]
*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 07 Efficiency and the Telephone|CHAPTER VII - THE TELEPHONE AND NATIONAL EFFICIENCY]]
*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 08 Telephone worldwide|CHAPTER VIII - THE TELEPHONE IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES]]
*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 09 Future of the Telephone|CHAPTER IX - THE FUTURE OF THE TELEPHONE]]


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