The History of Telephone

The History of the Telephone
by Herbert N. Casson
PREFACE
Thirty-five short years, and presto!
the newborn art of telephony is fullgrown.
Three million telephones are now scattered
abroad in foreign countries, and seven millions
are massed here, in the land of its birth.
So entirely has the telephone outgrown the ridicule
with which, as many people can well remember,
it was first received, that it is now in most
places taken for granted, as though it were a
part of the natural phenomena of this planet. It
has so marvellously extended the facilities of
conversation--that "art in which a man has all
mankind for competitors"--that it is now an
indispensable help to whoever would live the
convenient life. The disadvantage of being deaf and
dumb to all absent persons, which was universal
in pre-telephonic days, has now happily been
overcome; and I hope that this story of how and
by whom it was done will be a welcome addition
to American libraries.
It is such a story as the telephone itself might
tell, if it could speak with a voice of its own.
It is not technical. It is not statistical. It is
not exhaustive. It is so brief, in fact, that a
second volume could readily be made by describing
the careers of telephone leaders whose names
I find have been omitted unintentionally from
this book--such indispensable men, for instance,
as William R. Driver, who has signed more telephone
cheques and larger ones than any other
man; Geo. S. Hibbard, Henry W. Pope, and
W. D. Sargent, three veterans who know telephony
in all its phases; George Y. Wallace, the
last survivor of the Rocky Mountain pioneers;
Jasper N. Keller, of Texas and New England;
W. T. Gentry, the central figure of the Southeast,
and the following presidents of telephone
companies: Bernard E. Sunny, of Chicago; E.
B. Field, of Denver; D. Leet Wilson, of Pittsburg;
L. G. Richardson, of Indianapolis; Caspar
E. Yost, of Omaha; James E. Caldwell, of
Nashville; Thomas Sherwin, of Boston; Henry T.
Scott, of San Francisco; H. J. Pettengill, of
Dallas; Alonzo Burt, of Milwaukee; John Kil-
gour, of Cincinnati; and Chas. S. Gleed, of Kansas
City.
I am deeply indebted to most of these men for
the information which is herewith presented;
and also to such pioneers, now dead, as O. E.
Madden, the first General Agent; Frank L.
Pope, the noted electrical expert; C. H. Haskins,
of Milwaukee; George F. Ladd, of San Francisco;
and Geo. F. Durant, of St. Louis.
H. N. C.
PINE HILL, N. Y., June 1, 1910.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 
I THE BIRTH OF THE TELEPHONE
II THE BUILDING OF THE BUSINESS
III THE HOLDING OF THE BUSINESS
IV THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ART
V THE EXPANSION OF THE BUSINESS 
VI NOTABLE USERS OF THE TELEPHONE 
VII THE TELEPHONE AND NATIONAL EFFICIENCY
VIII THE TELEPHONE IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES
IX THE FUTURE OF THE TELEPHONE
THE HISTORY OF THE TELEPHONE
CHAPTER I
THE BIRTH OF THE TELEPHONE
In that somewhat distant year 1875, when the
telegraph and the Atlantic cable were the
most wonderful things in the world, a tall young
professor of elocution was desperately busy in a
noisy machine-shop that stood in one of the narrow
streets of Boston, not far from Scollay
Square. It was a very hot afternoon in June,
but the young professor had forgotten the heat
and the grime of the workshop. He was wholly
absorbed in the making of a nondescript machine,
a sort of crude harmonica with a clock-spring
reed, a magnet, and a wire. It was a most
absurd toy in appearance. It was unlike any
other thing that had ever been made in any country.
The young professor had been toiling over
it for three years and it had constantly baffled
him, until, on this hot afternoon in June, 1875,
he heard an almost inaudible sound--a faint
TWANG--come from the machine itself.
For an instant he was stunned. He had been
expecting just such a sound for several months,
but it came so suddenly as to give him the sensation
of surprise. His eyes blazed with delight,
and he sprang in a passion of eagerness to an
adjoining room in which stood a young mechanic
who was assisting him.
"Snap that reed again, Watson," cried the
apparently irrational young professor. There
was one of the odd-looking machines in each
room, so it appears, and the two were connected
by an electric wire. Watson had snapped the
reed on one of the machines and the professor
had heard from the other machine exactly the
same sound. It was no more than the gentle
TWANG of a clock-spring; but it was the first time
in the history of the world that a complete sound
had been carried along a wire, reproduced perfectly
at the other end, and heard by an expert
in acoustics.
That twang of the clock-spring was the first
tiny cry of the newborn telephone, uttered in the
clanging din of a machine-shop and happily
heard by a man whose ear had been trained to
recognize the strange voice of the little newcomer.
There, amidst flying belts and jarring
wheels, the baby telephone was born, as feeble
and helpless as any other baby, and "with no
language but a cry."
The professor-inventor, who had thus rescued
the tiny foundling of science, was a young Scottish
American. His name, now known as widely
as the telephone itself, was Alexander Graham
Bell. He was a teacher of acoustics and a student
of electricity, possibly the only man in his
generation who was able to focus a knowledge
of both subjects upon the problem of the telephone.
To other men that exceedingly faint
sound would have been as inaudible as silence
itself; but to Bell it was a thunder-clap. It was
a dream come true. It was an impossible thing
which had in a flash become so easy that he could
scarcely believe it. Here, without the use of a
battery, with no more electric current than that
made by a couple of magnets, all the waves of
a sound had been carried along a wire and
changed back to sound at the farther end. It
was absurd. It was incredible. It was something
which neither wire nor electricity had been
known to do before. But it was true.
No discovery has ever been less accidental.
It was the last link of a long chain of discoveries.
It was the result of a persistent and
deliberate search. Already, for half a year
or longer, Bell had known the correct theory of
the telephone; but he had not realized that the
feeble undulatory current generated by a magnet
was strong enough for the transmission of speech.
He had been taught to undervalue the incredible
efficiency of electricity.
Not only was Bell himself a teacher of the
laws of speech, so highly skilled that he was
an instructor in Boston University. His father,
also, his two brothers, his uncle, and his
grandfather had taught the laws of speech in the
universities of Edinburgh, Dublin, and London.
For three generations the Bells had been professors
of the science of talking. They had even
helped to create that science by several inven-
tions. The first of them, Alexander Bell, had
invented a system for the correction of stammering
and similar defects of speech. The second,
Alexander Melville Bell, was the dean of British
elocutionists, a man of creative brain and a most
impressive facility of rhetoric. He was the author
of a dozen text-books on the art of speaking
correctly, and also of a most ingenious
sign-language which he called "Visible Speech."
Every letter in the alphabet of this language
represented a certain action of the lips and
tongue; so that a new method was provided for
those who wished to learn foreign languages or
to speak their own language more correctly.
And the third of these speech-improving Bells,
the inventor of the telephone, inherited the
peculiar genius of his fathers, both inventive and
rhetorical, to such a degree that as a boy he had
constructed an artificial skull, from gutta-percha
and India rubber, which, when enlivened by a
blast of air from a hand-bellows, would actually
pronounce several words in an almost human
manner.
The third Bell, the only one of this remarkable
family who concerns us at this time, was a young
man, barely twenty-eight, at the time when his
ear caught the first cry of the telephone. But he
was already a man of some note on his own account.
He had been educated in Edinburgh, the
city of his birth, and in London; and had in one
way and another picked up a smattering of
anatomy, music, electricity, and telegraphy.
Until he was sixteen years of age, he had read
nothing but novels and poetry and romantic tales
of Scottish heroes. Then he left home to become
a teacher of elocution in various British
schools, and by the time he was of age he had
made several slight discoveries as to the nature
of vowel-sounds. Shortly afterwards, he met in
London two distinguished men, Alexander J.
Ellis and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who did far
more than they ever knew to forward Bell in
the direction of the telephone.
Ellis was the president of the London Philological
Society. Also, he was the translator
of the famous book on "The Sensations of Tone,"
written by Helmholtz, who, in the period from
1871 to 1894 made Berlin the world-centre for
the study of the physical sciences. So it happened
that when Bell ran to Ellis as a young
enthusiast and told his experiments, Ellis informed
him that Helmholtz had done the same
things several years before and done them more
completely. He brought Bell to his house and
showed him what Helmholtz had done--how he
had kept tuning-forks in vibration by the power
of electro-magnets, and blended the tones of several
tuning-forks together to produce the complex
quality of the human voice.
Now, Helmholtz had not been trying to invent
a telephone, nor any sort of message-carrier.
His aim was to point out the physical basis of
music, and nothing more. But this fact that
an electro-magnet would set a tuning-fork humming
was new to Bell and very attractive. It
appealed at once to him as a student of speech.
If a tuning-fork could be made to sing by a
magnet or an electrified wire, why would it not
be possible to make a musical telegraph--a telegraph
with a piano key-board, so that many messages
could be sent at once over a single wire?
Unknown to Bell, there were several dozen inven-
tors then at work upon this problem, which
proved in the end to be very elusive. But it gave
him at least a starting-point, and he forthwith
commenced his quest of the telephone.
As he was then in England, his first step was
naturally to visit Sir Charles Wheatstone, the
best known English expert on telegraphy.
Sir Charles had earned his title by many inventions.
He was a simple-natured scientist, and
treated Bell with the utmost kindness. He
showed him an ingenious talking-machine that
had been made by Baron de Kempelin. At this
time Bell was twenty-two and unknown; Wheatstone
was sixty-seven and famous. And the
personality of the veteran scientist made so vivid
a picture upon the mind of the impressionable
young Bell that the grand passion of science became
henceforth the master-motif of his life.
From this summit of glorious ambition he was
thrown, several months later, into the depths of
grief and despondency. The White Plague had
come to the home in Edinburgh and taken away
his two brothers. More, it had put its mark
upon the young inventor himself. Nothing but
a change of climate, said his doctor, would put
him out of danger. And so, to save his life, he
and his father and mother set sail from Glasgow
and came to the small Canadian town of Brantford,
where for a year he fought down his
tendency to consumption, and satisfied his nervous
energy by teaching "Visible Speech" to a
tribe of Mohawk Indians.
By this time it had become evident, both to
his parents and to his friends, that young Graham
was destined to become some sort of a creative
genius. He was tall and supple, with a pale
complexion, large nose, full lips, jet-black eyes,
and jet-black hair, brushed high and usually
rumpled into a curly tangle. In temperament
he was a true scientific Bohemian, with the ideals
of a savant and the disposition of an artist. He
was wholly a man of enthusiasms, more devoted
to ideas than to people; and less likely to master
his own thoughts than to be mastered by them.
He had no shrewdness, in any commercial sense,
and very little knowledge of the small practical
details of ordinary living. He was always intense,
always absorbed. When he applied his
mind to a problem, it became at once an enthralling
arena, in which there went whirling a chariot-
race of ideas and inventive fancies.
He had been fascinated from boyhood by his
father's system of "Visible Speech." He knew
it so well that he once astonished a professor of
Oriental languages by repeating correctly a sentence
of Sanscrit that had been written in "Visible
Speech" characters. While he was living in
London his most absorbing enthusiasm was the
instruction of a class of deaf-mutes, who could
be trained to talk, he believed, by means of the
"Visible Speech" alphabet. He was so deeply
impressed by the progress made by these pupils,
and by the pathos of their dumbness, that when
he arrived in Canada he was in doubt as to which
of these two tasks was the more important--the
teaching of deaf-mutes or the invention of a
musical telegraph.
At this point, and before Bell had begun to
experiment with his telegraph, the scene of the
story shifts from Canada to Massachusetts. It
appears that his father, while lecturing in Boston,
had mentioned Graham's exploits with a
class of deaf-mutes; and soon afterward the Boston
Board of Education wrote to Graham, offering
him five hundred dollars if he would come to
Boston and introduce his system of teaching in a
school for deaf-mutes that had been opened recently.
The young man joyfully agreed, and on
the first of April, 1871, crossed the line and became
for the remainder of his life an American.
For the next two years his telegraphic work
was laid aside, if not forgotten. His success as
a teacher of deaf-mutes was sudden and overwhelming.
It was the educational sensation of
1871. It won him a professorship in Boston
University; and brought so many pupils around
him that he ventured to open an ambitious
"School of Vocal Physiology," which became at
once a profitable enterprise. For a time there
seemed to be little hope of his escaping from the
burden of this success and becoming an inventor,
when, by a most happy coincidence, two of his
pupils brought to him exactly the sort of stimulation
and practical help that he needed and had
not up to this time received.
One of these pupils was a little deaf-mute
tot, five years of age, named Georgie Sanders.
Bell had agreed to give him a series of private
lessons for $350 a year; and as the child lived
with his grandmother in the city of Salem, sixteen
miles from Boston, it was agreed that Bell should
make his home with the Sanders family. Here
he not only found the keenest interest and sympathy
in his air-castles of invention, but also was
given permission to use the cellar of the house as
his workshop.
For the next three years this cellar was his
favorite retreat. He littered it with tuning-
forks, magnets, batteries, coils of wire, tin
trumpets, and cigar-boxes. No one outside of
the Sanders family was allowed to enter it, as
Bell was nervously afraid of having his ideas
stolen. He would even go to five or six stores
to buy his supplies, for fear that his intentions
should be discovered. Almost with the secrecy
of a conspirator, he worked alone in this cellar,
usually at night, and quite oblivious of the fact
that sleep was a necessity to him and to the
Sanders family.
"Often in the middle of the night Bell would
wake me up," said Thomas Sanders, the father
of Georgie. "His black eyes would be blazing
with excitement. Leaving me to go down to
the cellar, he would rush wildly to the barn and
begin to send me signals along his experimental
wires. If I noticed any improvement in his
machine, he would be delighted. He would leap
and whirl around in one of his `war-dances' and
then go contentedly to bed. But if the experiment
was a failure, he would go back to his workbench
and try some different plan."
The second pupil who became a factor--a
very considerable factor--in Bell's career was a
fifteen-year-old girl named Mabel Hubbard, who
had lost her hearing, and consequently her speech,
through an attack of scarlet-fever when a baby.
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
happiness of making her his wife. Mabel Hubbard
did much to encourage Bell. She followed each
step of his progress with the keenest interest.
She wrote his letters and copied his patents. She
cheered him on when he felt himself beaten.
And through her sympathy with Bell and his ambitions,
she led her father--a widely known Boston
lawyer named Gardiner G. Hubbard--to
become Bell's chief spokesman and defender, a
true apostle of the telephone.
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?"
"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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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
may be, when the creative minds of a nation are
focussed upon the subdual of this mysterious
force, which has more power and more delicacy
than any other force that man has been able to
harness.
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
knew its existence, and none put it to any
practical use. The wisest knew that a piece of
amber, when rubbed, will attract feathery substances.
But they regarded this as poetry rather
than science. There was a pretty legend among
the Phoenicians that the pieces of amber were the
petrified tears of maidens who had thrown themselves
into the sea because of unrequited love,
and each bead of amber was highly prized. It
was worn as an amulet and a symbol of purity.
Not for two thousand years did any one dream
that within its golden heart lay hidden the secret
of a new electrical civilization.
Not even in 1752, when Benjamin Franklin
flew his famous kite on the banks of the Schuylkill
River, and captured the first CANNED LIGHTNING,
was there any definite knowledge of electrical
energy. His lightning-rod was regarded
as an insult to the deity of Heaven. It was
blamed for the earthquake of 1755. And not
until the telegraph of Morse came into general
use, did men dare to think of the thunder-bolt of
Jove as a possible servant of the human race.
Thus it happened that when Bell invented the
telephone, he surprised the world with a new
idea. He had to make the thought as well as
the thing. No Jules Verne or H. G. Wells had
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
to the telephone, except possibly that expressive
phrase in the Bible, "And there came a voice."
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
wonder of it has become greater and not less;
and that there are still honor and profit, plenty
of both, to be won by the inventor and the
scientist.
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
hundred experts who are paid to do nothing else
but try out all new ideas and inventions; and
before these words can pass into the printed
book, new uses and new methods will have
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
the past. It will still be the most alluring and
elusive sprite that ever led the way through a
Dark Continent of mysterious phenomena.
There still remains for some future scientist
the task of showing us in detail exactly what the
telephone current does. Such a man will study
vibrations as Darwin studied the differentiation
of species. He will investigate how a child's
voice, speaking from Boston to Omaha, can
vibrate more than a million pounds of copper
wire; and he will invent a finer system of time to
fit the telephone, which can do as many different
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
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
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
another brain.
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.
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
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.
It makes the second disc shudder. And the
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?
End