PREFACE
Thirty-five short years, and presto! the
newborn art of telephony is full-grown. 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 marvelously 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 Kilgour, 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.
CHAPTER CONTENTS:
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
Illustrations
from book - (not yet available) -
courtesy of Paul A. Rauth:
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 inventions. 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 inventors 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
chariotrace 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 tuningforks, 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 deafmute 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 improved, 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 received 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
afternoon 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 schooldesks 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 electrical
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. Return to Table of Contents
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
shoefactory."
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 flyingmachine"; 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
sheetiron 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-inlaw, 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
demonstrations 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. Sanders, 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 wordpictures 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 wellknown 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
housecleaning 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 protect 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, ninetenths 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'sharps 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, foursquare 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. Return to Table of Contents
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 Western 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 incilable; 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
socalled "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
intelligible 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 claimant 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 eightyseven 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 eighteenmonths' 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 department. 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 creating 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. Return
to Table of Contents
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 messengerboy 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 telephone 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 instance, 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 interlocking 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
inventors. 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 wonderworld 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
matterof-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 rebuilding 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 educator. 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 hundreds 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 crossarms 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 cablelaying 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 gaspipes, 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 toughskinned 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
disturbing 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 scrapheap 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 twentyone 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 afterwards came a
"buzzer," and then the magnetoelectric 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 speakingtube 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-anddog 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 complete 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 chessplayer 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 despatcher 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 telephoneusing 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 manufacturing, 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 coldblooded 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 opendoor 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 telephony--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. Return
to Table of Contents
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 except 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 mastereffort. 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 wellknown 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-andchain 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 redhot 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 conversations 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 seventythousand-mile
nerve-system for the far West.
Chicago, in this year, had two hundred thousand 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 oldtimers--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 fiftymillion-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 convention 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 Companies. 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 streetrailways 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 widespread 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 onequarter 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. Return to Table of Contents
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 sixhundred 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 wilderness. 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 passenger 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 longdistance wires; and in eleven days a
two-thousandline 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 twentyfour
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. Return to Table of Contents
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. Colorado 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 pigiron, 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
coonskin 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 Telegraph," 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 messages 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
today'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-anhour 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 longdistance 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 fortunes 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 ............ 4 cents
Taxes ........... 4 cents
Interest ........ 6 cents
Surplus ......... 8 cents
Maintenance .... 16 cents
Dividends ...... 18 cents
Labor .......... 44 cents
Total ---------------- $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
purpose. It is not at all like a piano or a talkingmachine, 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. Return to Table of Contents
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 airtubes." "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
speakingtrumpet," 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 impressed 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 thirteen 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 monopolized 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-hundreddollar
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 fiftyfive
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 arrowheads. 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 infant 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 onethird 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 nation, 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
telephone 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 steelmill. 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. Return to
Table of Contents
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 sixtytwo 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 staffand-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 department. 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
competition 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 twentytwo thousand, five hundred offices, all of
which helps to make telegraphy a luxury of the few. It is employing as large a force of
messengerboys 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'seye 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," continues
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 psychology 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 faceto-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--onetwentieth 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 twentyfive
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 tremble 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? Return to Table of Contents
