← catalogue

The History of the Telephone

by Herbert Newton Casson · English · Gutenberg #819 · 330,099 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The History of the Telephone
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The History of the Telephone

Author: Herbert Newton Casson


        
Release date: February 1, 1997 [eBook #819]
                Most recently updated: August 5, 2008

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/819

Credits: Produced by Charles Keller, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORY OF THE TELEPHONE ***




Produced by Charles Keller





THE HISTORY OF THE TELEPHONE

By Herbert N. Casson




PREFACE


Thirty-five short years, and presto! the newborn art of telephony is
fullgrown. Three million telephones are now scattered abroad in foreign
countries, and seven millions are massed here, in the land of its birth.

So entirely has the telephone outgrown the ridicule with which, as many
people can well remember, it was first received, that it is now in
most places taken for granted, as though it were a part of the natural
phenomena of this planet. It has so marvellously extended the
facilities of conversation--that "art in which a man has all mankind for
competitors"--that it is now an indispensable help to whoever would
live the convenient life. The disadvantage of being deaf and dumb to
all absent persons, which was universal in pre-telephonic days, has now
happily been overcome; and I hope that this story of how and by whom it
was done will be a welcome addition to American libraries.

It is such a story as the telephone itself might tell, if it could speak
with a voice of its own. It is not technical. It is not statistical. It
is not exhaustive. It is so brief, in fact, that a second volume could
readily be made by describing the careers of telephone leaders whose
names I find have been omitted unintentionally from this book--such
indispensable men, for instance, as William R. Driver, who has signed
more telephone cheques and larger ones than any other man; Geo. S.
Hibbard, Henry W. Pope, and W. D. Sargent, three veterans who know
telephony in all its phases; George Y. Wallace, the last survivor of the
Rocky Mountain pioneers; Jasper N. Keller, of Texas and New England;
W. T. Gentry, the central figure of the Southeast, and the following
presidents of telephone companies: Bernard E. Sunny, of Chicago; E. B.
Field, of Denver; D. Leet Wilson, of Pittsburg; L. G. Richardson, of
Indianapolis; Caspar E. Yost, of Omaha; James E. Caldwell, of Nashville;
Thomas Sherwin, of Boston; Henry T. Scott, of San Francisco; H. J.
Pettengill, of Dallas; Alonzo Burt, of Milwaukee; John 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.



CONTENTS


CHAPTER

     I    THE BIRTH OF THE TELEPHONE

     II   THE BUILDING OF THE BUSINESS

     III  THE HOLDING OF THE BUSINESS

     IV   THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ART

     V    THE EXPANSION OF THE BUSINESS

     VI   NOTABLE USERS OF THE TELEPHONE

     VII THE TELEPHONE AND NATIONAL EFFICIENCY

     VIII THE TELEPHONE IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES

     IX THE FUTURE OF THE TELEPHONE




THE HISTORY OF THE TELEPHONE



CHAPTER I. THE BIRTH OF THE TELEPHONE

In that somewhat distant year 1875, when the telegraph and the Atlantic
cable were the most wonderful things in the world, a tall young
professor of elocution was desperately busy in a noisy machine-shop
that stood in one of the narrow streets of Boston, not far from Scollay
Square. It was a very hot afternoon in June, but the young professor had
forgotten the heat and the grime of the workshop. He was wholly absorbed
in the making of a nondescript machine, a sort of crude harmonica with
a clock-spring reed, a magnet, and a wire. It was a most absurd toy in
appearance. It was unlike any other thing that had ever been made in any
country. The young professor had been toiling over it for three years
and it had constantly baffled him, until, on this hot afternoon in June,
1875, he heard an almost inaudible sound--a faint TWANG--come from the
machine itself.

For an instant he was stunned. He had been expecting just such a sound
for several months, but it came so suddenly as to give him the sensation
of surprise. His eyes blazed with delight, and he sprang in a passion of
eagerness to an adjoining room in which stood a young mechanic who was
assisting him.

"Snap that reed again, Watson," cried the apparently irrational young
professor. There was one of the odd-looking machines in each room, so
it appears, and the two were connected by an electric wire. Watson had
snapped the reed on one of the machines and the professor had heard from
the other machine exactly the same sound. It was no more than the gentle
TWANG of a clock-spring; but it was the first time in the history of the
world that a complete sound had been carried along a wire, reproduced
perfectly at the other end, and heard by an expert in acoustics.

That twang of the clock-spring was the first tiny cry of the newborn
telephone, uttered in the clanging din of a machine-shop and happily
heard by a man whose ear had been trained to recognize the strange voice
of the little newcomer. There, amidst flying belts and jarring wheels,
the baby telephone was born, as feeble and helpless as any other baby,
and "with no language but a cry."

The professor-inventor, who had thus rescued the tiny foundling of
science, was a young Scottish American. His name, now known as widely
as the telephone itself, was Alexander Graham Bell. He was a teacher
of acoustics and a student of electricity, possibly the only man in his
generation who was able to focus a knowledge of both subjects upon the
problem of the telephone. To other men that exceedingly faint sound
would have been as inaudible as silence itself; but to Bell it was a
thunder-clap. It was a dream come true. It was an impossible thing which
had in a flash become so easy that he could scarcely believe it. Here,
without the use of a battery, with no more electric current than that
made by a couple of magnets, all the waves of a sound had been carried
along a wire and changed back to sound at the farther end. It was
absurd. It was incredible. It was something which neither wire nor
electricity had been known to do before. But it was true.

No discovery has ever been less accidental. It was the last link of
a long chain of discoveries. It was the result of a persistent and
deliberate search. Already, for half a year or longer, Bell had known
the correct theory of the telephone; but he had not realized that the
feeble undulatory current generated by a magnet was strong enough
for the transmission of speech. He had been taught to undervalue the
incredible efficiency of electricity.

Not only was Bell himself a teacher of the laws of speech, so highly
skilled that he was an instructor in Boston University. His father,
also, his two brothers, his uncle, and his grandfather had taught the
laws of speech in the universities of Edinburgh, Dublin, and London.
For three generations the Bells had been professors of the science
of talking. They had even helped to create that science by several
inven-tions. The first of them, Alexander Bell, had invented a system
for the correction of stammering and similar defects of speech. The
second, Alexander Melville Bell, was the dean of British elocutionists,
a man of creative brain and a most impressive facility of rhetoric. He
was the author of a dozen text-books on the art of speaking correctly,
and also of a most ingenious sign-language which he called "Visible
Speech." Every letter in the alphabet of this language represented a
certain action of the lips and tongue; so that a new method was provided
for those who wished to learn foreign languages or to speak their own
language more correctly. And the third of these speech-improving Bells,
the inventor of the telephone, inherited the peculiar genius of his
fathers, both inventive and rhetorical, to such a degree that as a boy
he had constructed an artificial skull, from gutta-percha and India
rubber, which, when enlivened by a blast of air from a hand-bellows,
would actually pronounce several words in an almost human manner.

The third Bell, the only one of this remarkable family who concerns us
at this time, was a young man, barely twenty-eight, at the time when his
ear caught the first cry of the telephone. But he was already a man of
some note on his own account. He had been educated in Edinburgh, the
city of his birth, and in London; and had in one way and another picked
up a smattering of anatomy, music, electricity, and telegraphy. Until he
was sixteen years of age, he had read nothing but novels and poetry and
romantic tales of Scottish heroes. Then he left home to become a teacher
of elocution in various British schools, and by the time he was of age
he had made several slight discoveries as to the nature of vowel-sounds.
Shortly afterwards, he met in London two distinguished men, Alexander J.
Ellis and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who did far more than they ever knew
to forward Bell in the direction of the telephone.

Ellis was the president of the London Philological Society. Also, he was
the translator of the famous book on "The Sensations of Tone," written
by Helmholtz, who, in the period from 1871 to 1894 made Berlin the
world-centre for the study of the physical sciences. So it happened that
when Bell ran to Ellis as a young enthusiast and told his experiments,
Ellis informed him that Helmholtz had done the same things several years
before and done them more completely. He brought Bell to his house and
showed him what Helmholtz had done--how he had kept tuning-forks in
vibration by the power of electro-magnets, and blended the tones of
several tuning-forks together to produce the complex quality of the
human voice.

Now, Helmholtz had not been trying to invent a telephone, nor any sort
of message-carrier. His aim was to point out the physical basis of
music, and nothing more. But this fact that an electro-magnet would set
a tuning-fork humming was new to Bell and very attractive. It appealed
at once to him as a student of speech. If a tuning-fork could be made to
sing by a magnet or an electrified wire, why would it not be possible
to make a musical telegraph--a telegraph with a piano key-board, so that
many messages could be sent at once over a single wire? Unknown to Bell,
there were several dozen inven-tors then at work upon this problem,
which proved in the end to be very elusive. But it gave him at least a
starting-point, and he forthwith commenced his quest of the telephone.

As he was then in England, his first step was naturally to visit Sir
Charles Wheatstone, the best known English expert on telegraphy. Sir
Charles had earned his title by many inventions. He was a simple-natured
scientist, and treated Bell with the utmost kindness. He showed him an
ingenious talking-machine that had been made by Baron de Kempelin. At
this time Bell was twenty-two and unknown; Wheatstone was sixty-seven
and famous. And the personality of the veteran scientist made so vivid
a picture upon the mind of the impressionable young Bell that the grand
passion of science became henceforth the master-motif of his life.

From this summit of glorious ambition he was thrown, several months
later, into the depths of grief and despondency. The White Plague had
come to the home in Edinburgh and taken away his two brothers. More, it
had put its mark upon the young inventor himself. Nothing but a change
of climate, said his doctor, would put him out of danger. And so, to
save his life, he and his father and mother set sail from Glasgow and
came to the small Canadian town of Brantford, where for a year he fought
down his tendency to consumption, and satisfied his nervous energy by
teaching "Visible Speech" to a tribe of Mohawk Indians.

By this time it had become evident, both to his parents and to his
friends, that young Graham was destined to become some sort of a
creative genius. He was tall and supple, with a pale complexion, large
nose, full lips, jet-black eyes, and jet-black hair, brushed high
and usually rumpled into a curly tangle. In temperament he was a true
scientific Bohemian, with the ideals of a savant and the disposition
of an artist. He was wholly a man of enthusiasms, more devoted to ideas
than to people; and less likely to master his own thoughts than to be
mastered by them. He had no shrewdness, in any commercial sense, and
very little knowledge of the small practical details of ordinary living.
He was always intense, always absorbed. When he applied his mind to a
problem, it became at once an enthralling arena, in which there went
whirling a chariot-race of ideas and inventive fancies.

He had been fascinated from boyhood by his father's system of "Visible
Speech." He knew it so well that he once astonished a professor of
Oriental languages by repeating correctly a sentence of Sanscrit that
had been written in "Visible Speech" characters. While he was living in
London his most absorbing enthusiasm was the instruction of a class of
deaf-mutes, who could be trained to talk, he believed, by means of the
"Visible Speech" alphabet. He was so deeply impressed by the progress
made by these pupils, and by the pathos of their dumbness, that when he
arrived in Canada he was in doubt as to which of these two tasks was the
more important--the teaching of deaf-mutes or the invention of a musical
telegraph.

At this point, and before Bell had begun to experiment with his
telegraph, the scene of the story shifts from Canada to Massachusetts.
It appears that his father, while lecturing in Boston, had mentioned
Graham's exploits with a class of deaf-mutes; and soon afterward the
Boston Board of Education wrote to Graham, offering him five hundred
dollars if he would come to Boston and introduce his system of teaching
in a school for deaf-mutes that had been opened recently. The young man
joyfully agreed, and on the first of April, 1871, crossed the line and
became for the remainder of his life an American.

For the next two years his telegraphic work was laid aside, if not
forgotten. His success as a teacher of deaf-mutes was sudden and
overwhelming. It was the educational sensation of 1871. It won him a
professorship in Boston University; and brought so many pupils around
him that he ventured to open an ambitious "School of Vocal Physiology,"
which became at once a profitable enterprise. For a time there seemed
to be little hope of his escaping from the burden of this success and
becoming an inventor, when, by a most happy coincidence, two of his
pupils brought to him exactly the sort of stimulation and practical help
that he needed and had not up to this time received.

One of these pupils was a little deaf-mute tot, five years of age, named
Georgie Sanders. Bell had agreed to give him a series of private lessons
for $350 a year; and as the child lived with his grandmother in the city
of Salem, sixteen miles from Boston, it was agreed that Bell should make
his home with the Sanders family. Here he not only found the keenest
interest and sympathy in his air-castles of invention, but also was
given permission to use the cellar of the house as his workshop.

For the next three years this cellar was his favorite retreat. He
littered it with tuning-forks, magnets, batteries, coils of wire, tin
trumpets, and cigar-boxes. No one outside of the Sanders family was
allowed to enter it, as Bell was nervously afraid of having his ideas
stolen. He would even go to five or six stores to buy his supplies, for
fear that his intentions should be discovered. Almost with the secrecy
of a conspirator, he worked alone in this cellar, usually at night, and
quite oblivious of the fact that sleep was a necessity to him and to the
Sanders family.

"Often in the middle of the night Bell would wake me up," said Thomas
Sanders, the father of Georgie. "His black eyes would be blazing with
excitement. Leaving me to go down to the cellar, he would rush wildly to
the barn and begin to send me signals along his experimental wires. If I
noticed any improvement in his machine, he would be delighted. He would
leap and whirl around in one of his `war-dances' and then go contentedly
to bed. But if the experiment was a failure, he would go back to his
workbench and try some different plan."

The second pupil who became a factor--a very considerable factor--in
Bell's career was a fifteen-year-old girl named Mabel Hubbard, who had
lost her hearing, and consequently her speech, through an attack of
scarlet-fever when a baby. She was a gentle and lovable girl, and Bell,
in his ardent and headlong way, lost his heart to her completely; and
four years later, he had the happiness of making her his wife. Mabel
Hubbard did much to encourage Bell. She followed each step of his
progress with the keenest interest. She wrote his letters and copied his
patents. She cheered him on when he felt himself beaten. And through her
sympathy with Bell and his ambitions, she led her father--a widely
known Boston lawyer named Gardiner G. Hubbard--to become Bell's chief
spokesman and defender, a true apostle of the telephone.

Hubbard first became aware of Bell's inventive efforts one evening when
Bell was visiting at his home in Cambridge. Bell was illustrating some
of the mysteries of acoustics by the aid of a piano. "Do you know," he
said to Hubbard, "that if I sing the note G close to the strings of
the piano, that the G-string will answer me?" "Well, what then?" asked
Hubbard. "It is a fact of tremendous importance," replied Bell. "It is
an evidence that we may some day have a musical telegraph, which will
send as many messages simultaneously over one wire as there are notes on
that piano."

Later, Bell ventured to confide to Hubbard his wild dream of sending
speech over an electric wire, but Hubbard laughed him to scorn. "Now you
are talking nonsense," he said. "Such a thing never could be more than
a scientific toy. You had better throw that idea out of your mind and go
ahead with your musical telegraph, which if it is successful will make
you a millionaire."

But the longer Bell toiled at his musical telegraph, the more he dreamed
of replacing the telegraph and its cumbrous sign-language by a new
machine that would carry, not dots and dashes, but the human voice.
"If I can make a deaf-mute talk," he said, "I can make iron talk." For
months he wavered between the two ideas. He had no more than the most
hazy conception of what this voice-carrying machine would be like.
At first he conceived of having a harp at one end of the wire, and a
speaking-trumpet at the other, so that the tones of the voice would be
reproduced by the strings of the harp.

Then, in the early Summer of 1874, while he was puzzling over this harp
apparatus, the dim outline of a new path suddenly glinted in front of
him. He had not been forgetful of "Visible Speech" all this while,
but had been making experiments with two remarkable machines--the
phonautograph and the manometric capsule, by means of which the
vibrations of sound were made plainly visible. If these could be
im-proved, he thought, then the deaf might be taught to speak by
SIGHT--by learning an alphabet of vibrations. He mentioned these
experiments to a Boston friend, Dr. Clarence J. Blake, and he, being a
surgeon and an aurist, naturally said, "Why don't you use a REAL EAR?"

Such an idea never had, and probably never could have, occurred to Bell;
but he accepted it with eagerness. Dr. Blake cut an ear from a dead
man's head, together with the ear-drum and the associated bones. Bell
took this fragment of a skull and arranged it so that a straw touched
the ear-drum at one end and a piece of moving smoked glass at the other.
Thus, when Bell spoke loudly into the ear, the vibrations of the drum
made tiny markings upon the glass.

It was one of the most extraordinary incidents in the whole history of
the telephone. To an uninitiated onlooker, nothing could have been more
ghastly or absurd. How could any one have interpreted the gruesome joy
of this young professor with the pale face and the black eyes, who stood
earnestly singing, whispering, and shouting into a dead man's ear? What
sort of a wizard must he be, or ghoul, or madman? And in Salem, too, the
home of the witchcraft superstition! Certainly it would not have gone
well with Bell had he lived two centuries earlier and been caught at
such black magic.

What had this dead man's ear to do with the invention of the telephone?
Much. Bell noticed how small and thin was the ear-drum, and yet how
effectively it could send thrills and vibrations through heavy bones.
"If this tiny disc can vibrate a bone," he thought, "then an iron disc
might vibrate an iron rod, or at least, an iron wire." In a flash the
conception of a membrane telephone was pictured in his mind. He saw in
imagination two iron discs, or ear-drums, far apart and connected by
an electrified wire, catching the vibrations of sound at one end, and
reproducing them at the other. At last he was on the right path, and had
a theoretical knowledge of what a speaking telephone ought to be. What
remained to be done was to construct such a machine and find out how the
electric current could best be brought into harness.

Then, as though Fortune suddenly felt that he was winning this
stupendous success too easily, Bell was flung back by an avalanche
of troubles. Sanders and Hubbard, who had been paying the cost of his
experiments, abruptly announced that they would pay no more unless he
confined his attention to the musical telegraph, and stopped wasting his
time on ear-toys that never could be of any financial value. What
these two men asked could scarcely be denied, as one of them was his
best-paying patron and the other was the father of the girl whom he
hoped to marry. "If you wish my daughter," said Hubbard, "you must
abandon your foolish telephone." Bell's "School of Vocal Physiology,"
too, from which he had hoped so much, had come to an inglorious end.
He had been too much absorbed in his experiments to sustain it. His
professorship had been given up, and he had no pupils except Georgie
Sanders and Mabel Hubbard. He was poor, much poorer than his associates
knew. And his mind was torn and distracted by the contrary calls of
science, poverty, business, and affection. Pouring out his sorrows in a
letter to his mother, he said: "I am now beginning to realize the cares
and anxieties of being an inventor. I have had to put off all pupils and
classes, for flesh and blood could not stand much longer such a strain
as I have had upon me."

While stumbling through this Slough of Despond, he was called to
Washington by his patent lawyer. Not having enough money to pay the cost
of such a journey, he borrowed the price of a return ticket from Sanders
and arranged to stay with a friend in Washington, to save a hotel bill
that he could not afford. At that time Professor Joseph Henry, who knew
more of the theory of electrical science than any other American,
was the Grand Old Man of Washington; and poor Bell, in his doubt and
desperation, resolved to run to him for advice.

Then came a meeting which deserves to be historic. For an entire
afternoon the two men worked together over the apparatus that Bell had
brought from Boston, just as Henry had worked over the telegraph before
Bell was born. Henry was now a veteran of seventy-eight, with only
three years remaining to his credit in the bank of Time, while Bell was
twenty-eight. There was a long half-century between them; but the youth
had discovered a New Fact that the sage, in all his wisdom, had never
known.

"You are in possession of the germ of a great invention," said Henry,
"and I would advise you to work at it until you have made it complete."

"But," replied Bell, "I have not got the electrical knowledge that is
necessary."

"Get it," responded the aged scientist.

"I cannot tell you how much these two words have encouraged me," said
Bell afterwards, in describing this interview to his parents. "I live
too much in an atmosphere of discouragement for scientific pursuits; and
such a chimerical idea as telegraphing VOCAL SOUNDS would indeed seem to
most minds scarcely feasible enough to spend time in working over."

By this time Bell had moved his workshop from the cellar in Salem to 109
Court Street, Boston, where he had rented a room from Charles Williams,
a manufacturer of electrical supplies. Thomas A. Watson was his
assistant, and both Bell and Watson lived nearby, in two cheap little
bedrooms. The rent of the workshop and bedrooms, and Watson's wages
of nine dollars a week, were being paid by Sanders and Hubbard.
Consequently, when Bell returned from Washington, he was compelled
by his agreement to devote himself mainly to the musical telegraph,
although his heart was now with the telephone. For exactly three months
after his interview with Professor Henry, he continued to plod ahead,
along both lines, until, on that memorable hot afternoon in June, 1875,
the full TWANG of the clock-spring came over the wire, and the telephone
was born.

From this moment, Bell was a man of one purpose. He won over Sanders and
Hubbard. He converted Watson into an enthusiast. He forgot his musical
telegraph, his "Visible Speech," his classes, his poverty. He threw
aside a profession in which he was already locally famous. And he
grappled with this new mystery of electricity, as Henry had advised
him to do, encouraging himself with the fact that Morse, who was only
a painter, had mastered his electrical difficulties, and there was no
reason why a professor of acoustics should not do as much.

The telephone was now in existence, but it was the youngest and feeblest
thing in the nation. It had not yet spoken a word. It had to be taught,
developed, and made fit for the service of the irritable business world.
All manner of discs had to be tried, some smaller and thinner than
a dime and others of steel boiler-plate as heavy as the shield of
Achilles. In all the books of electrical science, there was nothing to
help Bell and Watson in this journey they were making through an unknown
country. They were as chartless as Columbus was in 1492. Neither they
nor any one else had acquired any experience in the rearing of a young
telephone. No one knew what to do next. There was nothing to know.

For forty weeks--long exasperating weeks--the telephone could do no more
than gasp and make strange inarticulate noises. Its educators had not
learned how to manage it. Then, on March 10, 1876, IT TALKED. It said
distinctly--

"MR. WATSON, COME HERE, I WANT YOU." Watson, who was at the lower end of
the wire, in the basement, dropped the receiver and rushed with wild joy
up three flights of stairs to tell the glad tidings to Bell. "I can hear
you!" he shouted breathlessly. "I can hear the WORDS."

It was not easy, of course, for the weak young telephone to make itself
heard in that noisy workshop. No one, not even Bell and Watson, was
familiar with its odd little voice. Usually Watson, who had a
remarkably keen sense of hearing, did the listening; and Bell, who was
a professional elocutionist, did the talking. And day by day the tone
of the baby instrument grew clearer--a new note in the orchestra of
civilization.

On his twenty-ninth birthday, Bell received his patent, No.
174,465--"the most valuable single patent ever issued" in any country.
He had created something so entirely new that there was no name for it
in any of the world's languages. In describing it to the officials
of the Patent Office, he was obliged to call it "an improvement in
telegraphy," when, in truth, it was nothing of the kind. It was as
different from the telegraph as the eloquence of a great orator is from
the sign-language of a deaf-mute.

Other inventors had worked from the standpoint of the telegraph; and
they never did, and never could, get any better results than signs and
symbols. But Bell worked from the standpoint of the human voice. He
cross-fertilized the two sciences of acoustics and electricity. His
study of "Visible Speech" had trained his mind so that he could mentally
SEE the shape of a word as he spoke it. He knew what a spoken word was,
and how it acted upon the air, or the ether, that carried its vibrations
from the lips to the ear. He was a third-generation specialist in the
nature of speech, and he knew that for the transmission of spoken words
there must be "a pulsatory action of the electric current which is the
exact equivalent of the aerial impulses."

Bell knew just enough about electricity, and not too much. He did
not know the possible from the impossible. "Had I known more about
electricity, and less about sound," he said, "I would never have
invented the telephone." What he had done was so amazing, so foolhardy,
that no trained electrician could have thought of it. It was "the
very hardihood of invention," and yet it was not in any sense a chance
discovery. It was the natural output of a mind that had been led to
assemble just the right materials for such a product.

As though the very stars in their courses were working for this young
wizard with the talking wire, the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia
opened its doors exactly two months after the telephone had learned to
talk. Here was a superb opportunity to let the wide world know what
had been done, and fortunately Hubbard was one of the Centennial
Commissioners. By his influence a small table was placed in the
Department of Education, in a narrow space between a stairway and a
wall, and on this table was deposited the first of the telephones.

Bell had no intention of going to the Centennial himself. He was too
poor. Sanders and Hubbard had never done more than pay his room-rent and
the expense of his experiments. For his three or four years of inventing
he had 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 after-noon
the judges were to make a special tour of inspection, and Mr. Hubbard,
after much trouble, had obtained a promise that they would spend a
few minutes examining Bell's telephone. By this time it had been on
exhibition for more than six weeks, without attracting the serious
attention of anybody.

When Sunday afternoon arrived, Bell was at his little table, nervous,
yet confident. But hour after hour went by, and the judges did not
arrive. The day was intensely hot, and they had many wonders to examine.
There was the first electric light, and the first grain-binder, and the
musical telegraph of Elisha Gray, and the marvellous exhibit of printing
telegraphs shown by the Western Union Company. By the time they came to
Bell's table, through a litter of school-desks and blackboards, the
hour was seven o'clock, and every man in the party was hot, tired, and
hungry. Several announced their intention of returning to their hotels.
One took up a telephone receiver, looked at it blankly, and put it
down again. He did not even place it to his ear. Another judge made a
slighting remark which raised a laugh at Bell's expense. Then a most
marvellous thing happened--such an incident as would make a chapter in
"The Arabian Nights Entertainments."

Accompanied by his wife, the Empress Theresa, and by a bevy of
courtiers, the Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro de Alcantara, walked into
the room, advanced with both hands outstretched to the bewildered Bell,
and exclaimed: "Professor Bell, I am delighted to see you again." The
judges at once forgot the heat and the fatigue and the hunger. Who was
this young inventor, with the pale complexion and black eyes, that he
should be the friend of Emperors? They did not know, and for the moment
even Bell himself had forgotten, that Dom Pedro had once visited Bell's
class of deaf-mutes at Boston University. He was especially interested
in such humanitarian work, and had recently helped to organize the first
Brazilian school for deaf-mutes at Rio de Janeiro. And so, with the
tall, blond-bearded Dom Pedro in the centre, the assembled judges, and
scientists--there were fully fifty in all--entered with unusual zest
into the proceedings of this first telephone exhibition.

A wire had been strung from one end of the room to the other, and while
Bell went to the transmitter, Dom Pedro took up the receiver and placed
it to his ear. It was a moment of tense expectancy. No one knew clearly
what was about to happen, when the Emperor, with a dramatic gesture,
raised his head from the receiver and exclaimed with a look of utter
amazement: "MY GOD--IT TALKS!"

Next came to the receiver the oldest scientist in the group, the
venerable Joseph Henry, whose encouragement to Bell had been so timely.
He stopped to listen, and, as one of the bystanders afterwards said,
no one could forget the look of awe that came into his face as he heard
that iron disc talking with a human voice. "This," said he, "comes
nearer to overthrowing the doctrine of the conservation of energy than
anything I ever saw."

Then came Sir William Thomson, latterly known as Lord Kelvin. It was
fitting that he should be there, for he was the foremost 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.



CHAPTER II. THE BUILDING OF THE BUSINESS

After the telephone had been born in Boston, baptized in the Patent
Office, and given a royal reception at the Philadelphia Centennial, it
might be supposed that its life thenceforth would be one of peace and
pleasantness. But as this is history, and not fancy, there must be
set down the very surprising fact that the young newcomer received no
welcome and no notice from the great business world. "It is a scientific
toy," said the men of trade and commerce. "It is an interesting
instrument, of course, for professors of electricity and acoustics; but
it can never be a practical necessity. As well might you propose to put
a telescope into a steel-mill or to hitch a balloon to a shoe-factory."

Poor Bell, instead of being applauded, was pelted with a hailstorm of
ridicule. He was an "impostor," a "ventriloquist," a "crank who says
he can talk through a wire." The London Times alluded pompously to the
telephone as the latest American humbug, and gave many profound reasons
why speech could not be sent over a wire, because of the intermittent
nature of the electric current. Almost all electricians--the men who
were supposed to know--pronounced the telephone an impossible thing; and
those who did not openly declare it to be a hoax, believed that Bell had
stumbled upon some freakish use of electricity, which could never be of
any practical value.

Even though he came late in the succession of inventors, Bell had to run
the gantlet of scoffing and adversity. By the reception that the public
gave to his telephone, he learned to sympathize with Howe, whose first
sewing-machine was smashed by a Boston mob; with McCormick, whose first
reaper was called "a cross between an Astley chariot, a wheelbarrow,
and a flying-machine"; with Morse, whom ten Congresses regarded as a
nuisance; with Cyrus Field, whose Atlantic Cable was denounced as "a mad
freak of stubborn ignorance"; and with Westinghouse, who was called a
fool for proposing "to stop a railroad train with wind."

The very idea of talking at a piece of sheet-iron was so new and
extraordinary that the normal mind repulsed it. Alike to the laborer
and the scientist, it was incomprehensible. It was too freakish, too
bizarre, to be used outside of the laboratory and the museum. No one,
literally, could understand how it worked; and the only man who offered
a clear solution of the mystery was a Boston mechanic, who maintained
that there was "a hole through the middle of the wire."

People who talked for the first time into a telephone box had a sort of
stage fright. They felt foolish. To do so seemed an absurd performance,
especially when they had to shout at the top of their voices. Plainly,
whatever of convenience there might be in this new contrivance was
far outweighed by the loss of personal dignity; and very few men
had sufficient imagination to picture the telephone as a part of the
machinery of their daily work. The banker said it might do well enough
for grocers, but that it would never be of any value to banking; and the
grocer said it might do well enough for bankers, but that it would never
be of any value to grocers.

As Bell had worked out his invention in Salem, one editor displayed the
headline, "Salem Witchcraft." The New York Herald said: "The effect is
weird and almost supernatural." The Providence Press said: "It is hard
to resist the notion that the powers of darkness are somehow in league
with it." And The Boston Times said, in an editorial of bantering
ridicule: "A fellow can now court his girl in China as well as in East
Boston; but the most serious aspect of this invention is the awful and
irresponsible power it will give to the average mother-in-law, who will
be able to send her voice around the habitable globe."

There were hundreds of shrewd capitalists in American cities in 1876,
looking with sharp eyes in all directions for business chances; but not
one of them came to Bell with an offer to buy his patent. Not one came
running for a State contract. And neither did any legislature, or city
council, come forward to the task of giving the people a cheap and
efficient telephone service. As for Bell himself, he was not a man of
affairs. In all practical business matters, he was as incompetent as a
Byron or a Shelley. He had done his part, and it now remained for men
of different abilities to take up his telephone and adapt it to the uses
and conditions of the business world.

The first man to undertake this work was Gardiner G. Hubbard, who
became soon afterwards the father-in-law of Bell. He, too, was a man
of enthusiasm rather than of efficiency. He was not a man of wealth
or business experience, but he was admirably suited to introduce the
telephone to a hostile public. His father had been a judge of the
Massachusetts Supreme Court; and he himself was a lawyer whose practice
had been mainly in matters of legislation. He was, in 1876, a man of
venerable appearance, with white hair, worn long, and a patriarchal
beard. He was a familiar figure in Washington, and well known among the
public men of his day. A versatile and entertaining companion, by turns
prosperous and impecunious, and an optimist always, Gardiner Hubbard
became a really indispensable factor as the first advance agent of the
telephone business.

No other citizen had done more for the city of Cambridge than Hubbard.
It was he who secured gas for Cambridge in 1853, and pure water, and a
street-railway to Boston. He had gone through the South in 1860 in
the patriotic hope that he might avert the impending Civil War. He
had induced the legislature to establish the first public school for
deaf-mutes, the school that drew Bell to Boston in 1871. And he had been
for years a most restless agitator for improvements in telegraphy and
the post office. So, as a promoter of schemes for the public good,
Hubbard was by no means a novice. His first step toward capturing
the attention of an indifferent nation was to beat the big drum of
publicity. He saw that this new idea of telephoning must be made
familiar to the public mind. He talked telephone by day and by night.
Whenever he travelled, he carried a pair of the magical instruments
in his valise, and gave 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. Sand-ers, the motherly old lady who had sheltered Bell in
the days of his experiment, sitting proudly in one of the front seats.
A pole was set up at the front of the hall, supporting the end of a
telegraph wire that ran from Salem to Boston. And Watson, who became the
first public talker by telephone, sent messages from Boston to various
members of the audience. An account of this lecture was sent by
telephone to The Boston Globe, which announced the next morning--


"This special despatch of the Globe has been transmitted by telephone
in the presence of twenty people, who have thus been witnesses to a feat
never before attempted--the sending of news over the space of sixteen
miles by the human voice."


This Globe despatch awoke the newspaper editors with an unexpected jolt.
For the first time they began to notice that there was a new word in the
language, and a new idea in the scientific world. No newspaper had made
any mention whatever of the telephone for seventy-five days after Bell
received his patent. Not one of the swarm of reporters who thronged the
Philadelphia Centennial had regarded the telephone as a matter of any
public interest. But when a column of news was sent by telephone to
The Boston Globe, the whole newspaper world was agog with excitement.
A thousand pens wrote the name of Bell. Requests to repeat his lecture
came to Bell from Cyrus W. Field, the veteran of the Atlantic Cable,
from the poet Longfellow, and from many others.

As he was by profession an elocutionist, Bell was able to make the most
of these opportunities. His lectures became popular entertainments. They
were given in the largest halls. At one lecture two Japanese gentlemen
were induced to talk to one another in their own language, via the
telephone. At a second lecture a band played "The Star-Spangled Banner,"
in Boston, and was heard by an audience of two thousand people in
Providence. At a third, Signor Ferranti, who was in Providence, sang a
selection from "The Marriage of Figaro" to an audience in Boston. At a
fourth, an exhortation from Moody and a song from Sankey came over the
vibrating wire. And at a fifth, in New Haven, Bell stood sixteen Yale
professors in line, hand in hand, and talked through their bodies--a
feat which was then, and is to-day, almost too wonderful to believe.

Very slowly these lectures, and the tireless activity of Hubbard, pushed
back the ridicule and the incredulity; and in the merry month of May,
1877, a man named Emery drifted into Hubbard's office from the near-by
city of Charlestown, and leased two telephones for twenty actual
dollars--the first money ever paid for a telephone. This was the first
feeble sign that such a novelty as the telephone business could be
established; and no money ever looked handsomer than this twenty dollars
did to Bell, Sanders, Hubbard, and Watson. It was the tiny first-fruit
of fortune.

Greatly encouraged, they prepared a little circular which was the first
advertisement of the telephone business. It is an oddly simple little
document to-day, but to the 1877 brain it was startling. It modestly
claimed that a telephone was superior to a telegraph for three reasons:


"(1) No skilled operator is required, but direct communication may be
had by speech without the intervention of a third person.


"(2) The communication is much more rapid, the average number of words
transmitted in a minute by the Morse sounder being from fifteen to
twenty, by telephone from one to two hundred.


"(3) No expense is required, either for its operation or repair. It
needs no battery and has no complicated machinery. It is unsurpassed for
economy and simplicity."


The only telephone line in the world at this time was between the
Williams' workshop in Boston and the home of Mr. Williams in Somerville.
But in May, 1877, a young man named E. T. Holmes, who was running a
burglar-alarm business in Boston, proposed that a few telephones be
linked to his wires. He was a friend and customer of Williams, and
suggested this plan half in jest and half in earnest. Hubbard was quick
to seize this opportunity, and at once lent Holmes a dozen telephones.
Without asking permission, Holmes went into six banks and nailed up
a telephone in each. Five bankers made no protest, but the sixth
indignantly ordered "that playtoy" to be taken out. The other five
telephones could be connected by a switch in Holmes's office, and thus
was born the first tiny and crude Telephone Exchange. Here it ran for
several weeks as a telephone system by day and a burglar-alarm by night.
No money was paid by the bankers. The service was given to them as
an exhibition and an advertisement. The little shelf with its five
telephones was no more like the marvellous exchanges of to-day than
a canoe is like a Cunarder, but it was unquestionably the first place
where several telephone wires came together and could be united.

Soon afterwards, Holmes took his telephones out of the banks, and
started a real telephone business among the express companies of
Boston. But by this time several exchanges had been opened for ordinary
business, in New Haven, Bridgeport, New York, and Philadelphia. Also,
a man from Michigan had arrived, with the hardihood to ask for a State
agency--George W. Balch, of Detroit. He was so welcome that Hubbard
joyfully gave him everything he asked--a perpetual right to the whole
State of Michigan. Balch was not required to pay a cent in advance,
except his railway fare, and before he was many years older he had sold
his lease for a handsome fortune of a quarter of a million dollars,
honestly earned by his initiative and enterprise.

By August, when Bell's patent was sixteen months old, there were 778
telephones in use. This looked like success to the optimistic Hubbard.
He decided that the time had come to organize the business, so
he created a simple agreement which he called the "Bell Telephone
Association." This agreement gave Bell, Hubbard and Sanders a
three-tenths interest apiece in the patents, and Watson one-tenth. THERE
WAS NO CAPITAL. There was none to be had. The four men had at this time
an absolute monopoly of the telephone business; and everybody else was
quite willing that they should have it.

The only man who had money and dared to stake it on the future of the
telephone was Thomas Sanders, and he did this not mainly for business
reasons. Both he and Hubbard were attached to Bell primarily by
sentiment, as Bell had removed the blight of dumbness from Sanders's
little son, and was soon to marry Hubbard's daughter.

Also, Sanders had no expectation, at first, that so much money would be
needed. He was not rich. His entire business, which was that of cutting
out soles for shoe manufacturers, was not at any time worth more than
thirty-five thousand dollars. Yet, from 1874 to 1878, he had advanced
nine-tenths of the money that was spent on the telephone. He had paid
Bell's room-rent, and Watson's wages, and Williams's expenses, and
the cost of the exhibit at the Centennial. The first five thousand
telephones, and more, were made with his money. And so many long,
expensive months dragged by before any relief came to Sanders, that
he was compelled, much against his will and his business judgment, to
stretch his credit within an inch of the breaking-point to help Bell and
the telephone. Desperately he signed note after note until he faced a
total of one hundred and ten thousand dollars. If the new "scientific
toy" succeeded, which he often doubted, he would be the richest citizen
in Haverhill; and if it failed, which he sorely feared, he would be a
bankrupt.

A disheartening series of rebuffs slowly forced the truth in upon
Sanders's mind that the business world refused to accept the telephone
as an article of commerce. It was a toy, a plaything, a scientific
wonder, but not a necessity to be bought and used for ordinary purposes
by ordinary people. Capitalists treated it exactly as they treated the
Atlantic Cable project when Cyrus Field visited Boston in 1862. They
admired and marvelled; but not a man subscribed a dollar. Also, Sanders
very soon learned that it was a most unpropitious time for the setting
afloat of a new enterprise. It was a period of turmoil and suspicion.
What with the Jay Cooke failure, the Hayes-Tilden deadlock, and the
bursting of a hundred railroad bubbles, there was very little in the
news of the day to encourage investors.

It was impossible for Sanders, or Bell, or Hubbard, to prepare any
definite plan. No matter what the plan might have been, they had no
money to put it through. They believed that they had something new and
marvellous, which some one, somewhere, would be willing to buy. Until
this good genie should arrive, they could do no more than flounder
ahead, and take whatever business was the nearest and the cheapest. So
while Bell, in eloquent rhapsodies, painted word-pictures of a universal
telephone service to applauding audiences, Sanders and Hubbard were
leasing telephones two by two, to business men who previously had been
using the private lines of the Western Union Telegraph Company.

This great corporation was at the time their natural and inevitable
enemy. It had swallowed most of its competitors, and was reaching out to
monopolize all methods of communication by wire. The rosiest hope that
shone in front of Sanders and Hubbard was that the Western Union might
conclude to buy the Bell patents, just as it had already bought many
others. In one moment of discouragement they had offered the telephone
to President Orton, of the Western Union, for $100,000; and Orton had
refused it. "What use," he asked pleasantly, "could this company make of
an electrical toy?"

But besides the operation of its own wires, the Western Union was
supplying customers with various kinds of printing-telegraphs and dial
telegraphs, some of which could transmit sixty words a minute. These
accurate instruments, it believed, could never be displaced by such a
scientific oddity as the telephone. And it continued to believe this
until one of its subsidiary companies--the Gold and Stock--reported that
several of its machines had been superseded by telephones.

At once the Western Union awoke from its indifference. Even this tiny
nibbling at its business must be stopped. It took action quickly and
organized the "American Speaking-Telephone Company," with $300,000
capital, and with three electrical inventors, Edison, Gray, and Dolbear,
on its staff. With all the bulk of its great wealth and prestige, it
swept down upon Bell and his little bodyguard. It trampled upon Bell's
patent with as little concern as an elephant can have when he tramples
upon an ant's nest. To the complete bewilderment of Bell, it coolly
announced that it had "the only original telephone," and that it was
ready to supply "superior telephones with all the latest improvements
made by the original inventors--Dolbear, Gray, and Edison."

The result was strange and unexpected. The Bell group, instead of being
driven from the field, were at once lifted to a higher level in the
business world. The effect was as if the Standard Oil Company were to
commence the manufacture of aeroplanes. In a flash, the telephone ceased
to be a "scientific toy," and became an article of commerce. It began
for the first time to be taken seriously. And the Western Union, in
the endeavor to protect its private lines, became involuntarily a
bell-wether to lead capitalists in the direction of the telephone.

Sanders's relatives, who were many and rich, came to his rescue. Most of
them were well-known business men--the Bradleys, the Saltonstalls,
Fay, Silsbee, and Carlton. These men, together with Colonel William
H. Forbes, who came in as a friend of the Bradleys, were the first
capitalists who, for purely business reasons, invested money in the
Bell patents. Two months after the Western Union had given its weighty
endorsement to the telephone, these men organized a company to do
business in New England only, and put fifty thousand dollars in its
treasury.

In a short time the delighted Hubbard found himself leasing telephones
at the rate of a thousand a month. He was no longer a promoter, but a
general manager. Men were standing in line to ask for agencies. Crude
little telephone exchanges were being started in a dozen or more cities.
There was a spirit of confidence and enterprise; and the next step,
clearly, was to create a business organization. None of the partners
were competent to undertake such a work. Hubbard had little aptitude as
an organizer; Bell had none; and Sanders was held fast by his leather
interests. Here, at last, after four years of the most heroic effort,
were the raw materials out of which a telephone business could be
constructed. But who was to be the builder, and where was he to be
found?

One morning the indefatigable Hubbard solved the problem. "Watson," he
said, "there's a young man in Washington who can handle this situation,
and I want you to run down and see what you think of him." Watson went,
reported favorably, and in a day or so the young man received a letter
from Hubbard, offering him the position of General Manager, at a salary
of thirty-five hundred dollars a year. "We rely," Hubbard said, "upon
your executive ability, your fidelity, and unremitting zeal." The
young man replied, in one of those dignified letters more usual in the
nineteenth than in the twentieth century. "My faith in the success of
the enterprise is such that I am willing to trust to it," he wrote, "and
I have confidence that we shall establish the harmony and cooperation
that is essential to the success of an enterprise of this kind." One
week later the young man, Theodore N. Vail, took his seat as General
Manager in a tiny office in Reade Street, New York, and the building of
the business began.

This arrival of Vail at the critical moment emphasized the fact that
Bell was one of the most fortunate of inventors. He was not robbed of
his invention, as might easily have happened. One by one there arrived
to help him a number of able men, with all the various abilities that
the changing situation required. There was such a focussing of factors
that the whole matter appeared to have been previously rehearsed. No
sooner had Bell appeared on the stage than his supporting players, each
in his turn, received his cue and took part in the action of the drama.
There was not one of these men who could have done the work of any
other. Each was distinctive and indispensable. Bell invented the
telephone; Watson constructed it; Sanders financed it; Hubbard
introduced it; and Vail put it on a business basis.

The new General Manager had, of course, no experience in the telephone
business. Neither had any one else. But he, like Bell, came to his task
with a most surprising fitness. He was a member of the historic Vail
family of Morristown, New Jersey, which had operated the Speedwell Iron
Works for four or five generations. His grand-uncle Stephen had built
the engines for the Savannah, the first American steamship to cross the
Atlantic Ocean; and his cousin Alfred was the friend and co-worker of
Morse, the inventor of the telegraph. Morse had lived for several years
at the Vail homestead in Morristown; and it was here that he erected
his first telegraph line, a three-mile circle around the Iron Works, in
1838. He and Alfred Vail experimented side by side in the making of the
telegraph, and Vail eventually received a fortune for his share of the
Morse patent.

Thus it happened that young Theodore Vail learned the dramatic story
of Morse at his mother's knee. As a boy, he played around the first
telegraph line, and learned to put messages on the wire. His favorite
toy was a little telegraph that he constructed for himself. At
twenty-two he went West, in the vague hope of possessing a bonanza farm;
then he swung back into telegraphy, and in a few years found himself in
the Government Mail Service at Washington. By 1876, he was at the head
of this Department, which he completely reorganized. He introduced the
bag system in postal cars, and made war on waste and clumsiness. By
virtue of this position he was the one man in the United States who had
a comprehensive view of all railways and telegraphs. He was much more
apt, consequently, than other men to develop the idea of a national
telephone system.

While in the midst of this bureaucratic house-cleaning he met Hubbard,
who had just been appointed by President Hayes as the head of a
commission on mail transportation. He and Hubbard were constantly thrown
together, on trains and in hotels; and as Hubbard invariably had a pair
of telephones in his valise, the two men soon became co-enthusiasts.
Vail found himself painting brain-pictures of the future of the
telephone, and by the time that he was asked to become its General
Manager, he had become so confident that, as he said afterwards, he "was
willing to leave a Government job with a small salary for a telephone
job with no salary."

So, just as Amos Kendall had left the post office service thirty years
before to establish the telegraph business, Theodore N. Vail left the
post office service to establish the telephone business. He had been
in authority over thirty-five hundred postal employees, and was the
developer of a system that covered every inhabited portion of the
country. Consequently, he had a quality of experience that was immensely
valuable in straightening out the tangled affairs of the telephone. Line
by line, he mapped out a method, a policy, a system. He introduced
a larger view of the telephone business, and swept off the table all
schemes for selling out. He persuaded half a dozen of his post office
friends to buy stock, so that in less than two months the first "Bell
Telephone Company" was organized, with $450,000 capital and a service of
twelve thousand telephones.

Vail's first step, naturally, was to stiffen up the backbone of this
little company, and to prevent the Western Union from frightening it
into a surrender. He immediately sent a copy of Bell's patent to every
agent, with orders to hold the fort against all opposition. "We have
the only original telephone patents," he wrote; "we have organized and
introduced the business, and we do not propose to have it taken from us
by any corporation." To one agent, who was showing the white feather, he
wrote:


"You have too great an idea of the Western Union. If it was all massed
in your one city you might well fear it; but it is represented there by
one man only, and he has probably as much as he can attend to outside of
the telephone. For you to acknowledge that you cannot compete with his
influence when you make it your special business, is hardly the thing.
There may be a dozen concerns that will all go to the Western Union, but
they will not take with them all their friends. I would advise that you
go ahead and keep your present advantage. We must organize companies
with sufficient vitality to carry on a fight, as it is simply useless to
get a company started that will succumb to the first bit of opposition
it may encounter."


Next, having encouraged his thoroughly alarmed agents, Vail proceeded to
build up a definite business policy. He stiffened up the contracts and
made them good for five years only. He confined each agent to one place,
and reserved all rights to connect one city with another. He established
a department to collect and 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, nine-tenths of the merchants refused to become
subscribers. In Boston, the first pay-station ran three months before it
earned a dollar. Even as late as 1880, when the first National Telephone
Convention was held at Niagara Falls, one of the delegates expressed the
general situation very correctly when he said: "We were all in a state
of enthusiastic uncertainty. We were full of hope, yet when we analyzed
those hopes they were very airy indeed. There was probably not one
company that could say it was making a cent, nor even that it EXPECTED
to make a cent."

Especially in the largest cities, where the Western Union had most
power, the lives of the telephone pioneers were packed with hardships
and adventures. In Philadelphia, for instance, a resolute young man
named Thomas E. Cornish was attacked as though he had suddenly become a
public enemy, when he set out to establish the first telephone service.
No official would grant him a permit to string wires. His workmen were
arrested. The printing-telegraph men warned him that he must either quit
or be driven out. When he asked capitalists for money, they replied that
he might as well expect to lease jew's-harps as telephones. Finally, he
was compelled to resort to strategy where argument had failed. He had
received an order from Colonel Thomas Scott, who wanted a wire between
his house and his office. Colonel Scott was the President of the
Pennsylvania Railroad, and therefore a man of the highest prestige in
the city. So as soon as Cornish had put this line in place, he kept his
men at work stringing other lines. When the police interfered, he showed
them Colonel Scott's signature and was let alone. In this way he put
fifteen wires up before the trick was discovered; and soon afterwards,
with eight subscribers, he founded the first Philadelphia exchange.

As may be imagined, such battling as this did not put much money into
the treasury of the parent company; and the letters written by Sanders
at this time prove that it was in a hard plight.

The following was one of the queries put to Hubbard by the overburdened
Sanders:

"How on earth do you expect me to meet a draft of two hundred and
seventy-five dollars without a dollar in the treasury, and with a debt
of thirty thousand dollars staring us in the face?" "Vail's salary is
small enough," he continued in a second letter, "but as to where it is
coming from I am not so clear. Bradley is awfully blue and discouraged.
Williams is tormenting me for money and my personal credit will not
stand everything. I have advanced the Company two thousand dollars
to-day, and Williams must have three thousand dollars more this month.
His pay-day has come and his capital will not carry him another inch.
If Bradley throws up his hand, I will unfold to you my last desperate
plan."

And if the company had little money, it had less credit. Once when Vail
had ordered a small bill of goods from a merchant named Tillotson, of
15 Dey Street, New York, the merchant replied that the goods were ready,
and so was the bill, which was seven dollars. By a strange coincidence,
the magnificent building of the New York Telephone Company stands to-day
on the site of Tillotson's store.

Month after month, the little Bell Company lived from hand to mouth. No
salaries were paid in full. Often, for weeks, they were not paid at all.
In Watson's note-book there are such entries during this period as
"Lent Bell fifty cents," "Lent Hubbard twenty cents," "Bought one bottle
beer--too bad can't have beer every day." More than once Hubbard would
have gone hungry had not Devonshire, the only clerk, shared with him
the contents of a dinner-pail. Each one of the little group was beset by
taunts and temptations. Watson was offered ten thousand dollars for
his one-tenth interest, and hesitated three days before refusing it.
Railroad companies offered Vail a salary that was higher and sure, if he
would superintend their mail business. And as for Sanders, his folly was
the talk of Haverhill. One Haverhill capitalist, E. J. M. Hale, stopped
him on the street and asked, "Have n't you got a good leather business,
Mr. Sanders?" "Yes," replied Sanders. "Well," said Hale, "you had better
attend to it and quit playing on wind instruments." Sanders's banker,
too, became uneasy on one occasion and requested him to call at the
bank. "Mr. Sanders," he said, "I will be obliged if you will take that
telephone stock out of the bank, and give me in its place your note for
thirty thousand dollars. I am expecting the examiner here in a few days,
and I don't want to get caught with that stuff in the bank."

Then, in the very midnight of this depression, poor Bell returned from
England, whither he and his bride had gone on their honeymoon, and
announced that he had no money; that he had failed to establish a
telephone business in England; and that he must have a thousand dollars
at once to pay his urgent debts. He was thoroughly discouraged and sick.
As he lay in the Massachusetts General Hospital, he wrote a cry for help
to the embattled little company that was making its desperate fight to
protect his patents. "Thousands of telephones are now in operation in
all parts of the country," he said, "yet I have not yet received one
cent from my invention. On the contrary, I am largely out of pocket
by my researches, as the mere value of the profession that I have
sacrificed during my three years' work, amounts to twelve thousand
dollars."

Fortunately, there came, in almost the same mail with Bell's letter,
another letter from a young Bostonian named Francis Blake, with the good
news that he had invented a transmitter as satisfactory as Edison's, and
that he would prefer to sell it for stock instead of cash. If ever a man
came as an angel of light, that man was Francis Blake. The possession of
his transmitter instantly put the Bell Company on an even footing with
the Western Union, in the matter of apparatus. It encouraged the few
capitalists who had invested money, and it stirred others to come
forward. The general business situation had by this time become
more settled, and in four months the company had twenty-two thousand
telephones in use, and had reorganized into the National Bell Telephone
Company, with $850, 000 capital and with Colonel Forbes as its first
President. Forbes now picked up the load that had been carried so long
by Sanders. As the son of an East India merchant and the son-in-law of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was a Bostonian of the Brahmin caste. He was
a big, four-square man who was both popular and efficient; and his
leadership at this crisis was of immense value.

This reorganization put the telephone business into the hands of
competent business men at every point. It brought the heroic and
experimental period to an end. From this time onwards the telephone
had strong friends in the financial world. It was being attacked by
the Western Union and by rival inventors who were jealous of Bell's
achievement. It was being half-starved by cheap rates and crippled by
clumsy apparatus. It was being abused and grumbled at by an impatient
public. But the art of making and marketing it had at last been built
up into a commercial enterprise. It was now a business, fighting for its
life.



CHAPTER III. THE HOLDING OF THE BUSINESS

For seventeen months no one disputed Bell's claim to be the original
inventor of the telephone. All the honor, such as it was, had been given
to him freely, and no one came forward to say that it was not rightfully
his. No one, so far as we know, had any strong desire to do so. No one
conceived that the telephone would ever be any more than a whimsical
oddity of science. It was so new, so unexpected, that from Lord
Kelvin down to the messenger boys in the telegraph offices, it was an
incomprehensible surprise. But after Bell had explained his invention
in public lectures before more than twenty thousand people, after it
had been on exhibition for months at the Philadelphia Centennial, after
several hundred articles on it had appeared in newspapers and scientific
magazines, and after actual sales of telephones had been made in
various parts of the country, there began to appear such a succession of
claimants and infringers that the forgetful public came to believe that
the telephone, like most inventions, was the product of many minds.

Just as Morse, who was the sole inventor of the American telegraph in
1837, was confronted by sixty-two rivals in 1838, so Bell, who was the
sole inventor in 1876, found himself two years later almost mobbed by
the "Tichborne claimants" of the telephone. The inventors who had been
his competitors in the attempt to produce a musical telegraph, persuaded
themselves that they had unconsciously done as much as he. Any possessor
of a telegraphic patent, who had used the common phrase "talking wire,"
had a chance to build up a plausible story of prior invention. And
others came forward with claims so vague and elusive that Bell would
scarcely have been more surprised if the heirs of Goethe had demanded a
share of the telephone royalties on the ground that Faust had spoken of
"making a bridge through the moving air."

This babel of inventors and pretenders amazed Bell and disconcerted his
backers. But it was no more than might have been expected. Here was
a patent--"the most valuable single patent ever issued"--and yet the
invention itself was so simple that it could be duplicated easily by any
smart boy or any ordinary mechanic. The making of a telephone was like
the trick of Columbus standing an egg on end. Nothing was easier to
those who knew how. And so it happened that, as the crude little
model of Bell's original telephone lay in the Patent Office open and
unprotected except by a few phrases that clever lawyers might evade,
there sprang up inevitably around it the most costly and persistent
Patent War that any country has ever known, continuing for eleven years
and comprising SIX HUNDRED LAWSUITS.

The first attack upon the young telephone business was made by the
Western Union Telegraph Company. It came charging full tilt upon Bell,
driving three inventors abreast--Edison, Gray, and Dolbear. It expected
an easy victory; in fact, the disparity between the two opponents was so
evident, that there seemed little chance of a contest of any kind.
"The Western Union will swallow up the telephone people," said public
opinion, "just as it has already swallowed up all improvements in
telegraphy."

At that time, it should be remembered, the Western Union was the only
corporation that was national in its extent. It was the most powerful
electrical company in the world, and, as Bell wrote to his parents,
"probably the largest corporation that ever existed." It had behind it
not only forty millions of capital, but the prestige of the Vanderbilts,
and the favor of financiers everywhere. Also, it met the telephone
pioneers at every point because it, too, was a WIRE company. It owned
rights-of-way along roads and on house-tops. It had a monopoly of hotels
and railroad offices. No matter in what direction the Bell Company
turned, the live wire of the Western Union lay across its path.

From the first, the Western Union relied more upon its strength than
upon the merits of its case. Its chief electrical expert, Frank L. Pope,
had made a six months' examination of the Bell patents. He had bought
every book in the United States and Europe that was likely to have any
reference to the transmission of speech, and employed a professor
who knew eight languages to translate them. He and his men ransacked
libraries and patent offices; they rummaged and sleuthed and
interviewed; and found nothing of any value. In his final report to
the Western Union, Mr. Pope announced that there was no way to make
a telephone except Bell's way, and advised the purchase of the Bell
patents. "I am entirely unable to discover any apparatus or method
anticipating the invention of Bell as a whole," he said; "and I conclude
that his patent is valid." But the officials of the great corporation
refused to take this report seriously. They threw it aside and employed
Edison, Gray, and Dolbear to devise a telephone that could be put into
competition with Bell's.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, there now came a period
of violent competition which is remembered as the Dark Ages of the
telephone business. The Western Union bought out several of the Bell
exchanges and opened up a lively war on the others. As befitting its
size, it claimed everything. It introduced Gray as the original inventor
of the telephone, and ordered its lawyers to take action at once against
the Bell Company for infringement of the Gray patent. This high-handed
action, it hoped, would most quickly bring the little Bell group into
a humble and submissive frame of mind. Every morning the Western Union
looked to see the white flag flying over the Bell headquarters. But
no white flag appeared. On the contrary, the news came that the Bell
Company had secured two eminent lawyers and were ready to give battle.

The case began in the Autumn of 1878 and lasted for a year. Then it
came to a sudden and most unexpected ending. The lawyer-in-chief of
the Western Union was George Gifford, who was perhaps the ablest patent
attorney of his day. He was versed in patent lore from Alpha to Omega;
and as the trial proceeded, he became convinced that the Bell patent was
valid. He notified the Western Union confidentially, of course, that its
case could not be proven, and that "Bell was the original inventor of
the telephone." The best policy, he suggested, was to withdraw their
claims and make a settlement. This wise advice was accepted, and the
next day the white flag was hauled up, not by the little group of Bell
fighters, who were huddled together in a tiny, two-room office, but by
the mighty Western Union itself, which had been so arrogant when the
encounter began.

A committee of three from each side was appointed, and after months of
disputation, a treaty of peace was drawn up and signed. By the terms of
this treaty the Western Union agreed--

(1) To admit that Bell was the original inventor.

(2) To admit that his patents were valid.

(3) To retire from the telephone business.


The Bell Company, in return for this surrender, agreed--

(1) To buy the Western Union telephone system.

(2) To pay the Western Union a royalty of twenty per cent on all
telephone rentals.

(3) To keep out of the telegraph business.


This agreement, which was to remain in force for seventeen years, was a
master-stroke of diplomacy on the part of the Bell Company. It was the
Magna Charta of the telephone. It transformed a giant competitor into
a friend. It added to the Bell System fifty-six thousand telephones in
fifty-five cities. And it swung the valiant little company up to such a
pinnacle of prosperity that its stock went skyrocketing until it touched
one thousand dollars a share.

The Western Union had lost its case, for several very simple reasons:
It had tried to operate a telephone system on telegraphic lines, a
plan that has invariably been unsuccessful, it had a low idea of the
possibilities of the telephone business; and its already busy agents had
little time or knowledge or enthusiasm to give to the new enterprise.
With all its power, it found itself outfought by this compact body of
picked men, who were young, zealous, well-handled, and protected by a
most invulnerable patent.

The Bell Telephone now took its place with the Telegraph, the Railroad,
the Steamboat, the Harvester, and the other necessities of a civilized
country. Its pioneer days were over. There was no more ridicule and
incredulity. Every one knew that the Bell people had whipped the
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 irreconcilable; and until his death, in 1901, never
renounced his claim to be the original inventor of the telephone.

The reason for this persistence is very evident. Gray was a professional
inventor, a highly competent man who had begun his career as a
blacksmith's apprentice, and risen to be a professor of Oberlin. He
made, during his lifetime, over five million dollars by his patents.
In 1874, he and Bell were running a neck-and-neck race to see who could
first invent a musical telegraph--when, presto! Bell suddenly turned
aside, because of his acoustical knowledge, and invented the telephone,
while Gray kept straight ahead. Like all others who were in quest of a
better telegraph instrument, Gray had glimmerings of the possibility of
sending speech by wire, and by one of the strangest of coincidences
he filed a caveat on the subject on the SAME DAY that Bell filed the
application for a patent. Bell had arrived first. As the record book
shows, the fifth entry on that day was: "A. G. Bell, $15"; and the
thirty-ninth entry was "E. Gray, $10."

There was a vast difference between Gray's caveat and Bell's
application. A caveat is a declaration that the writer has NOT invented
a thing, but believes that he is about to do so; while an APPLICATION is
a declaration that the writer has already perfected the invention. But
Gray could never forget that he had seemed to be, for a time, so close
to the golden prize; and seven years after he had been set aside by the
Western Union agreement, he reappeared with claims that had grown larger
and more definite.

When all the evidence in the various Gray lawsuits is sifted out, there
appear to have been three distinctly different Grays: first, Gray the
SCOFFER, who examined Bell's telephone at the Centennial and said it
was "nothing but the old lover's telegraph. It is impossible to make
a practical speaking telephone on the principle shown by Professor
Bell.... The currents are too feeble"; second, Gray the CONVERT, who
wrote frankly to Bell in 1877, "I do not claim the credit of inventing
it"; and third, Gray the CLAIMANT, who endeavored to prove in 1886 that
he was the original inventor. His real position in the matter was once
well and wittily described by his partner, Enos M. Barton, who said: "Of
all the men who DIDN'T invent the telephone, Gray was the nearest."

It is now clearly seen that the telephone owes nothing to Gray. There
are no Gray telephones in use in any country. Even Gray himself, as he
admitted in court, failed when he tried to make a telephone on the lines
laid down in his caveat. The final word on the whole matter was recently
spoken by George C. Maynard, who established the telephone business in
the city of Washington. Said Mr. Maynard:


"Mr. Gray was an intimate and valued friend of mine, but it is no
disrespect to his memory to say that on some points involved in the
telephone matter, he was mistaken. No subject was ever so thoroughly
investigated as the invention of the speaking telephone. No patent has
ever been submitted to such determined assault from every direction as
Bell's; and no inventor has ever been more completely vindicated. Bell
was the first inventor, and Gray was not."


After Gray, the weightiest challenger who came against Bell was
Professor Amos E. Dolbear, of Tufts College. He, like Gray, had written
a letter of applause to Bell in 1877. "I congratulate you, sir," he
said, "upon your very great invention, and I hope to see it supplant
all forms of existing telegraphs, and that you will be successful in
obtaining the wealth and honor which is your due." But one year later,
Dolbear came to view with an opposition telephone. It was not an
imitation of Bell's, he insisted, but an improvement upon an electrical
device made by a German named Philip Reis, in 1861.

Thus there appeared upon the scene the so-called "Reis telephone," which
was not a telephone at all, in any practical sense, but which served
well enough for nine years or more as a weapon to use against the Bell
patents. Poor Philip Reis himself, the son of a baker in Frankfort,
Germany, had hoped to make a telephone, but he had failed. His machine
was operated by a "make-and-break" current, and so could not carry
the infinitely delicate vibrations made by the human voice. It could
transmit the pitch of a sound, but not the QUALITY. At its best, it
could carry a tune, but never at any time a spoken sentence. Reis, in
his later years, realized that his machine could never be used for the
transmission of conversation; and in a letter to a friend he tells of a
code of signals that he has invented.

Bell had once, during his three years of experimenting, made a Reis
machine, although at that time he had not seen one. But he soon threw
it aside, as of no practical value. As a teacher of acoustics, Bell knew
that the one indispensable requirement of a telephone is that it shall
transmit the WHOLE of a sound, and not merely the pitch of it. Such
scientists as Lord Kelvin, Joseph Henry, and Edison had seen the little
Reis instrument years before Bell invented the telephone; but they
regarded it as a mere musical toy. It was "not in any sense a speaking
telephone," said Lord Kelvin. And Edison, when trying to put the Reis
machine in the most favorable light, admitted humorously that when he
used a Reis transmitter he generally "knew what was coming; and knowing
what was coming, even a Reis transmitter, pure and simple, reproduces
sounds which seem almost like that which was being transmitted; but
when the man at the other end did not know what was coming, it was very
seldom that any word was recognized."

In the course of the Dolbear lawsuit, a Reis machine was brought into
court, and created much amusement. It was able to squeak, but not to
speak. Experts and professors wrestled with it in vain. It refused
to transmit one 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 claim-ant could beat Bell in the courts, this
company massed the losers together and came forward with a scrap-basket
full of patents. Several powerful capitalists undertook to pay the
expenses of this adventure. Wires were strung; stock was sold; and the
enterprise looked for a time so genuine that when the Bell lawyers asked
for an injunction against it, they were refused. This was as hard a blow
as the Bell people received in their eleven years of litigation; and
the Bell stock tumbled thirty-five points in a few days. Infringing
companies sprang up like gourds in the night. And all went merrily with
the promoters until the Overland Company was thrown out of court, as
having no evidence, except "the refuse and dregs of former cases--the
heel-taps found in the glasses at the end of the frolic."

But even after this defeat for the claimants, the frolic was not wholly
ended. They next planned to get through politics what they could not get
through law; they induced the Government to bring suit for the annulment
of the Bell patents. It was a bold and desperate move, and enabled the
promoters of paper companies to sell stock for several years longer. The
whole dispute was re-opened, from Gray to Drawbaugh. Every battle was
re-fought; and in the end, of course, the Government officials learned
that they were being used to pull telephone chestnuts out of the fire.
The case was allowed to die a natural death, and was informally dropped
in 1896.

In all, the Bell Company fought out thirteen lawsuits that were of
national interest, and five that were carried to the Supreme Court in
Washington. It fought out five hundred and eighty-seven other lawsuits
of various natures; and with the exception of two trivial contract
suits, IT NEVER LOST A CASE.

Its experience is an unanswerable indictment of our system of protecting
inventors. No inventor had ever a clearer title than Bell. The Patent
Office itself, in 1884, made an eighteen-months' investigation of all
telephone patents, and reported: "It is to Bell that the world owes the
possession of the speaking telephone." Yet his patent was continuously
under fire, and never at any time secure. Stock companies whose paper
capital totalled more than $500,000,000 were organized to break it down;
and from first to last the success of the telephone was based much
less upon the monopoly of patents than upon the building up of a well
organized business.

Fortunately for Bell and the men who upheld him, they were defended by
two master-lawyers who have seldom, if ever, had an equal for team work
and efficiency--Chauncy Smith and James J. Storrow. These two men were
marvellously well mated. Smith was an old-fashioned attorney of the
Websterian sort, dignified, ponderous, and impressive. By 1878, when he
came in to defend the little Bell Company against the towering Western
Union, Smith had become the most noted patent lawyer in Boston. He was a
large, thick-set man, a reminder of Benjamin Franklin, with clean-shaven
face, long hair curling at the ends, frock coat, high collar, and beaver
hat.

Storrow, on the contrary, was a small man, quiet in manner,
conversational in argument, and an encyclopedia of definite information.
He was so thorough that, when he became a Bell lawyer, he first spent
an entire summer at his country home in Petersham, studying the laws
of physics and electricity. He was never in the slightest degree
spectacular. Once only, during the eleven years of litigation, did
he lose control of his temper. He was attacking the credibility of a
witness whom he had put on the stand, but who had been tampered with by
the opposition lawyers. "But this man is your own witness," protested
the lawyers. "Yes," shouted the usually soft-speaking Storrow; "he WAS
my witness, but now he is YOUR LIAR."

The efficiency of these two men was greatly increased by a third--Thomas
D. Lockwood, who was chosen by Vail in 1879 to establish a Patent
Department. Two years before, Lockwood had heard Bell lecture in
Chickering Hall, New York, and was a "doubting Thomas." But a closer
study of the telephone transformed him into an enthusiast. Having a
memory like a filing system, and a knack for invention, Lockwood was
well fitted to create such a 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.



CHAPTER IV. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ART

Four wire-using businesses were already in the field when the telephone
was born: the fire-alarm, burglar-alarm, telegraph, and messenger-boy
service; and at first, as might have been expected, the humble little
telephone was huddled in with these businesses as a sort of poor
relation. To the general public, it was a mere scientific toy; but there
were a few men, not many, in these wire-stringing trades, who saw a
glimmering chance of creating a telephone business. They put telephones
on the wires that were then in use. As these became popular, they added
others. Each of their customers wished to be able to talk to every
one else. And so, having undertaken to give telephone service, they
presently found themselves battling with the most intricate and baffling
engineering problem of modern times--the construction around the
tele-phone of such a mechanism as would bring it into universal service.

The first of these men was Thomas A. Watson, the young mechanic who had
been hired as Bell's helper. He began a work that to-day requires an
army of twenty-six thousand people. He was for a couple of years
the total engineering and manufacturing department of the telephone
business, and by 1880 had taken out sixty patents for his own
suggestions. It was Watson who took the telephone as Bell had made it,
really a toy, with its diaphragm so delicate that a warm breath would
put it out of order, and toughened it into a more rugged machine. Bell
had used a disc of fragile gold-beaters' skin with a patch of sheet-iron
glued to the centre. He could not believe, for a time, that a disc of
all-iron would vibrate under the slight influence of a spoken word. But
he and Watson noticed that when the patch was bigger the talking was
better, and presently they threw away the gold-beaters' skin and used
the iron alone.

Also, it was Watson who spent months experimenting with all sorts and
sizes of iron discs, so as to get the one that would best convey the
sound. If the iron was too thick, he discovered, the voice was shrilled
into a Punch-and-Judy squeal; and if it was too thin, the voice became a
hollow and sepulchral groan, as if the speaker had his head in a barrel.
Other months, too, were spent in finding out the proper size and shape
for the air cavity in front of the disc. And so, after the telephone had
been perfected, IN PRINCIPLE, a full year was required to lift it out
of the class of scientific toys, and another year or two to present it
properly to the business world.

Until 1878 all Bell telephone apparatus was made by Watson in Charles
Williams's little shop in Court Street, Boston--a building long since
transformed into a five-cent theatre. But the business soon grew too big
for the shop. Orders fell five weeks behind. Agents stormed and fretted.
Some action had to be taken quickly, so licenses were given to four
other manufacturers to make bells, switchboards, and so forth. By this
time the Western Electric Company of Chicago had begun to make the
infringing Gray-Edison telephones for the Western Union, so that there
were soon six groups of mechanics puzzling their wits over the new
talk-machinery.

By 1880 there was plenty of telephonic apparatus being made, but in
too many different varieties. Not all the summer gowns of that year
presented more styles and fancies. The next step, if there was to be
any degree of uniformity, was plainly to buy and consolidate these six
companies; and by 1881 Vail had done this. It was the first merger in
telephone history. It was a step of immense importance. Had it not been
taken, the telephone business would have been torn into fragments by the
civil wars between rival inventors.

From this time the Western Electric became the headquarters of
telephonic apparatus. It was the Big Shop, all roads led to it. No
matter where a new idea was born, sooner or later it came knocking at
the door of the Western Electric to receive a material body. Here were
the skilled workmen who became the hands of the telephone business. And
here, too, were many of the ablest inventors and engineers, who did most
to develop the cables and switchboards of to-day.

In Boston, Watson had resigned in 1882, and in his place, a year or
two later stood a timely new arrival named E. T. Gilliland. This
really notable man was a friend in need to the telephone. He had been
a manufacturer of electrical apparatus in Indianapolis, until Vail's
policy of consolidation drew him into the central group of pioneers
and pathfinders. For five years Gilliland led the way as a developer
of better and cheaper equipment. He made the best of a most difficult
situation. He was so handy, so resourceful, that he invariably found a
way to unravel the mechanical tangles that perplexed the first telephone
agents, and this, too, without compelling them to spend large sums of
capital. He took the ideas and apparatus that were then in existence,
and used them to carry the telephone business through the most critical
period of its life, when there was little time or money to risk
on experiments. He took the peg switchboard of the telegraph, for
in-stance, and developed it to its highest point, to a point that was
not even imagined possible by any one else. It was the most practical
and complete switchboard of its day, and held the field against all
comers until it was superseded by the modern type of board, vastly more
elaborate and expensive.

By 1884, gathered around Gilliland in Boston and the Western Electric
in Chicago, there came to be a group of mechanics and high-school
graduates, very young men, mostly, who had no reputations to lose;
and who, partly for a living and mainly for a lark, plunged into the
difficulties of this new business that had at that time little history
and less prestige. These young adventurers, most of whom are still
alive, became the makers of industrial history. They were unquestionably
the founders of the present science of telephone engineering.

The problem that they dashed at so lightheartedly was much larger than
any of them imagined. It was a Gibraltar of impossibilities. It was on
the face of it a fantastic nightmare of a task--to weave such a web of
wires, with 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 wonder-world of sound. All wires at that time were
single, and ran into the earth at each end, making what was called a
"grounded circuit." And this connection with the earth, which is really
a big magnet, caused all manner of strange and uncouth noises on the
telephone wires.

Noises! Such a jangle of meaningless noises had never been heard by
human ears. There were spluttering and bubbling, jerking and rasping,
whistling and screaming. There were the rustling of leaves, the croaking
of frogs, the hissing of steam, and the flapping of birds' wings. There
were clicks from telegraph wires, scraps of talk from other telephones,
and curious little squeals that were unlike any known sound. The lines
running east and west were noisier than the lines running north and
south. The night was noisier than the day, and at the ghostly hour of
midnight, for what strange reason no one knows, the babel was at its
height. Watson, who had a fanciful mind, suggested that perhaps these
sounds were signals from the inhabitants of Mars or some other sociable
planet. But the matter-of-fact young telephonists agreed to lay the
blame on "induction"--a hazy word which usually meant the natural
meddlesomeness of electricity.

Whatever else the mysterious noises were, they were a nuisance. The poor
little telephone business was plagued almost out of its senses. It was
like a dog with a tin can tied to its tail. No matter where it went, it
was pursued by this unearthly clatter. "We were ashamed to present our
bills," said A. A. Adee, one of the first agents; "for no matter how
plainly a man talked into his telephone, his language was apt to sound
like Choctaw at the other end of the line."

All manner of devices were solemnly tried to hush the wires, and each
one usually proved to be as futile as an incantation. What was to be
done? Step by step the telephone men were driven back. They were beaten.
There was no way to silence these noises. Reluctantly, they agreed
that the only way was to pull up the ends of each wire from the tainted
earth, and join them by a second wire. This was the "metallic circuit"
idea. It meant an appalling increase in the use of wire. It would compel
the rebuild-ing of the switchboards and the invention of new signal
systems. But it was inevitable; and in 1883, while the dispute about it
was in full blast, one of the young men quietly slipped it into use on
a new line between Boston and Providence. The effect was magical. "At
last," said the delighted manager, "we have a perfectly quiet line."

This young man, a small, slim youth who was twenty-two years old
and looked younger, was no other than J. J. Carty, now the first of
telephone engineers and almost the creator of his profession. Three
years earlier he had timidly asked for a job as operator in the Boston
exchange, at five dollars a week, and had shown such an aptitude for the
work that he was soon made one of the captains. At thirty years of age
he became a central figure in the development of the art of telephony.

What Carty has done is known by telephone men in all countries; but the
story of Carty himself--who he is, and why--is new. First of all, he is
Irish, pure Irish. His father had left Ireland as a boy in 1825. During
the Civil War his father made guns in the city of Cambridge, where young
John Joseph was born; and afterwards he made bells for church steeples.
He was instinctively a mechanic and proud of his calling. He could
tell the weight of a bell from the sound of it. Moses G. Farmer, the
electrical inventor, and Howe, the creator of the sewing-machine, were
his friends.

At five years of age, little John J. Carty was taken by his father to
the shop where the bells were made, and he was profoundly impressed by
the magical strength of a big magnet, that picked up heavy weights as
though they were feathers. At the high school his favorite study
was physics; and for a time he and another boy named Rolfe--now a
distinguished man of science--carried on electrical experiments of
their own in the cellar of the Rolfe house. Here they had a "Tom
Thumb" telegraph, a telephone which they had ventured to improve, and a
hopeless tangle of wires. Whenever they could afford to buy more wires
and batteries, they went to a near-by store which supplied electrical
apparatus to the professors and students of Harvard. This store, with
its workshop in the rear, seemed to the two boys a veritable wonderland;
and when Carty, a youth of eighteen, was compelled to leave school
because of his bad eyesight, he ran at once and secured the glorious job
of being boy-of-all-work in this store of wonders. So, when he became an
operator in the Boston telephone exchange, a year later, he had already
developed to a remarkable degree his natural genius for telephony.

Since then, Carty and the telephone business have grown up together,
he always a little distance in advance. No other man has touched the
apparatus of telephony at so many points. He fought down the flimsy,
clumsy methods, which led from one snarl to another. He found out how
to do with wires what Dickens did with words. "Let us do it right, boys,
and then we won't have any bad dreams"--this has been his motif. And,
as the crown and climax of his work, he mapped out the profession of
telephone engineering on the widest and most comprehensive lines.

In Carty, the engineer evolved into the 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 cross-arms and
three hundred wires.

From poles the wires soon overflowed to housetops, until in New York
alone they had overspread eleven thousand roofs. These roofs had to be
kept in repair, and their chimneys were the deadly enemies of the iron
wires. Many a wire, in less than two or three years, was withered to the
merest shred of rust. As if these troubles were not enough, there were
the storms of winter, which might wipe out a year's revenue in a single
day. The sleet storms were the worst. Wires were weighted down with ice,
often three pounds of ice per foot of wire. And so, what with sleet, and
corrosion, and the cost of roof-repairing, and the lack of room for
more wires, the telephone men were between the devil and the deep
sea--between the urgent necessity of burying their wires, and the
inexorable fact that they did not know how to do it.

Fortunately, by the time that this problem arrived, the telephone
business was fairly well established. It had outgrown its early days
of ridicule and incredulity. It was paying wages and salaries and
even dividends. Evidently it had arrived on the scene in the nick of
time--after the telegraph and before the trolleys and electric lights.
Had it been born ten years later, it might not have been able to
survive. So delicate a thing as a baby telephone could scarcely have
protected itself against the powerful currents of electricity that came
into general use in 1886, if it had not first found out a way of hiding
safely underground.

The first declaration in favor of an underground system was made by the
Boston company in 1880. "It may be expedient to place our entire system
underground," said the sorely perplexed manager, "whenever a practicable
method is found of accomplishing: it." All manner of theories were
afloat but Theodore N. Vail, who was usually the man of constructive
imagination in emergencies, began in 1882 a series of actual experiments
at Attleborough, Massachusetts, to find out exactly what could, and what
could not, be done with wires that were buried in the earth.

A five-mile trench was dug beside a railway track. The work was done
handily and cheaply by the labor-saving plan of hitching a locomotive to
a plough. Five ploughs were jerked apart before the work was finished.
Then, into this trench were laid wires with every known sort of
covering. Most of them, naturally, were wrapped with rubber or
gutta-percha, after the fashion of a submarine cable. When all were in
place, the willing locomotive was harnessed to a huge wooden drag, which
threw the ploughed soil back into the trench and covered the wires a
foot deep. It was the most professional cable-laying that any one at
that time could do, and it succeeded, not brilliantly, but well enough
to encourage the telephone engineers to go ahead.

Several weeks later, the first two cables for actual use were laid in
Boston and Brooklyn; and in 1883 Engineer J. P. Davis was set to grapple
with the Herculean labor of putting a complete underground system in the
wire-bound city of New York. This he did in spite of a bombardment of
explosions from leaky gas-pipes, and with a woeful lack of experts and
standard materials. All manner of makeshifts had to be tried in place of
tile ducts, which were not known in 1883. Iron pipe was used at first,
then asphalt, concrete, boxes of sand and creosoted wood. As for the
wires, they were first wrapped in cotton, and then twisted into cables,
usually of a hundred wires each. And to prevent the least taint of
moisture, which means sudden death to a telephone current, these cables
were invariably soaked in oil.

This oil-filled type of cable carried the telephone business safely
through half a dozen years. But it was not the final type. It was
preliminary only, the best that could be made at that time. Not one
is in use to-day. In 1888 Theodore Vail set on foot a second series of
experiments, to see if a cable could be made that was better suited as
a highway for the delicate electric currents of the telephone. A young
engineer named John A. Barrett, who had already made his mark as an
expert, by finding a way to twist and transpose the wires, was set apart
to tackle this problem. Being an economical Vermonter, Barrett went to
work in a little wooden shed in the backyard of a Brooklyn foundry. In
this foundry he had seen a unique machine that could be made to mould
hot lead around a rope of twisted wires. This was a notable discovery.
It meant TIGHT COVERINGS. It meant a victory over that most troublesome
of enemies--moisture. Also, it meant that cables could henceforth be
made longer, with fewer sleeves and splices, and without the oil, which
had always been an unmitigated nuisance.

Next, having made the cable tight, Barrett set out to produce it more
cheaply and by accident stumbled upon a way to make it immensely more
efficient. All wires were at that time wrapped with cotton, and his plan
was to find some less costly material that would serve the same purpose.
One of his workmen, a Virginian, suggested the use of paper twine, which
had been used in the South during the Civil War, when cotton was scarce
and expensive. Barrett at once searched the South for paper twine and
found it. He bought a barrel of it from a small factory in Richmond, but
after a trial it proved to be too flimsy. If such paper could be put
on flat, he reasoned, it would be stronger. Just then he heard of an
erratic genius who had an invention for winding paper tape on wire for
the use of milliners.

Paper-wound bonnet-wire! Who could imagine any connection between this
and the telephone? Yet this hint was exactly what Barrett needed. He
experimented until he had devised a machine that crumpled the paper
around the wire, instead of winding it tightly. This was the finishing
touch. For a time these paper-wound cables were soaked in oil, but in
1890 Engineer F. A. Pickernell dared to trust to the tightness of the
lead sheathing, and laid a "dry core" cable, the first of the modern
type, in one of the streets of Philadelphia. This cable was the event
of the year. It was not only cheaper. It was the best-talking cable that
had ever been harnessed to a telephone.

What Barrett had done was soon made clear. By wrapping the wire with
loose paper, he had in reality cushioned it with AIR, which is the
best possible insulator. Not the paper, but the air in the paper, had
improved the cable. More air was added by the omission of the oil. And
presently Barrett perceived that he had merely reproduced in a cable,
as far as possible, the conditions of the overhead wires, which are
separated by nothing but air.

By 1896 there were two hundred thousand miles of wire snugly wrapped in
paper and lying in leaden caskets beneath the streets of the cities, and
to-day there are six million miles of it owned by the affiliated Bell
companies. Instead of blackening the streets, the wire nerves of the
telephone are now out of sight under the roadway, and twining into the
basements of buildings like a new sort of metallic ivy. Some cables are
so large that a single spool of cable will weigh twenty-six tons
and require a giant truck and a sixteen-horse team to haul it to its
resting-place. As many as twelve hundred wires are often bunched into
one sheath, and each cable lies loosely in a little duct of its own.
It is reached by manholes where it runs under the streets and in little
switching-boxes placed at intervals it is frayed out into separate pairs
of wires that blossom at length into telephones.

Out in the open country there are still the open wires, which in point
of talking are the best. In the suburbs of cities there are neat green
posts with a single gray cable hung from a heavy wire. Usually, a
telephone pole is made from a sixty-year-old tree, a cedar, chestnut,
or juniper. It lasts twelve years only, so that the one item of poles is
still costing the telephone companies several millions a year. The
total number of poles now in the United States, used by telephone and
telegraph companies, once covered an area, before they were cut down, as
large as the State of Rhode Island.

But the highest triumph of wire-laying came when New York swept into the
Skyscraper Age, and when hundreds of tall buildings, as high as the fall
of the waters of Niagara, grew up like a range of magical cliffs upon
the precious rock of Manhattan. Here the work of the telephone engineer
has been so well done that although every room in these cliff-buildings
has its telephone, there is not a pole in sight, not a cross-arm, not
a wire. Nothing but the tip-ends of an immense system are visible. No
sooner is a new skyscraper walled and roofed, than the telephones are
in place, at once putting the tenants in touch with the rest of the
city and the greater part of the United States. In a single one of these
monstrous buildings, the Hudson Terminal, there is a cable that runs
from basement to roof and ravels out to reach three thousand desks.
This mighty geyser of wires is fifty tons in weight and would, if
straightened out into a single line, connect New York with Chicago. Yet
it is as invisible as the nerves and muscles of a human body.

During this evolution of the cable, even the wire itself was being
remade. Vail and others had noticed that of all the varieties of wire
that were for sale, not one was exactly suitable for a telephone system.
The first telephone wire was of galvanized iron, which had at least the
primitive virtue of being cheap. Then came steel wire, stronger but
less durable. But these wires were noisy and not good conductors of
electricity. An ideal telephone wire, they found, must be made of either
silver or copper. Silver was out of the question, and copper wire was
too soft and weak. It would not carry its own weight.

The problem, therefore, was either to make steel wire a better
conductor, or to produce a copper wire that would be strong enough. Vail
chose the latter, and forthwith gave orders to a Bridgeport manufacturer
to begin experiments. A young expert named Thomas B. Doolittle was at
once set to work, and presently appeared the first hard-drawn copper
wire, made tough-skinned by a fairly simple process. Vail bought thirty
pounds of it and scattered it in various parts of the United States,
to note the effect upon it of different climates. One length of it may
still be seen at the Vail homestead in Lyndonville, Vermont. Then this
hard-drawn wire was put to a severe test by being strung between Boston
and New York. This line was a brilliant success, and the new wire was
hailed with great delight as the ideal servant of the telephone.

Since then there has been little trouble with copper wire, except
its price. It was four times as good as iron wire, and four times as
expensive. Every mile of it, doubled, weighed two hundred pounds and
cost thirty dollars. On the long lines, where it had to be as thick as
a lead pencil, the expense seemed to be ruinously great. When the first
pair of wires was strung between New York and Chicago, for instance,
it was found to weigh 870,000 pounds--a full load for a twenty-two-car
freight train; and the cost of the bare metal was $130,000. So enormous
has been the use of copper wire since then by the telephone companies,
that fully one-fourth of all the capital invested in the telephone has
gone to the owners of the copper mines.

For several years the brains of the telephone men were focussed upon
this problem--how to reduce the expenditure on copper. One uncanny
device, which would seem to be a mere inventor's fantasy if it had not
already saved the telephone companies four million dollars or more, is
known as the "phantom circuit." It enables three messages to run at the
same time, where only two ran before. A double track of wires is made
to carry three talk-trains running abreast, a feat made possible by the
whimsical disposition of electricity, and which is utterly inconceivable
in railroading. This invention, which is the nearest approach as yet to
multiple telephony, was conceived by Jacobs in England and Carty in the
United States.

But the most copper money has been saved--literally tens of millions of
dollars--by persuading thin wires to work as efficiently as thick ones.
This has been done by making better transmitters, by insulating the
smaller wires with enamel instead of silk, and by placing coils of a
certain nature at intervals upon the wires. The invention of this last
device startled the telephone men like a flash of lightning out of a
blue sky. It came from outside--from the quiet laboratory of a Columbia
professor who had arrived in the United States as a young Hungarian
immigrant not many years earlier. From this professor, Michael J.
Pupin, came the idea of "loading" a telephone line, in such a way as to
reinforce the electric current. It enabled a thin wire to carry as far
as a thick one, and thus saved as much as forty dollars a wire per mile.
As a reward for his cleverness, a shower of gold fell upon Pupin, and
made him in an instant as rich as one of the grand-dukes of his native
land.

It is now a most highly skilled occupation, supporting fully fifteen
thousand families, to put the telephone wires in place and protect them
against innumerable dangers. This is the profession of the wire chiefs
and their men, a corps of human spiders, endlessly spinning threads
under streets and above green fields, on the beds of rivers and the
slopes of mountains, massing them in cities and fluffing them out among
farms and villages. To tell the doings of a wire chief, in the course
of his ordinary week's work, would in itself make a lively book
of adventures. Even a washerwoman, with one lone, non-electrical
clothes-line of a hundred yards to operate, has often enough trouble
with it. But the wire chiefs of the Bell telephone have charge of as
much wire as would make TWO HUNDRED MILLION CLOTHES-LINES--ten apiece
to every family in the United States; and these lines are not punctuated
with clothespins, but with the most delicate of electrical instruments.

The wire chiefs must detect trouble under a thousand disguises. Perhaps
a small boy has thrown a snake across the wires or driven a nail into
a cable. Perhaps some self-reliant citizen has moved his own telephone
from one room to another. Perhaps a sudden rainstorm has splashed its
fatal moisture upon an unwiped joint. Or perhaps a submarine cable has
been sat upon by the Lusitania and flattened to death. But no matter
what the trouble, a telephone system cannot be stopped for repairs.
It cannot be picked up and put into a dry-dock. It must be repaired
or improved by a sort of vivisection while it is working. It is an
interlocking unit, a living, conscious being, half human and half
machine; and an injury in any one place may cause a pain or sickness to
its whole vast body.

And just as the particles of a human body change every six or seven
years, without disturb-ing the body, so the particles of our telephone
systems have changed repeatedly without any interruption of traffic.
The constant flood of new inventions has necessitated several complete
rebuildings. Little or nothing has ever been allowed to wear out. The
New York system was rebuilt three times in sixteen years; and many a
costly switchboard has gone to the scrap-heap at three or four years of
age. What with repairs and inventions and new construction, the various
Bell companies have spent at least $425,000,000 in the first ten years
of the twentieth century, without hindering for a day the ceaseless
torrent of electrical conversation.

The crowning glory of a telephone system of to-day is not so much the
simple telephone itself, nor the maze and mileage of its cables, but
rather the wonderful mechanism of the Switchboard. This is the part that
will always remain mysterious to the public. It is seldom seen, and it
remains as great a mystery to those who have seen it as to those who
have not. Explanations of it are futile. As well might any one expect to
learn Sanscrit in half an hour as to understand a switchboard by making
a tour of investigation around it. It is not like anything else
that either man or Nature has ever made. It defies all metaphors
and comparisons. It cannot be shown by photography, not even in
moving-pictures, because so much of it is concealed inside its wooden
body. And few people, if any, are initiated into its inner mysteries
except those who belong to its own cortege of inventors and attendants.

A telephone switchboard is a pyramid of inventions. If it is full-grown,
it may have two million parts. It may be lit with fifteen thousand tiny
electric lamps and nerved with as much wire as would reach from New York
to Berlin. It may cost as much as a thousand pianos or as much as three
square miles of farms in Indiana. The ten thousand wire hairs of its
head are not only numbered, but enswathed in silk, and combed out in so
marvellous a way that any one of them can in a flash be linked to any
other. Such hair-dressing! Such puffs and braids and ringlet relays!
Whoever would learn the utmost that may be done with copper hairs
of Titian red, must study the fantastic coiffure of a telephone
Switchboard.

If there were no switchboard, there would still be telephones, but not a
telephone system. To connect five thousand people by telephone requires
five thousand wires when the wires run to a switchboard; but without
a switchboard there would have to be 12,497,500 wires--4,999 to every
telephone. As well might there be a nerve-system without a brain, as a
telephone system without a switchboard. If there had been at first
two separate companies, one owning the telephone and the other the
switchboard, neither could have done the business.

Several years before the telephone got a switchboard of its own, it made
use of the boards that had been designed for the telegraph. These were
as simple as wheelbarrows, and became absurdly inadequate as soon as
the telephone business began to grow. Then there came adaptations by the
dozen. Every telephone manager became by compulsion an inventor. There
was no source of information and each exchange did the best it could.
Hundreds of patents were taken out. And by 1884 there had come to be a
fairly definite idea of what a telephone switchboard ought to be.

The one man who did most to create the switchboard, who has been its
devotee for more than thirty years, is a certain modest and little known
inventor, still alive and busy, named Charles E. Scribner. Of the nine
thousand switchboard patents, Scribner holds six hundred or more. Ever
since 1878, when he devised the first "jackknife switch," Scribner has
been the wizard of the switchboard. It was he who saw most clearly its
requirements. Hundreds of others have helped, but Scribner was the one
man who persevered, who never asked for an easier job, and who in the
end became the master of his craft.

It may go far to explain the peculiar genius of Scribner to say that he
was born in 1858, in the year of the laying of the Atlantic Cable; and
that his mother was at the time profoundly interested in the work and
anxious for its success. His father was a judge in Toledo; but young
Scribner showed no aptitude for the tangles of the law. He preferred the
tangles of wire and system in miniature, which he and several other boys
had built and learned to operate. These boys had a benefactor in an old
bachelor named Thomas Bond. He had no special interest in telegraphy.
He was a dealer in hides. But he was attracted by the cleverness of the
boys and gave them money to buy more wires and more batteries. One day
he noticed an invention of young Scribner's--a telegraph repeater.

"This may make your fortune," he said, "but no mechanic in Toledo
can make a proper model of it for you. You must go to Chicago, where
telegraphic apparatus is made." The boy gladly took his advice and went
to the Western Electric factory in Chicago. Here he accidentally met
Enos M. Barton, the head of the factory. Barton noted that the boy was a
genius and offered him a job, which he accepted and has held ever
since. Such is the story of the entrance of Charles E. Scribner into the
telephone business, where he has been well-nigh indispensable.

His monumental work has been the development of the MULTIPLE
Switchboard, a much more brain-twisting problem than the building of
the Pyramids or the digging of the Panama Canal. The earlier types of
switchboard had become too cumbersome by 1885. They were well enough for
five hundred wires but not for five thousand. In some exchanges as many
as half a dozen operators were necessary to handle a single call; and
the clamor and confusion were becoming unbearable. Some handier and
quieter way had to be devised, and thus arose the Multiple board. The
first crude idea of such a way had sprung to life in the brain of a
Chicago man named L. B. Firman, in 1879; but he became a farmer and
forsook his invention in its infancy.

In the Multiple board, as it grew up under the hands of Scribner,
the outgoing wires are duplicated so as to be within reach of every
operator. A local call can thus be answered at once by the operator who
receives it; and any operator who is overwhelmed by a sudden rush of
business can be helped by her companions. Every wire that comes into the
board is tasselled out into many ends, and by means of a "busy test,"
invented by Scribner, only one of these ends can be put into use at a
time. The normal limit of such a board is ten thousand wires, and will
always remain so, unless a race of long-armed giantesses should appear,
who would be able to reach over a greater expanse of board. At present,
a business of more than ten thousand lines means a second exchange.

The Multiple board was enormously expensive. It grew more and more
elaborate until it cost one-third of a million dollars. The telephone
men racked their brains to produce something cheaper to take its place,
and they failed. The Multiple boards swallowed up capital as a desert
swallows water, but THEY SAVED TEN SECONDS ON EVERY CALL. This was an
unanswerable argument in their favor, and by 1887 twenty-one of them
were in use.

Since then, the switchboard has had three or four rebuildings. There has
seemed to be no limit to the demands of the public or the fertility
of Scribner's brain. Persistent changes were made in the system of
signalling. The first signal, used by Bell and Watson, was a tap on the
diaphragm with the finger-nail. Soon after-wards came a "buzzer," and
then the magneto-electric bell. In 1887 Joseph O'Connell, of Chicago,
conceived of the use of tiny electric lights as signals, a brilliant
idea, as an electric light makes no noise and can be seen either by
night or by day. In 1901, J. J. Carty invented the "bridging bell," a
way to put four houses on a single wire, with a different signal for
each house. This idea made the "party line" practicable, and at once
created a boom in the use of the telephone by enterprising farmers.

In 1896 there came a most revolutionary change in switchboards. All
things were made new. Instead of individual batteries, one at each
telephone, a large common battery was installed in the exchange itself.
This meant better signalling and better talking. It reduced the cost of
batteries and put them in charge of experts. It established uniformity.
It introduced the federal idea into the mechanism of a telephone system.
Best of all, it saved FOUR SECONDS ON EVERY CALL. The first of these
centralizing switchboards was put in place at Philadelphia; and other
cities followed suit as fast as they could afford the expense of
rebuilding. Since then, there have come some switchboards that are
wholly automatic. Few of these have been put into use, for the reason
that a switchboard, like a human body, must be semi-automatic only. To
give the most efficient service, there will always need to be an expert
to stand between it and the public.

As the final result of all these varying changes in switchboards and
signals and batteries, there grew up the modern Telephone Exchange. This
is the solar plexus of the telephone body. It is the vital spot. It
is the home of the switchboard. It is not any one's invention, as the
telephone was. It is a growing mechanism that is not yet finished, and
may never be; but it has already evolved far enough to be one of the
wonders of the electrical world. There is probably no other part of
an American city's equipment that is as sensitive and efficient as a
telephone exchange.

The idea of the exchange is somewhat older than the idea of the
telephone itself. There were communication exchanges before the
invention of the telephone. Thomas B. Doolittle had one in Bridgeport,
using telegraph instruments Thomas B. A. David had one in Pittsburg,
using printing-telegraph machines, which required little skill to
operate. And William A. Childs had a third, for lawyers only, in New
York, which used dials at first and afterwards printing machines. These
little exchanges had set out to do the work that is done to-day by
the telephone, and they did it after a fashion, in a most crude and
expensive way. They helped to prepare the way for the telephone, by
building up small constituencies that were ready for the telephone when
it arrived.

Bell himself was perhaps the first to see the future of the telephone
exchange. In a letter written to some English capitalists in 1878, he
said: "It is possible to connect every man's house, office or factory
with a central station, so as to give him direct communication with his
neighbors.... It is conceivable that cables of telephone wires could be
laid underground, or suspended overhead, connecting by branch wires with
private dwellings, shops, etc., and uniting them through the main cable
with a central office." This remarkable prophecy has now become stale
reading, as stale as Darwin's "Origin of Species," or Adam Smith's
"Wealth of Nations." But at the time that it was written it was a most
fanciful dream.

When the first infant exchange for telephone service was born in Boston,
in 1877, it was the tiny offspring of a burglar-alarm business operated
by E. T. Holmes, a young man whose father had originated the idea of
protecting property by electric wires in 1858. Holmes was the first
practical man who dared to offer telephone service for sale. He had
obtained two telephones, numbers six and seven, the first five
having gone to the junk-heap; and he attached these to a wire in his
burglar-alarm office. For two weeks his business friends played with the
telephones, like boys with a fascinating toy; then Holmes nailed up a
new shelf in his office, and on this shelf placed six box-telephones in
a row. These could be switched into connection with the burglar-alarm
wires and any two of the six wires could be joined by a wire cord.
Nothing could have been simpler, but it was the arrival of a new idea in
the business world.

The Holmes exchange was on the top floor of a little building, and
in almost every other city the first exchange was as near the roof as
possible, partly to save rent and partly because most of the wires were
strung on roof-tops. As the telephone itself had been born in a cellar,
so the exchange was born in a garret. Usually, too, each exchange was
an off-shoot of some other wire-using business. It was a medley of
makeshifts. Almost every part of its outfit had been made for other
uses. In Chicago all calls came in to one boy, who bawled them up a
speaking-tube to the operators. In another city a boy received the
calls, wrote them on white alleys, and rolled them to the boys at the
switchboard. There was no number system. Every one was called by name.
Even as late as 1880, when New York boasted fifteen hundred telephones,
names were still in use. And as the first telephones were used both as
transmitters and receivers, there was usually posted up a rule that was
highly important: "Don't Talk with your Ear or Listen with your Mouth."

To describe one of those early telephone exchanges in the silence of
a printed page is a wholly impossible thing. Nothing but a language
of noise could convey the proper impression. An editor who visited the
Chicago exchange in 1879 said of it: "The racket is almost deafening.
Boys are rushing madly hither and thither, while others are putting in
or taking out pegs from a central framework as if they were lunatics
engaged in a game of fox and geese." In the same year E. J. Hall wrote
from Buffalo that his exchange with twelve boys had become "a perfect
Bedlam." By the clumsy methods of those days, from two to six boys were
needed to handle each call. And as there was usually more or less of
a cat-and-dog squabble between the boys and the public, with every one
yelling at the top of his voice, it may be imagined that a telephone
exchange was a loud and frantic place.

Boys, as operators, proved to be most 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 chess-player carries in his head the arrangement of the
chess-men. And she is much more welcome at this strange school if she
is young and has never worked in other trades, where less speed and
vigilance are required.

No matter how many millions of dollars may be spent upon cables and
switchboards, the quality of telephone service depends upon the girl at
the exchange end of the wire. It is she who meets the public at every
point. She is the 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 telephone-using
community.

And now, so that there shall be no anticlimax in this story of telephone
development, we must turn the spot-light upon that immense aggregation
of workshops in which have been made three-fifths of the telephone
apparatus of the world--the Western Electric. The mother factory of this
globe-trotting business is the biggest thing in the spacious
back-yard of Chicago, and there are eleven smaller factories--her
children--scattered over the earth from New York to Tokio. To put its
totals into a sentence, it is an enterprise of 26,000-man-power, and
40,000,000-dollar-power; and the telephonic goods that it produces in
half a day are worth one hundred thousand dollars--as much, by the way,
as the Western Union REFUSED to pay for the Bell patents in 1877.

The Western Electric was born in Chicago, in the ashes of the big fire
of 1871; and it has grown up to its present greatness quietly, without
celebrating its birthdays. At first it had no telephones to make. None
had been invented, so it made telegraphic apparatus, burglar-alarms,
electric pens, and other such things. But in 1878, when the Western
Union made its short-lived attempt to compete with the Bell Company, the
Western Electric agreed to make its telephones. Three years later, when
the brief spasm of competition was ended, the Western Electric was
taken in hand by the Bell people and has since then remained the great
workshop of the telephone.

The main plant in Chicago is not especially remarkable from a
manufacturing point of view. Here are the inevitable lumber-yards and
foundries and machine-shops. Here is the mad waltz of the spindles that
whirl silk and cotton threads around the copper wires, very similar to
what may be seen in any braid factory. Here electric lamps are made,
five thousand of them in a day, in the same manner as elsewhere, except
that here they are so small and dainty as to seem designed for fairy
palaces.

The things that are done with wire in the Western Electric factories are
too many for any mere outsider to remember. Some wire is wrapped with
paper tape at a speed of nine thousand miles a day. Some is fashioned
into fantastic shapes that look like absurd sea-monsters, but which in
reality are only the nerve systems of switchboards. And some is twisted
into cables by means of a dozen whirling drums--a dizzying sight, as
each pair of drums revolve in opposite directions. Because of the fact
that a cable's inevitable enemy is moisture, each cable is wound on an
immense spool and rolled into an oven until it is as dry as a cinder.
Then it is put into a strait-jacket of lead pipe, sealed at both ends,
and trundled into a waiting freight car.

No other company uses so much wire and hard rubber, or so many tons of
brass rods, as the Western Electric. Of platinum, too, which is more
expensive than gold, it uses one thousand pounds a year in the making
of telephone transmitters. This is imported from the Ural Mountains.
The silk thread comes from Italy and Japan; the iron for magnets, from
Norway; the paper tape, from Manila; the mahogany, from South America;
and the rubber, from Brazil and the valley of the Congo. At least seven
countries must cooperate to make a telephone message possible.

Perhaps the most extraordinary feature in the Western Electric factories
is the multitude of its inspectors. No other sort of 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 cold-blooded sense of justice
that fits him for the leadership of twenty-six thousand people.

So, as we have seen, the telephone as Bell invented it, was merely a
brilliant beginning in the development of the art of telephony. It was
an elfin birth--an elusive and delicate sprite that had to be nurtured
into maturity. It was like a soul, for which a body had to be created;
and no one knew how to make such a body. Had it been born in some less
energetic country, it might have remained feeble and undeveloped; but
not in the United States. Here in one year it had become famous, and
in three years it had become rich. Bell's invincible patent was soon
buttressed by hundreds of others. An open-door policy was adopted for
invention. Change followed change to such a degree that the experts of
1880 would be lost to-day in the mazes of a telephone exchange.

The art of the telephone engineer has in thirty years grown from the
most crude and clumsy of experiments into an exact and comprehensive
profession. As Carty has aptly said, "At first we invariably approached
every problem from the wrong end. If we had been told to load a herd of
cattle on a steamer, our method would have been to hire a Hagenbeck to
train the cattle for a couple of years, so that they would know enough
to walk aboard of the ship when he gave the signal; but to-day, if we
had to ship cattle, we would know enough to make a greased chute and
slide them on board in a jiffy."

The telephone world has now its own standards and ideals. It has a
language of its own, a telephonese that is quite unintelligible to
outsiders. It has as many separate branches of study as medicine or law.
There are few men, half a dozen at most, who can now be said to have
a general knowledge of telephony. And no matter how wise a telephone
expert may be, he can never reach perfection, because of the amazing
variety of things that touch or concern his profession.

"No one man knows all the details now," said Theodore Vail. "Several
days ago I was walking through a telephone exchange and I saw something
new. I asked Mr. Carty to explain it. He is our chief engineer; but
he did not understand it. We called the manager. He did n't know, and
called his assistant. He did n't know, and called the local engineer,
who was able to tell us what it was."

To sum up this development of the art of tele-phony--to present a
bird's-eye view--it may be divided into four periods:

1. Experiment. 1876 to 1886. This was the period of invention, in which
there were no experts and no authorities. Telephonic apparatus consisted
of makeshifts and adaptations. It was the period of iron wire, imperfect
transmitters, grounded circuits, boy operators, peg switchboards, local
batteries, and overhead lines.

2. Development. 1886 to 1896. In this period amateurs became engineers.
The proper type of apparatus was discovered, and was improved to a
high point of efficiency. In this period came the multiple switchboard,
copper wire, girl operators, underground cables, metallic circuit,
common battery, and the long-distance lines.

3. Expansion. 1896 to 1906. This was the era of big business. It was an
autumn period, in which the telephone men and the public began to reap
the fruits of twenty years of investment and hard work. It was the
period of the message rate, the pay station, the farm line, and the
private branch exchange.

4. Organization. 1906--. With the success of the Pupin coil, there came
a larger life for the telephone. It became less local and more national.
It began to link together its scattered parts. It discouraged the waste
and anarchy of duplication. It taught its older, but smaller brother,
the telegraph, to cooperate. It put itself more closely in touch with
the will of the public. And it is now pushing ahead, along the two roads
of standardization and efficiency, toward its ideal of one universal
telephone system for the whole nation. The key-word of the telephone
development of to-day is this--organization.



CHAPTER V. THE EXPANSION OF THE BUSINESS

The telephone business did not really begin to grow big and overspread
the earth until 1896, but the keynote of expansion was first sounded by
Theodore Vail in the earliest days, when as yet the telephone was a babe
in arms. In 1879 Vail said, in a letter written to one of his captains:

"Tell our agents that we have a proposition on foot to connect the
different cities for the purpose of personal communication, and in other
ways to organize a GRAND TELEPHONIC SYSTEM."

This was brave talk at that time, when there were not in the whole world
as many telephones as there are to-day in Cincinnati. It was brave talk
in those days of iron wire, peg switchboards, and noisy diaphragms. Most
telephone men regarded it as nothing more than talk. They did not see
any business future for the telephone 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 master-effort. He resolved to build a line from Boston to Providence,
and was so stubbornly bent upon doing this that when the Bell Company
refused to act, he picked up the risk and set off with it alone.
He organized a company of well-known Rhode Islanders--nicknamed the
"Governors' Company"--and built the line. It was a failure at first,
and went by the name of "Vail's Folly." But Engineer Carty, by a happy
thought, DOUBLED THE WIRE, and thus in a moment established two new
factors in the telephone business--the Metallic Circuit and the Long
Distance line.

At once the Bell Company came over to Vail's point of view, bought
his new line, and launched out upon what seemed to be the foolhardy
enterprise of stringing a double wire from Boston to New York. This
was to be not only the longest of all telephone lines, strung on ten
thousand poles; it was to be a line de luxe, built of glistening red
copper, not iron. Its cost was to be seventy thousand dollars, which was
an enormous sum in those hardscrabble days. There was much opposition to
such extravagance, and much ridicule. "I would n't take that line as a
gift," said one of the Bell Company's officials.

But when the last coil of wire was stretched into place, and the first
"Hello" leaped from Boston to New York, the new line was a victorious
success. It carried messages from the first day; and more, it raised the
whole telephone business to a higher level. It swept away the prejudice
that telephone service could become nothing more than a neighborhood
affair. "It was the salvation of the business," said Edward J. Hill. It
marked a turning-point in the history of the telephone, when the day
of small things was ended and the day of great things was begun. No
one man, no hundred men, had created it. It was the final result of ten
years of invention and improvement.

While this epoch-making line was being strung, Vail was pushing his
"grand telephonic system" policy by organizing The American Telephone
and Telegraph Company. This, too, was a master-stroke. It was the
introduction of the staff-and-line method of organization into business.
It was doing for the forty or fifty Bell Companies what Von Moltke
did for the German army prior to the Franco-Prussian War. It was the
creation of a central company that should link all local companies
together, and itself own and operate the means by which these companies
are united. This central company was to grapple with all national
problems, to own all telephones and long-distance lines, to protect all
patents, and to be the headquarters of invention, information, capital,
and legal protection for the entire federation of Bell Companies.

Seldom has a company been started with so small a capital and so vast a
purpose. It had no more than $100,000 of capital stock, in 1885; but
its declared object was nothing less than to establish a system of
wire communication for the human race. Here are, in its own words, the
marching orders of this Company: "To connect one or more points in each
and every city, town, or place an the State of New York, with one or
more points in each and every other city, town, or place in said State,
and in each and every other of the United States, and in Canada, and
Mexico; and each and every of said cities, towns, and places is to be
connected with each and every other city, town, or place in said States
and countries, and also by cable and other appropriate means with the
rest of the known world."

So ran Vail's dream, and for nine years he worked mightily to make it
come true. He remained until the various parts of the business had grown
together, and until his plan for a "grand telephonic system" was under
way and fairly well understood. Then he went out, into a series of
picturesque enterprises, until he had built up a four-square fortune;
and recently, in 1907, he came back to be the head of the telephone
business, and to complete the work of organization that he started
thirty years before.

When Vail said auf wiedersehen to the telephone business, it had passed
from infancy to childhood. It was well shaped but not fully grown. Its
pioneering days were over. It was self-supporting and had a little money
in the bank. But it could not then have carried the load of traffic that
it carries to-day. It had still too many problems to solve and too
much general inertia to overcome. It needed to be conserved, drilled,
educated, popularized. And the man who was finally chosen to replace
Vail was in many respects the appropriate leader for such a preparatory
period.

Hudson--John Elbridge Hudson--was the name of the new head of the
telephone people. He was a man of middle age, born in Lynn and bred in
Boston; a long-pedigreed New Englander, whose ancestors had smelted
iron ore in Lynn when Charles the First was King. He was a lawyer by
profession and a university professor by temperament. His specialty, as
a man of affairs, had been marine law; and his hobby was the collection
of rare books and old English engravings. He was a master of the Greek
language, and very fond of using it. On all possible occasions he used
the language of Pericles in his conversation; and even carried this
preference so far as to write his business memoranda in Greek. He was
above all else a scholar, then a lawyer, and somewhat incidentally the
central figure in the telephone world.

But it was of tremendous value to the telephone business at that time to
have at its head a man of Hudson's intellectual and moral calibre.

He gave it tone and prestige. He built up its credit. He kept it clean
and clear above all suspicion of wrong-doing. He held fast whatever
had been gained. And he prepared the way for the period of expansion by
borrowing fifty millions for improvements, and by adding greatly to the
strength and influence of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.

Hudson remained at the head of the telephone table until his death, in
1900, and thus lived to see the dawn of the era of big business. Under
his regime great things were done in the development of the art. The
business was pushed ahead at every point by its captains. Every man in
his place, trying to give a little better service than yesterday--that
was the keynote of the Hudson period. There was no one preeminent
genius. Each important step forward was the result of the cooperation of
many minds, and the prodding necessities of a growing traffic.

By 1896, when the Common Battery system created a new era, the telephone
engineer had pretty well mastered his simpler troubles. He was able to
handle his wires, no matter how many. By this time, too, the public
was ready for the telephone. A new generation had grown up, without the
prejudices of its fathers. People had grown away from the telegraphic
habit of thought, which was that wire communications were expensive
luxuries for the few. The telephone was, in fact, a new social nerve,
so new and so novel that very nearly twenty years went by before it
had fully grown into place, and before the social body developed the
instinct of using it.

Not that the difficulties of the telephone engineers were over, for they
were not. They have seemed to grow more numerous and complex every year.
But by 1896 enough had been done to warrant a forward movement. For the
next ten-year period the keynote of telephone history was EXPANSION.
Under the prevailing flat-rate plan of payment, all customers paid
the same yearly price and then used their telephones as often as they
pleased. This was a simple method, and the most satisfactory for small
towns and farming regions. But in a great city such a plan grew to be
suicidal. In New York, for instance, the price had to be raised to $240,
which lifted the telephone as high above the mass of the citizens as
though it were a piano or a diamond sunburst. Such a plan was strangling
the business. It was shutting out the small users. It was clogging the
wires with deadhead calls. It was giving some people too little service
and others too much. It was a very unsatisfactory situation.

How to extend the service and at the same time cheapen it to small
users--that was the Gordian knot; and the man who unquestionably did
most to untie it was Edward J. Hall. Mr. Hall founded the telephone
business in Buffalo in 1878, and seven years afterwards became the chief
of the long-distance traffic. He was then, and is to-day, one of the
statesmen of the telephone. For more than thirty years he has been the
"candid friend" of the business, incessantly suggesting, probing, and
criticising. Keen and dispassionate, with a genius for mercilessly
cutting to the marrow of a proposition, Hall has at the same time been a
zealot for the improvement and extension of telephone service. It was he
who set the agents free from the ball-and-chain of royalties, allowing
them to pay instead a percentage of gross receipts. And it was he who
"broke the jam," as a lumberman would say, by suggesting the MESSAGE
RATE system.

By this plan, which U. N. Bethell developed to its highest point in New
York, a user of the telephone pays a fixed minimum price for a certain
number of messages per year, and extra for all messages over this
number. The large user pays more, and the little user pays less. It
opened up the way to such an expansion of telephone business as Bell,
in his rosiest dreams, had never imagined. In three years, after 1896,
there were twice as many users; in six years there were four times as
many; in ten years there were eight to one. What with the message rate
and the pay station, the telephone was now on its way to be universal.
It was adapted to all kinds and conditions of men. A great corporation,
nerved at every point with telephone wires, may now pay fifty thousand
dollars to the Bell Company, while at the same time a young Irish
immigrant boy, just arrived in New York City, may offer five coppers and
find at his disposal a fifty million dollar telephone system.

When the message rate was fairly well established, Hudson died--fell
suddenly to the ground as he was about to step into a railway carriage.
In his place came Frederick P. Fish, also a lawyer and a Bostonian. Fish
was a popular, optimistic man, with a "full-speed-ahead" temperament.
He pushed the policy of expansion until he broke all the records. He
borrowed money in stupendous amounts--$150,000,000 at one time--and
flung it into a campaign of red-hot development. More business he
demanded, and more, and more, until his captains, like a thirty-horse
team of galloping horses, became very nearly uncontrollable.

It was a fast and furious period. The whole country was ablaze with a
passion of prosperity. After generations of conflict, the men with large
ideas had at last put to rout the men of small ideas. The waste
and folly of competition had everywhere driven men to the policy of
cooperation. Mills were linked to mills and factories to factories, in
a vast mutualism of industry such as no other age, perhaps, has ever
known. And as the telephone is essentially the instrument of co-working
and interdependent people, it found itself suddenly welcomed as the most
popular and indispensable of all the agencies that put men in touch with
each other.

To describe this growth in a single sentence, we might say that the
Bell telephone secured its first million of capital in 1879; its first
million of earnings in 1882; its first million of dividends in 1884; its
first million of surplus in 1885. It had paid out its first million for
legal expenses by 1886; began first to send a million messages a day
in 1888; had strung its first million miles of wire in 1900; and had
installed its first million telephones in 1898. By 1897 it had spun as
many cobwebs of wire as the mighty Western Union itself; by 1900 it had
twice as many miles of wire as the Western Union, and in 1905 FIVE TIMES
as many. Such was the plunging progress of the Bell Companies in this
period of expansion, that by 1905 they had swept past all European
countries combined, not only in the quality of the service but in the
actual number of telephones in use. This, too, without a cent of public
money, or the protection of a tariff, or the prestige of a governmental
bureau.

By 1892 Boston and New York were talking to Chicago, Milwaukee,
Pittsburg, and Washington. One-half of the people of the United States
were within talking distance of each other. The THOUSAND-MILE TALK had
ceased to be a fairy tale. Several years later the western end of the
line was pushed over the plains to Nebraska, enabling the spoken word in
Boston to be heard in Omaha. Slowly and with much effort the public were
taught to substitute the telephone for travel. A special long-distance
salon was fitted up in New York City to entice people into the habit
of talking to other cities. Cabs were sent for customers; and when one
arrived, he was escorted over Oriental rugs to a gilded booth, draped
with silken curtains. This was the famous "Room Nine." By such and many
other allurements a larger idea of telephone service was given to the
public mind; until in 1909 at least eighteen thousand New York-Chicago
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 seventy-thousand-mile nerve-system for the far West.

Chicago, in this year, had two hundred thou-sand telephones in use, in
her two hundred square miles of area. The business had been built up by
General Anson Stager, who was himself wealthy, and able to attract the
support of such men as John Crerar, H. H. Porter, and Robert T. Lincoln.
Since 1882 it has paid dividends, and in one glorious year its stock
soared to four hundred dollars a share. The old-timers--the men who
clambered over roof-tops in 1878 and tacked iron wires wherever they
could without being chased off--are still for the most part in control
of the Chicago company.

But as might have been expected, it was New York City that was the
record-breaker when the era of telephone expansion arrived. Here the
flood of big business struck with the force of a tidal wave. The number
of users leaped from 56,000 in 1900 up to 810,000 in 1908. In a single
year of sweating and breathless activity, 65,000 new telephones were
put on desks or hung on walls--an average of one new user for every two
minutes of the business day.

Literally tons, and hundreds of tons, of telephones were hauled in drays
from the factory and put in place in New York's homes and offices. More
and more were demanded, until to-day there are more telephones in New
York than there are in the four countries, France, Belgium, Holland, and
Switzerland combined. As a user of telephones New York has risen to be
unapproachable. Mass together all the telephones of London, Glasgow,
Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffleld, Bristol, and
Belfast, and there will even then be barely as many as are carrying the
conversations of this one American city.

In 1879 the New York telephone directory was a small card, showing
two hundred and fifty-two names; but now it has grown to be an
eight-hundred-page quarterly, with a circulation of half a million, and
requiring twenty drays, forty horses, and four hundred men to do the
work of distribution. There was one shabby little exchange thirty years
ago; but now there are fifty-two exchanges, as the nerve-centres of
a vast fifty-million-dollar system. Incredible as it may seem to
foreigners, it is literally true that in a single building in New York,
the Hudson Terminal, there are more telephones than in Odessa or Madrid,
more than in the two kingdoms of Greece and Bulgaria combined.

Merely to operate this system requires an army of more than five
thousand girls. Merely to keep their records requires two hundred and
thirty-five million sheets of paper a year. Merely to do the writing of
these records wears away five hundred and sixty thousand lead pencils.
And merely to give these girls a cup of tea or coffee at noon, compels
the Bell Company to buy yearly six thousand pounds of tea, seventeen
thousand pounds of coffee, forty-eight thousand cans of condensed milk,
and one hundred and forty barrels of sugar.

The myriad wires of this New York system are tingling with talk every
minute of the day and night. They are most at rest between three and
four o'clock in the morning, although even then there are usually ten
calls a minute. Between five and six o'clock, two thousand New Yorkers
are awake and at the telephone. Half an hour later there are twice as
many. Between seven and eight twenty-five thousand people have called
up twenty-five thousand other people, so that there are as many people
talking by wire as there were in the whole city of New York in the
Revolutionary period. Even this is only the dawn of the day's business.
By half-past eight it is doubled; by nine it is trebled; by ten it is
multiplied sixfold; and by eleven the roar has become an incredible
babel of one hundred and eighty thousand conversations an hour, with
fifty new voices clamoring at the exchanges every second.

This is "the peak of the load." It is the topmost pinnacle of talk. It
is the utmost degree of service that the telephone has been required to
give in any city. And it is as much a world's wonder, to men and
women of imagination, as the steel mills of Homestead or the turbine
leviathans that curve across the Atlantic Ocean in four and a half days.

As to the men who built it up: Charles F. Cutler died in 1907, but
most of the others are still alive and busy. Union N. Bethell, now
in Cutler's place at the head of the New York Company, has been the
operating chief for eighteen years. He is a man of shrewdness and
sympathy, with a rare sagacity in solving knotty problems, a president
of the new type, who regards his work as a sort of obligation he owes
to the public. And just as foreigners go to Pittsburg to see the steel
business at its best; just as they go to Iowa and Kansas to see the
New Farmer, so they make pilgrimages to Bethell's office to learn the
profession of telephony.

This unparalleled telephone system of New York grew up without having
at any time the rivalry of competition. But in many other cities and
especially in the Middle West, there sprang up in 1895 a medley of
independent companies. The time of the original patents had expired, and
the Bell Companies found themselves freed from the expense of litigation
only to be snarled up in a tangle of duplication. In a few years there
were six thousand of these little Robinson Crusoe companies. And by 1901
they had put in use more than a million telephones and were professing
to have a capital of a hundred millions.

Most of these companies were necessary and did much to expand the
telephone business into new territory. They were in fact small mutual
associations of a dozen or a hundred farmers, whose aim was to get
telephone service at cost. But there were other companies, probably
a thousand or more, which were organized by promoters who built their
hopes on the fact that the Bell Companies were unpopular, and on the
myth that they were fabulously rich. Instead of legitimately extending
telephone lines into communities that had none, these promoters
proceeded to inflict the messy snarl of an overlapping system upon
whatever cities would give them permission to do so.

In this way, masked as competition, the nuisance and waste of
duplication began in most American cities. The telephone business was
still so young, it was so little appreciated even by the telephone
officials and engineers, that the public regarded a second or a
third telephone system in one city as quite a possible and desirable
innovation. "We have two ears," said one promoter; "why not therefore
have two telephones?"

This duplication went merrily on for years before it was generally
discovered that the telephone is not an ear, but a nerve system; and
that such an experiment as a duplicate nerve system has never been
attempted by Nature, even in her most frivolous moods. Most people
fancied that a telephone system was practically the same as a gas or
electric light system, which can often be duplicated with the result of
cheaper rates and better service. They did not for years discover that
two telephone companies in one city means either half service or double
cost, just as two fire departments or two post offices would.

Some of these duplicate companies built up a complete plant, and gave
good local service, while others proved to be mere stock bubbles. Most
of them were over-capitalized, depending upon public sympathy to atone
for deficiencies in equipment. One which had printed fifty million
dollars of stock for sale was sold at auction in 1909 for four hundred
thousand dollars. All told, there were twenty-three of these bubbles
that burst in 1905, twenty-one in 1906, and twelve in 1907. So high
has been the death-rate among these isolated companies that at a recent
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 street-railways in
South America. In the first act of the telephone drama, it was he
who put the enterprise upon a business basis, and laid down the first
principles of its policy. In the second and third acts he had no place;
but when the curtain rose upon the fourth act, Vail was once

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/819