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+Project Gutenberg's The History of the Telephone, by Herbert N. Casson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere 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
+
+
+Title: The History of the Telephone
+
+Author: Herbert N. Casson
+
+Posting Date: August 5, 2008 [EBook #819]
+Release Date: February, 1997
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS 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 more the
+central figure, standing white-haired among his captains, and pushing
+forward the completion of the "grand telephonic system" that he had
+dreamed of when the telephone was three years old.
+
+Thus it came about that the telephone business was created by Vail,
+conserved by Hudson, expanded by Fish, and is now in process of being
+consolidated by Vail. It is being knit together into a stupendous Bell
+System--a federation of self-governing companies, united by a central
+company that is the busiest of them all. It is no longer protected by
+any patent monopoly. Whoever is rich enough and rash enough may enter
+the field. But it has all the immeasurable advantages that come from
+long experience, immense bulk, the most highly skilled specialists,
+and an abundance of capital. "The Bell System is strong," says Vail,
+"because we are all tied up together; and the success of one is
+therefore the concern of all."
+
+The Bell System! Here we have the motif of American telephone
+development. Here is the most comprehensive idea that has entered any
+telephone engineer's brain. Already this Bell System has grown to be so
+vast, so nearly akin to a national nerve system, that there is nothing
+else to which we can compare it. It is so wide-spread that few are
+aware of its greatness. It is strung out over fifty thousand cities and
+communities.
+
+If it were all gathered together into one place, this Bell System, it
+would make a city of Telephonia as large as Baltimore. It would contain
+half of the telephone property of the world. Its actual wealth would be
+fully $760,000,000, and its revenue would be greater than the revenue of
+the city of New York.
+
+Part of the property of the city of Telephonia consists of ten million
+poles, as many as would make a fence from New York to California, or put
+a stockade around Texas. If the Telephonians wished to use these poles
+at home, they might drive them in as piles along their water-front, and
+have a twenty-five thousand-acre dock; or if their city were a hundred
+square miles in extent, they might set up a seven-ply wall around it
+with these poles.
+
+Wire, too! Eleven million miles of it! This city of Telephonia would
+be the capital of an empire of wire. Not all the men in New York State
+could shoulder this burden of wire and carry it. Throw all the people
+of Illinois in one end of the scale, and put on the other side the
+wire-wealth of Telephonia, and long before the last coil was in place,
+the Illinoisans would be in the air.
+
+What would this city do for a living? It would make two-thirds of
+the telephones, cables, and switchboards of all countries. Nearly
+one-quarter of its citizens would work in factories, while the others
+would be busy in six thousand exchanges, making it possible for the
+people of the United States to talk to one another at the rate of SEVEN
+THOUSAND MILLION CONVERSATIONS A YEAR.
+
+The pay-envelope army that moves to work every morning in Telephonia
+would be a host of one hundred and ten thousand men and girls, mostly
+girls,--as many girls as would fill Vassar College a hundred times and
+more, or double the population of Nevada. Put these men and girls in
+line, march them ten abreast, and six hours would pass before the last
+company would arrive at the reviewing stand. In single file this throng
+of Telephonians would make a living wall from New York to New Haven.
+
+Such is the extraordinary city of which Alexander Graham Bell was the
+only resident in 1875. It has been built up without the backing of any
+great bank or multi-millionaire. There have been no Vanderbilts in it,
+no Astors, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Harrimans. There are even now
+only four men who own as many as ten thousand shares of the stock of
+the central company. This Bell System stands as the life-work of
+unprivileged men, who are for the most part still alive and busy. With
+very few and trivial exceptions, every part of it was made in the
+United States. No other industrial organism of equal size owes foreign
+countries so little. Alike in its origin, its development, and
+its highest point of efficiency and expansion, the telephone is as
+essentially American as the Declaration of Independence or the monument
+on Bunker Hill.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. NOTABLE USERS OF THE TELEPHONE
+
+What we might call the telephonization of city life, for lack of a
+simpler word, has remarkably altered our manner of living from what it
+was in the days of Abraham Lincoln. It has enabled us to be more social
+and cooperative. It has literally abolished the isolation of separate
+families, and has made us members of one great family. It has become so
+truly an organ of the social body that by telephone we now enter into
+contracts, give evidence, try lawsuits, make speeches, propose marriage,
+confer degrees, appeal to voters, and do almost everything else that is
+a matter of speech.
+
+In stores and hotels this wire traffic has grown to an almost
+bewildering extent, as these are the places where many interests meet.
+The hundred largest hotels in New York City have twenty-one thousand
+telephones--nearly as many as the continent of Africa and more than the
+kingdom of Spain. In an average year they send six million messages. The
+Waldorf-Astoria alone tops all residential buildings with eleven hundred
+and twenty telephones and five hundred thousand calls a year; while
+merely the Christmas Eve orders that flash into Marshall Field's store,
+or John Wanamaker's, have risen as high as the three thousand mark.
+
+Whether the telephone does most to concentrate population, or to scatter
+it, is a question that has not yet been examined. It is certainly true
+that it has made the skyscraper possible, and thus helped to create
+an absolutely new type of city, such as was never imagined even in the
+fairy tales of ancient nations. The skyscraper is ten years younger than
+the telephone. It is now generally seen to be the ideal building for
+business offices. It is one of the few types of architecture that may
+fairly be called American. And its efficiency is largely, if not mainly,
+due to the fact that its inhabitants may run errands by telephone as
+well as by elevator.
+
+There seems to be no sort of activity which is not being made more
+convenient by the telephone. It is used to call the duck-shooters in
+Western Canada when a flock of birds has arrived; and to direct the
+movements of the Dragon in Wagner's grand opera "Siegfried." At the last
+Yale-Harvard football game, it conveyed almost instantaneous news to
+fifty thousand people in various parts of New England. At the Vanderbilt
+Cup Race its wires girdled the track and reported every gain or mishap
+of the racing autos. And at such expensive pageants as that of the
+Quebec Tercentenary in 1908, where four thousand actors came and went
+upon a ten-acre stage, every order was given by telephone.
+
+Public officials, even in the United States, have been slow to change
+from the old-fashioned and more dignified use of written documents
+and uniformed messengers; but in the last ten years there has been a
+sweeping revolution in this respect. Government by telephone! This is a
+new idea that has already arrived in the more efficient departments of
+the Federal service. And as for the present Congress, that body has gone
+so far as to plan for a special system of its own, in both Houses, so
+that all official announcements may be heard by wire.
+
+Garfield was the first among American Presidents to possess a telephone.
+An exhibition instrument was placed in his house, without cost, in 1878,
+while he was still a member of Congress. Neither Cleveland nor Harrison,
+for temperamental reasons, used the magic wire very often. Under their
+regime, there was one lonely idle telephone in the White House, used by
+the servants several times a week. But with McKinley came a new order of
+things. To him a telephone was more than a necessity. It was a pastime,
+an exhilarating sport. He was the one President who really revelled in
+the comforts of telephony. In 1895 he sat in his Canton home and heard
+the cheers of the Chicago Convention. Later he sat there and ran
+the first presidential telephone campaign; talked to his managers in
+thirty-eight States. Thus he came to regard the telephone with a higher
+degree of appreciation than any of his predecessors had done, and
+eulogized it on many public occasions. "It is bringing us all closer
+together," was his favorite phrase.
+
+To Roosevelt the telephone was mainly for emergencies. He used it to the
+full during the Chicago Convention of 1907 and the Peace Conference at
+Portsmouth. But with Taft the telephone became again the common avenue
+of conversation. He has introduced at least one new telephonic custom a
+long-distance talk with his family every evening, when he is away from
+home. Instead of the solitary telephone of Cleveland-Harrison days, the
+White House has now a branch exchange of its own--Main 6--with a sheaf
+of wires that branch out into every room as well as to the nearest
+central.
+
+Next to public officials, bankers were perhaps the last to accept the
+facilities of the telephone. They were slow to abandon the fallacy that
+no business can be done without a written record. James Stillman, of New
+York, was first among bankers to foresee the telephone era. As early
+as 1875, while Bell was teaching his infant telephone to talk, Stillman
+risked two thousand dollars in a scheme to establish a crude dial system
+of wire communication, which later grew into New York's first telephone
+exchange. At the present time, the banker who works closest to his
+telephone is probably George W. Perkins, of the J. P. Morgan group
+of bankers. "He is the only man," says Morgan, "who can raise twenty
+millions in twenty minutes." The Perkins plan of rapid transit telephony
+is to prepare a list of names, from ten to thirty, and to flash from one
+to another as fast as the operator can ring them up. Recently one of
+the other members of the Morgan bank proposed to enlarge its telephone
+equipment. "What will we gain by more wires?" asked the operator. "If
+we were to put in a six-hundred pair cable, Mr. Perkins would keep it
+busy."
+
+The most brilliant feat of the telephone in the financial world was
+done during the panic of 1907. At the height of the storm, on a Saturday
+evening, the New York bankers met in an almost desperate conference.
+They decided, as an emergency measure of self-protection, not to ship
+cash to Western banks. At midnight they telephoned this decision to
+the bankers of Chicago and St. Louis. These men, in turn, conferred by
+telephone, and on Sunday afternoon called up the bankers of neighboring
+States. And so the news went from 'phone to 'phone, until by Monday
+morning all bankers and chief depositors were aware of the situation,
+and prepared for the team-play that prevented any general disaster.
+
+As for stockbrokers of the Wall Street species, they transact
+practically all their business by telephone. In their stock exchange
+stand six hundred and forty one booths, each one the terminus of a
+private wire. A firm of brokers will count it an ordinary year's talking
+to send fifty thousand messages; and there is one firm which last year
+sent twice as many. Of all brokers, the one who finally accomplished
+most by telephony was unquestionably E. H. Harriman. In the mansion that
+he built at Arden, there were a hundred telephones, sixty of them linked
+to the long-distance lines. What the brush is to the artist, what the
+chisel is to the sculptor, the telephone was to Harriman. He built his
+fortune with it. It was in his library, his bathroom, his private car,
+his camp in the Oregon wilder-ness. No transaction was too large or too
+involved to be settled over its wires. He saved the credit of the
+Erie by telephone--lent it five million dollars as he lay at home on
+a sickbed. "He is a slave to the telephone," wrote a magazine writer.
+"Nonsense," replied Harriman, "it is a slave to me."
+
+The telephone arrived in time to prevent big corporations from being
+unwieldy and aristocratic. The foreman of a Pittsburg coal company may
+now stand in his subterranean office and talk to the president of
+the Steel Trust, who sits on the twenty-first floor of a New York
+skyscraper. The long-distance talks, especially, have grown to be
+indispensable to the corporations whose plants are scattered and
+geographically misplaced--to the mills of New England, for instance,
+that use the cotton of the South and sell so much of their product to
+the Middle West. To the companies that sell perishable commodities,
+an instantaneous conversation with a buyer in a distant city has often
+saved a carload or a cargo. Such caterers as the meat-packers, who were
+among the first to realize what Bell had made possible, have greatly
+accelerated the wheels of their business by inter-city conversations.
+For ten years or longer the Cudahys have talked every business morning
+between Omaha and Boston, via fifteen hundred and seventy miles of wire.
+
+In the refining of oil, the Standard Oil Company alone, at its New York
+office, sends two hundred and thirty thousand messages a year. In the
+making of steel, a chemical analysis is made of each caldron of molten
+pig-iron, when it starts on its way to be refined, and this analysis is
+sent by telephone to the steelmaker, so that he will know exactly how
+each potful is to be handled. In the floating of logs down rivers,
+instead of having relays of shouters to prevent the logs from jamming,
+there is now a wire along the bank, with a telephone linked on at every
+point of danger. In the rearing of skyscrapers, it is now usual to have
+a temporary wire strung vertically, so that the architect may stand on
+the ground and confer with a foreman who sits astride of a naked girder
+three hundred feet up in the air. And in the electric light business,
+the current is distributed wholly by telephoned orders. To give New York
+the seven million electric lights that have abolished night in that
+city requires twelve private exchanges and five hundred and twelve
+telephones. All the power that creates this artificial daylight is
+generated at a single station, and let flow to twenty-five storage
+centres. Minute by minute, its flow is guided by an expert, who sits at
+a telephone exchange as though he were a pilot at the wheel of an ocean
+liner.
+
+The first steamship line to take notice of the telephone was the Clyde,
+which had a wire from dock to office in 1877; and the first railway was
+the Pennsylvania, which two years later was persuaded by Professor Bell
+himself to give it a trial in Altoona. Since then, this railroad has
+become the chief beneficiary of the art of telephony. It has one hundred
+and seventy-five exchanges, four hundred operators, thirteen thousand
+telephones, and twenty thousand miles of wire--a more ample system than
+the city of New York had in 1896.
+
+To-day the telephone goes to sea in the passenger steamer and the
+warship. Its wires are waiting at the dock and the depot, so that a
+tourist may sit in his stateroom and talk with a friend in some distant
+office. It is one of the most incredible miracles of telephony that
+a passenger at New York, who is about to start for Chicago on a fast
+express, may telephone to Chicago from the drawing-room of a Pullman. He
+himself, on the swiftest of all trains, will not arrive in Chicago for
+eighteen hours; but the flying words can make the journey, and RETURN,
+while his train is waiting for the signal to start.
+
+In the operation of trains, the railroads have waited thirty years
+before they dared to trust the telephone, just as they waited fifteen
+years before they dared to trust the telegraph. In 1883 a few railways
+used the telephone in a small way, but in 1907, when a law was passed
+that made telegraphers highly expensive, there was a general swing
+to the telephone. Several dozen roads have now put it in use, some
+employing it as an associate of the Morse method and others as a
+complete substitute. It has already been found to be the quickest way of
+despatching trains. It will do in five minutes what the telegraph did
+in ten. And it has enabled railroads to hire more suitable men for the
+smaller offices.
+
+In news-gathering, too, much more than in railroading, the day of the
+telephone has arrived. The Boston Globe was the first paper to receive
+news by telephone. Later came The Washington Star, which had a wire
+strung to the Capitol, and thereby gained an hour over its competitors.
+To-day the evening papers receive most of their news over the wire a
+la Bell instead of a la Morse. This has resulted in a specialization of
+reporters--one man runs for the news and another man writes it. Some of
+the runners never come to the office. They receive their assignments
+by telephone, and their salaries by mail. There are even a few who are
+allowed to telephone their news directly to a swift linotype operator,
+who clicks it into type on his machine, without the scratch of a pencil.
+This, of course, is the ideal method of news-gathering, which is rarely
+possible.
+
+A paper of the first class, such as The New York World, has now an
+outfit of twenty trunk lines and eighty telephones. Its outgoing calls
+are two hundred thousand a year and its incoming calls three hundred
+thousand, which means that for every morning, evening, or Sunday
+edition, there has been an average of seven hundred and fifty messages.
+The ordinary newspaper in a small town cannot afford such a service,
+but recently the United Press has originated a cooperative method. It
+telephones the news over one wire to ten or twelve newspapers at one
+time. In ten minutes a thousand words can in this way be flung out to a
+dozen towns, as quickly as by telegraph and much cheaper.
+
+But it is in a dangerous crisis, when safety seems to hang upon a
+second, that the telephone is at its best. It is the instrument of
+emergencies, a sort of ubiquitous watchman. When the girl operator in
+the exchange hears a cry for help--"Quick! The hospital!" "The fire
+department!" "The police!" she seldom waits to hear the number. She
+knows it. She is trained to save half-seconds. And it is at such
+moments, if ever, that the users of a telephone can appreciate its
+insurance value. No doubt, if a King Richard III were worsted on a
+modern battlefield, his instinctive cry would be, "My Kingdom for a
+telephone!"
+
+When instant action is needed in the city of New York, a General Alarm
+can in five minutes be sent by the police wires over its whole vast
+area of three hundred square miles. When, recently, a gas main broke in
+Brooklyn, sixty girls were at once called to the centrals in that part
+of the city to warn the ten thousand families who had been placed in
+danger. When the ill-fated General Slocum caught fire, a mechanic in a
+factory on the water-front saw the blaze, and had the presence of mind
+to telephone the newspapers, the hospitals, and the police. When a small
+child is lost, or a convict has escaped from prison, or the forest is
+on fire, or some menace from the weather is at hand, the telephone bells
+clang out the news, just as the nerves jangle the bells of pain when
+the body is in danger. In one tragic case, the operator in Folsom, New
+Mexico, refused to quit her post until she had warned her people of a
+flood that had broken loose in the hills above the village. Because of
+her courage, nearly all were saved, though she herself was drowned at
+the switchboard. Her name--Mrs. S. J. Rooke--deserves to be remembered.
+
+If a disaster cannot be prevented, it is the telephone, usually, that
+brings first aid to the injured. After the destruction of San Francisco,
+Governor Guild, of Massachusetts, sent an appeal for the stricken city
+to the three hundred and fifty-four mayors of his State; and by the
+courtesy of the Bell Company, which carried the messages free, they were
+delivered to the last and furthermost mayors in less than five hours.
+After the destruction of Messina, an order for enough lumber to build
+ten thousand new houses was cabled to New York and telephoned to Western
+lumbermen. So quickly was this order filled that on the twelfth day
+after the arrival of the cablegram, the ships were on their way to
+Messina with the lumber. After the Kansas City flood of 1903, when the
+drenched city was without railways or street-cars or electric lights,
+it was the telephone that held the city together and brought help to the
+danger-spots. And after the Baltimore fire, the telephone exchange was
+the last force to quit and the first to recover. Its girls sat on their
+stools at the switchboard until the window-panes were broken by the
+heat. Then they pulled the covers over the board and walked out.
+Two hours later the building was in ashes. Three hours later another
+building was rented on the unburned rim of the city, and the wire chiefs
+were at work. In one day there was a system of wires for the use of the
+city officials. In two days these were linked to long-distance wires;
+and in eleven days a two-thousand-line switchboard was in full working
+trim. This feat still stands as the record in rebuilding.
+
+In the supreme emergency of war, the telephone is as indispensable, very
+nearly, as the cannon. This, at least, is the belief of the Japanese,
+who handled their armies by telephone when they drove back the Russians.
+Each body of Japanese troops moved forward like a silkworm, leaving
+behind it a glistening strand of red copper wire. At the decisive battle
+of Mukden, the silk-worm army, with a million legs, crept against the
+Russian hosts in a vast crescent, a hundred miles from end to end. By
+means of this glistening red wire, the various batteries and regiments
+were organized into fifteen divisions. Each group of three divisions was
+wired to a general, and the five generals were wired to the great Oyama
+himself, who sat ten miles back of the firing-line and sent his orders.
+Whenever a regiment lunged forward, one of the soldiers carried a
+telephone set. If they held their position, two other soldiers ran
+forward with a spool of wire. In this way and under fire of the Russian
+cannon, one hundred and fifty miles of wire were strung across the
+battlefield. As the Japanese said, it was this "flying telephone" that
+enabled Oyama to manipulate his forces as handily as though he were
+playing a game of chess. It was in this war, too, that the Mikado's
+soldiers strung the costliest of all telephone lines, at 203 Metre Hill.
+When the wire had been basted up this hill to the summit, the fortress
+of Port Arthur lay at their mercy. But the climb had cost them
+twenty-four thousand lives.
+
+Of the seven million telephones in the United States, about two million
+are now in farmhouses. Every fourth American farmer is in telephone
+touch with his neighbors and the market. Iowa leads, among the farming
+States. In Iowa, not to have a telephone is to belong to what a Londoner
+would call the "submerged tenth" of the population. Second in line comes
+Illinois, with Kansas, Nebraska, and Indiana following closely behind;
+and at the foot of the list, in the matter of farm telephones, are
+Connecticut and Louisiana.
+
+The first farmer who discovered the value of the telephone was
+the market gardener. Next came the bonanza farmer of the Red River
+Valley--such a man, for instance, as Oliver Dalrymple, of North Dakota,
+who found that by the aid of the telephone he could plant and harvest
+thirty thousand acres of wheat in a single season. Then, not more than
+half a dozen years ago, there arose a veritable Telephone Crusade among
+the farmers of the Middle West. Cheap telephones, yet fairly good,
+had by this time been made possible by the improvements of the Bell
+engineers; and stories of what could be done by telephone became the
+favorite gossip of the day. One farmer had kept his barn from being
+burned down by telephoning for his neighbors; another had cleared five
+hundred dollars extra profit on the sale of his cattle, by telephoning
+to the best market; a third had rescued a flock of sheep by sending
+quick news of an approaching blizzard; a fourth had saved his son's life
+by getting an instantaneous message to the doctor; and so on.
+
+How the telephone saved a three million dollar fruit crop in Colorado,
+in 1909, is the story that is oftenest told in the West. Until that
+year, the frosts in the Spring nipped the buds. No farmer could be sure
+of his harvest. But in 1909, the fruit-growers bought smudge-pots--three
+hundred thousand or more. These were placed in the orchards, ready to
+be lit at a moment's notice. Next, an alliance was made with the United
+States Weather Bureau so that whenever the Frost King came down from the
+north, a warning could be telephoned to the farmers. Just when Colorado
+was pink with apple blossoms, the first warning came. "Get ready to
+light up your smudge-pots in half an hour." Then the farmers telephoned
+to the nearest towns: "Frost is coming; come and help us in the
+orchards." Hundreds of men rushed out into the country on horseback
+and in wagons. In half an hour the last warning came: "Light up; the
+thermometer registers twenty-nine." The smudge-pot artillery was set
+ablaze, and kept blazing until the news came that the icy forces had
+retreated. And in this way every Colorado farmer who had a telephone
+saved his fruit.
+
+In some farming States, the enthusiasm for the telephone is running so
+high that mass meetings are held, with lavish oratory on the general
+theme of "Good Roads and Telephones." And as a result of this Telephone
+Crusade, there are now nearly twenty thousand groups of farmers, each
+one with a mutual telephone system, and one-half of them with sufficient
+enterprise to link their little webs of wires to the vast Bell system,
+so that at least a million farmers have been brought as close to the
+great cities as they are to their own barns.
+
+What telephones have done to bring in the present era of big crops, is
+an interesting story in itself. To compress it into a sentence, we might
+say that the telephone has completed the labor-saving movement which
+started with the McCormick reaper in 1831. It has lifted the farmer
+above the wastefulness of being his own errand-boy. The average length
+of haul from barn to market in the United States is nine and a half
+miles, so that every trip saved means an extra day's work for a man and
+team. Instead of travelling back and forth, often to no purpose, the
+farmer may now stay at home and attend to his stock and his crops.
+
+As yet, few farmers have learned to appreciate the value of quality in
+telephone service, as they have in other lines. The same man who will
+pay six prices for the best seed-corn, and who will allow nothing but
+high-grade cattle in his barn, will at the same time be content with the
+shabbiest and flimsiest telephone service, without offering any other
+excuse than that it is cheap. But this is a transient phase of farm
+telephony. The cost of an efficient farm system is now so little--not
+more than two dollars a month, that the present trashy lines are certain
+sooner or later to go to the junk-heap with the sickle and the flail and
+all the other cheap and unprofitable things.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. THE TELEPHONE AND NATIONAL EFFICIENCY
+
+The larger significance of the telephone is that it completes the work
+of eliminating the hermit and gypsy elements of civilization. In an
+almost ideal way, it has made intercommunication possible without
+travel. It has enabled a man to settle permanently in one place, and yet
+keep in personal touch with his fellows.
+
+Until the last few centuries, much of the world was probably what
+Morocco is to-day--a region without wheeled vehicles or even roads of
+any sort. There is a mythical story of a wonderful speaking-trumpet
+possessed by Alexander the Great, by which he could call a soldier who
+was ten miles distant; but there was probably no substitute for the
+human voice except flags and beacon-fires, or any faster method of
+travel than the gait of a horse or a camel across ungraded plains. The
+first sensation of rapid transit doubtless came with the sailing vessel;
+but it was the play-toy of the winds, and unreliable. When Columbus
+dared to set out on his famous voyage, he was five weeks in crossing
+from Spain to the West Indies, his best day's record two hundred miles.
+The swift steamship travel of to-day did not begin until 1838, when the
+Great Western raced over the Atlantic in fifteen days.
+
+As for organized systems of intercommunication, they were unknown even
+under the rule of a Pericles or a Caesar. There was no post office in
+Great Britain until 1656--a generation after America had begun to be
+colonized. There was no English mail-coach until 1784; and when Benjamin
+Franklin was Postmaster General at Philadelphia, an answer by mail from
+Boston, when all went well, required not less than three weeks. There
+was not even a hard-surface road in the thirteen United States until
+1794; nor even a postage stamp until 1847, the year in which Alexander
+Graham Bell was born. In this same year Henry Clay delivered his
+memorable speech on the Mexican War, at Lexington, Kentucky, and it was
+telegraphed to The New York Herald at a cost of five hundred dollars,
+thus breaking all previous records for news-gathering enterprise. Eleven
+years later the first cable established an instantaneous sign-language
+between Americans and Europeans; and in 1876 there came the perfect
+distance-talking of the telephone.
+
+No invention has been more timely than the telephone. It arrived at the
+exact period when it was needed for the organization of great cities
+and the unification of nations. The new ideas and energies of science,
+commerce, and cooperation were beginning to win victories in all parts
+of the earth. The first railroad had just arrived in China; the first
+parliament in Japan; the first constitution in Spain. Stanley was moving
+like a tiny point of light through the heart of the Dark Continent. The
+Universal Postal Union had been organized in a little hall in Berne. The
+Red Cross movement was twelve years old. An International Congress of
+Hygiene was being held at Brussells, and an International Congress of
+Medicine at Philadelphia. De Lesseps had finished the Suez Canal and
+was examining Panama. Italy and Germany had recently been built into
+nations; France had finally swept aside the Empire and the Commune and
+established the Republic. And what with the new agencies of railroads,
+steamships, cheap newspapers, cables, and telegraphs, the civilized
+races of mankind had begun to be knit together into a practical
+consolidation.
+
+To the United States, especially, the telephone came as a friend in
+need. After a hundred years of growth, the Republic was still a loose
+confederation of separate States, rather than one great united nation.
+It had recently fallen apart for four years, with a wide gulf of blood
+between; and with two flags, two Presidents, and two armies. In 1876
+it was hesitating halfway between doubt and confidence, between the old
+political issues of North and South, and the new industrial issues of
+foreign trade and the development of material resources. The West was
+being thrown open. The Indians and buffaloes were being driven back.
+There was a line of railway from ocean to ocean. The population was
+gaining at the rate of a million a year. Colorado had just been
+baptized as a new State. And it was still an unsolved problem whether or
+not the United States could be kept united, whether or not it could be
+built into an organic nation without losing the spirit of self-help and
+democracy.
+
+It is not easy for us to realize to-day how young and primitive was the
+United States of 1876. Yet the fact is that we have twice the population
+that we had when the telephone was invented. We have twice the wheat
+crop and twice as much money in circulation. We have three times the
+railways, banks, libraries, newspapers, exports, farm values, and
+national wealth. We have ten million farmers who make four times as much
+money as seven million farmers made in 1876. We spend four times as
+much on our public schools, and we put four times as much in the savings
+bank. We have five times as many students in the colleges. And we have
+so revolutionized our methods of production that we now produce seven
+times as much coal, fourteen times as much oil and pig-iron, twenty-two
+times as much copper, and forty-three times as much steel.
+
+There were no skyscrapers in 1876, no trolleys, no electric lights, no
+gasoline engines, no self-binders, no bicycles, no automobiles. There
+was no Oklahoma, and the combined population of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho,
+and Arizona was about equal to that of Des Moines. It was in this
+year that General Custer was killed by the Sioux; that the flimsy iron
+railway bridge fell at Ashtabula; that the "Molly Maguires" terrorized
+Pennsylvania; that the first wire of the Brooklyn Bridge was strung; and
+that Boss Tweed and Hell Gate were both put out of the way in New York.
+
+The Great Elm, under which the Revolutionary patriots had met, was still
+standing on Boston Common. Daniel Drew, the New York financier, who was
+born before the American Constitution was adopted, was still alive; so
+were Commodore Vanderbilt, Joseph Henry, A. T. Stewart, Thurlow Weed,
+Peter Cooper, Cyrus McCormick, Lucretia Mott, Bryant, Longfellow, and
+Emerson. Most old people could remember the running of the first railway
+train; people of middle age could remember the sending of the first
+telegraph message; and the children in the high schools remembered the
+laying of the first Atlantic Cable.
+
+The grandfathers of 1876 were fond of telling how Webster opposed taking
+Texas and Oregon into the Union; how George Washington advised against
+including the Mississippi River; and how Monroe warned Congress that
+a country that reached from the Atlantic to the Middle West was "too
+extensive to be governed but by a despotic monarchy." They told how
+Abraham Lincoln, when he was postmaster of New Salem, used to carry the
+letters in his coon-skin cap and deliver them at sight; how in 1822 the
+mails were carried on horseback and not in stages, so as to have the
+quickest possible service; and how the news of Madison's election was
+three weeks in reaching the people of Kentucky. When the telegraph
+was mentioned, they told how in Revolutionary days the patriots used a
+system of signalling called "Washington's Tele-graph," consisting of a
+pole, a flag, a basket, and a barrel.
+
+So, the young Republic was still within hearing distance of its
+childhood, in 1876. Both in sentiment and in methods of work it
+was living close to the log-cabin period. Many of the old slow ways
+survived, the ways that were fast enough in the days of the stage-coach
+and the tinder-box. There were seventy-seven thousand miles of railway,
+but poorly built and in short lengths. There were manufacturing
+industries that employed two million, four hundred thousand people, but
+every trade was broken up into a chaos of small competitive units, each
+at war with all the others. There were energy and enterprise in the
+highest degree, but not efficiency or organization. Little as we knew
+it, in 1876 we were mainly gathering together the plans and the raw
+materials for the building up of the modern business world, with its
+quick, tense life and its national structure of immense coordinated
+industries.
+
+In 1876 the age of specialization and community of interest was in its
+dawn. The cobbler had given place to the elaborate factory, in which
+seventy men cooperated to make one shoe. The merchant who had hitherto
+lived over his store now ventured to have a home in the suburbs. No man
+was any longer a self-sufficient Robinson Crusoe. He was a fraction,
+a single part of a social mechanism, who must necessarily keep in the
+closest touch with many others.
+
+A new interdependent form of civilization was about to be developed, and
+the telephone arrived in the nick of time to make this new civilization
+workable and convenient. It was the unfolding of a new organ. Just as
+the eye had become the telescope, and the hand had become machinery, and
+the feet had become railways, so the voice became the telephone. It was
+a new ideal method of communication that had been made indispensable by
+new conditions. The prophecy of Carlyle had come true, when he said that
+"men cannot now be bound to men by brass collars; you will have to bind
+them by other far nobler and cunninger methods."
+
+Railways and steamships had begun this work of binding man to man by
+"nobler and cunninger methods." The telegraph and cable had gone still
+farther and put all civilized people within sight of each other, so that
+they could communicate by a sort of deaf and dumb alphabet. And then
+came the telephone, giving direct instantaneous communication and
+putting the people of each nation within hearing distance of each
+other. It was the completion of a long series of inventions. It was
+the keystone of the arch. It was the one last improvement that enabled
+interdependent nations to handle themselves and to hold together.
+
+To make railways and steamboats carry letters was much, in the evolution
+of the means of communication. To make the electric wire carry signals
+was more, because of the instantaneous transmission of important news.
+But to make the electric wire carry speech was MOST, because it put
+all fellow-citizens face to face, and made both message and answer
+instantaneous. The invention of the telephone taught the Genie of
+Electricity to do better than to carry mes-sages in the sign language of
+the dumb. It taught him to speak. As Emerson has finely said:
+
+
+"We had letters to send. Couriers could not go fast enough, nor far
+enough; broke their wagons, foundered their horses; bad roads in Spring,
+snowdrifts in Winter, heat in Summer--could not get their horses out
+of a walk. But we found that the air and the earth were full of
+electricity, and always going our way, just the way we wanted to send.
+WOULD HE TAKE A MESSAGE, Just as lief as not; had nothing else to do;
+would carry it in no time."
+
+
+As to the exact value of the telephone to the United States in dollars
+and cents, no one can tell. One statistician has given us a total of
+three million dollars a day as the amount saved by using telephones.
+This sum may be far too high, or too low. It can be no more than a
+guess. The only adequate way to arrive at the value of the telephone
+is to consider the nation as a whole, to take it all in all as a going
+concern, and to note that such a nation would be absolutely impossible
+without its telephone service. Some sort of a slower and lower grade
+republic we might have, with small industrial units, long hours of
+labor, lower wages, and clumsier ways. The money loss would be enormous,
+but more serious still would be the loss in the QUALITY OF THE NATIONAL
+LIFE. Inevitably, an untelephoned nation is less social, less unified,
+less progressive, and less efficient. It belongs to an inferior species.
+
+How to make a civilization that is organized and quick, instead of
+a barbarism that was chaotic and slow--that is the universal human
+problem, not wholly solved to-day. And how to develop a science of
+intercommunication, which commenced when the wild animals began to
+travel in herds and to protect themselves from their enemies by a
+language of danger-signals, and to democratize this science until the
+entire nation becomes self-conscious and able to act as one living
+being--that is the part of this universal problem which finally
+necessitated the invention of the telephone.
+
+With the use of the telephone has come a new habit of mind. The slow and
+sluggish mood has been sloughed off. The old to-morrow habit has been
+superseded by "Do It To-day"; and life has become more tense, alert,
+vivid. The brain has been relieved of the suspense of waiting for an
+answer, which is a psychological gain of great importance. It receives
+its reply at once and is set free to consider other matters. There is
+less burden upon the memory and the WHOLE MIND can be given to each new
+proposition.
+
+A new instinct of speed has been developed, much more fully in the
+United States than elsewhere. "No American goes slow," said Ian
+Maclaren, "if he has the chance of going fast; he does not stop to talk
+if he can talk walking; and he does not walk if he can ride." He is as
+pleased as a child with a new toy when some speed record is broken,
+when a pair of shoes is made in eleven minutes, when a man lays twelve
+hundred bricks in an hour, or when a ship crosses the Atlantic in
+four and a half days. Even seconds are now counted and split up into
+fractions. The average time, for instance, taken to reply to a telephone
+call by a New York operator, is now three and two-fifth seconds; and
+even this tiny atom of time is being strenuously worn down.
+
+As a witty Frenchman has said, one of our most lively regrets is that
+while we are at the telephone we cannot do business with our feet. We
+regard it as a victory over the hostility of nature when we do an hour's
+work in a minute or a minute's work in a second. Instead of saying, as
+the Spanish do, "Life is too short; what can one person do?" an American
+is more apt to say, "Life is too short; therefore I must do to-day's
+work to-day." To pack a lifetime with energy--that is the American plan,
+and so to economize that energy as to get the largest results. To get
+a question asked and answered in five minutes by means of an electric
+wire, instead of in two hours by the slow trudging of a messenger
+boy--that is the method that best suits our passion for instantaneous
+service.
+
+It is one of the few social laws of which we are fairly sure, that
+a nation organizes in proportion to its velocity. We know that a
+four-mile-an-hour nation must remain a huge inert mass of peasants and
+villagers; or if, after centuries of slow toil, it should pile up a
+great city, the city will sooner or later fall to pieces of its own
+weight. In such a way Babylon rose and fell, and Nineveh, and Thebes,
+and Carthage, and Rome. Mere bulk, unorganized, becomes its own
+destroyer. It dies of clogging and congestion. But when Stephenson's
+Rocket ran twenty-nine miles an hour, and Morse's telegraph clicked its
+signals from Washington to Baltimore, and Bell's telephone flashed the
+vibrations of speech between Boston and Salem, a new era began. In came
+the era of speed and the finely organized nations. In came cities of
+unprecedented bulk, but held together so closely by a web-work of steel
+rails and copper wires that they have become more alert and cooperative
+than any tiny hamlet of mud huts on the banks of the Congo.
+
+That the telephone is now doing most of all, in this binding together
+of all manner of men, is perhaps not too much to claim, when we remember
+that there are now in the United States seventy thousand holders of Bell
+telephone stock and ten million users of telephone service. There are
+two hundred and sixty-four wires crossing the Mississippi, in the Bell
+system; and five hundred and forty-four crossing Mason and Dixon's
+Line. It is the telephone which does most to link together cottage
+and skyscraper and mansion and factory and farm. It is not limited to
+experts or college graduates. It reaches the man with a nickel as
+well as the man with a million. It speaks all languages and serves all
+trades. It helps to prevent sectionalism and race feuds. It gives
+a common meeting place to capitalists and wage-workers. It is so
+essentially the instrument of all the people, in fact, that we might
+almost point to it as a national emblem, as the trade-mark of democracy
+and the American spirit.
+
+In a country like ours, where there are eighty nationalities in the
+public schools, the telephone has a peculiar value as a part of the
+national digestive apparatus. It prevents the growth of dialects and
+helps on the process of assimilation. Such is the push of American life,
+that the humble immigrants from Southern Europe, before they have been
+here half a dozen years, have acquired the telephone habit and
+have linked on their small shops to the great wire network of
+intercommunication. In the one community of Brownsville, for example,
+settled several years ago by an overflow of Russian Jews from the East
+Side of New York, there are now as many telephones as in the kingdom of
+Greece. And in the swarming East Side itself, there is a single exchange
+in Orchard Street which has more wires than there are in all the
+exchanges of Egypt.
+
+There can be few higher ideals of practical democracy than that which
+comes to us from the telephone engineer. His purpose is much more
+comprehensive than the supplying of telephones to those who want them.
+It is rather to make the telephone as universal as the water faucet, to
+bring within speaking distance every economic unit, to connect to the
+social organism every person who may at any time be needed. Just as
+the click of the reaper means bread, and the purr of the sewing-machine
+means clothes, and the roar of the Bessemer converter means steel, and
+the rattle of the press means education, so the ring of the telephone
+bell has come to mean unity and organization.
+
+Already, by cable, telegraph, and telephone, no two towns in the
+civilized world are more than one hour apart. We have even girdled the
+earth with a cablegram in twelve minutes. We have made it possible for
+any man in New York City to enter into conversation with any other
+New Yorker in twenty-one seconds. We have not been satisfied with
+establishing such a system of transportation that we can start any day
+for anywhere from anywhere else; neither have we been satisfied with
+establishing such a system of communication that news and gossip are
+the common property of all nations. We have gone farther. We have
+established in every large region of population a system of voice-nerves
+that puts every man at every other man's ear, and which so magically
+eliminates the factor of distance that the United States becomes three
+thousand miles of neighbors, side by side.
+
+This effort to conquer Time and Space is above all else the instinct
+of material progress. To shrivel up the miles and to stretch out the
+minutes--this has been one of the master passions of the human race. And
+thus the larger truth about the telephone is that it is vastly more than
+a mere convenience. It is not to be classed with safety razors and piano
+players and fountain pens. It is nothing less than the high-speed tool
+of civilization, gearing up the whole mechanism to more effective social
+service. It is the symbol of national efficiency and cooperation.
+
+All this the telephone is doing, at a total cost to the nation of
+probably $200,000,000 a year--no more than American farmers earn in ten
+days. We pay the same price for it as we do for the potatoes, or for
+one-third of the hay crop, or for one-eighth of the corn. Out of every
+nickel spent for electrical service, one cent goes to the telephone. We
+could settle our telephone bill, and have several millions left over,
+if we cut off every fourth glass of liquor and smoke of tobacco. Whoever
+rents a typewriting machine, or uses a street car twice a day, or has
+his shoes polished once a day, may for the same expense have a very good
+telephone service. Merely to shovel away the snow of a single storm in
+1910 cost the city government of New York as much as it will pay for
+five or six years of telephoning.
+
+This almost incredible cheapness of telephony is still far from being
+generally perceived, mainly for psychological reasons. A telephone is
+not impressive. It has no bulk. It is not like the Singer Building or
+the Lusitania. Its wires and switchboards and batteries are scattered
+and hidden, and few have sufficient imagination to picture them in all
+their complexity. If only it were possible to assemble the hundred or
+more telephone buildings of New York in one vast plaza, and if the two
+thousand clerks and three thousand maintenance men and six thousand girl
+operators were to march to work each morning with bands and banners,
+then, perhaps, there might be the necessary quality of impressiveness by
+which any large idea must always be imparted to the public mind.
+
+For lack of a seven and one-half cent coin, there is now five-cent
+telephony even in the largest American cities. For five cents whoever
+wishes has an entire wire-system at his service, a system that is kept
+waiting by day and night, so that it will be ready the instant he needs
+it. This system may have cost from twenty to fifty millions, yet it
+may be hired for one-eighth the cost of renting an automobile. Even in
+long-distance telephony, the expense of a message dwindles when it is
+compared with the price of a return railway ticket. A talk from New
+York to Philadelphia, for instance, costs seventy-five cents, while
+the railway fare would be four dollars. From New York to Chicago a talk
+costs five dollars as against seventy dollars by rail. As Harriman once
+said, "I can't get from my home to the depot for the price of a talk to
+Omaha."
+
+To say what the net profits have been, to the entire body of people who
+have invested money in the telephone, will always be more or less of a
+guess. The general belief that immense fortunes were made by the lucky
+holders of Bell stock, is an exaggeration that has been kept alive by
+the promoters of wildcat companies. No such fortunes were made. "I do
+not believe," says Theodore Vail, "that any one man ever made a
+clear million out of the telephone." There are not apt to be any
+get-rich-quick for-tunes made in corporations that issue no watered
+stock and do not capitalize their franchises. On the contrary, up
+to 1897, the holders of stock in the Bell Companies had paid in four
+million, seven hundred thousand dollars more than the par value; and in
+the recent consolidation of Eastern companies, under the presidency of
+Union N. Bethell, the new stock was actually eight millions less than
+the stock that was retired.
+
+Few telephone companies paid any profits at first. They had undervalued
+the cost of building and maintenance. Denver expected the cost to be two
+thousand, five hundred dollars and spent sixty thousand dollars. Buffalo
+expected to pay three thousand dollars and had to pay one hundred and
+fifty thousand dollars. Also, they made the unwelcome discovery that an
+exchange of two hundred costs more than twice as much as an exchange of
+one hundred, because of the greater amount of traffic. Usually a dollar
+that is paid to a telephone company is divided as follows:
+
+     Rent............ 4c
+     Taxes........... 4c
+     Interest........ 6c
+     Surplus......... 8c
+     Maintenance.... 16c
+     Dividends...... 18c
+     Labor.......... 44c
+                     ----                   $1.00
+
+
+Most of the rate troubles (and their name has been legion) have arisen
+because the telephone business was not understood. In fact, until
+recently, it did not understand itself. It persisted in holding to
+a local and individualistic view of its business. It was slow to put
+telephones in unprofitable places. It expected every instrument to
+pay its way. In many States, both the telephone men and the public
+overlooked the most vital fact in the case, which is that the members of
+a telephone system are above all else INTERDEPENDENT.
+
+One telephone by itself has no value. It is as useless as a reed cut
+out of an organ or a finger that is severed from a hand. It is not even
+ornamental or adaptable to any other pur-pose. It is not at all like a
+piano or a talking-machine, which has a separate existence. It is useful
+only in proportion to the number of other telephones it reaches. AND
+EVERY TELEPHONE ANYWHERE ADDS VALUE TO EVERY OTHER TELEPHONE ON THE SAME
+SYSTEM OF WIRES. That, in a sentence, is the keynote of equitable rates.
+
+Many a telephone, for the general good, must be put where it does not
+earn its own living. At any time some sudden emergency may arise that
+will make it for the moment priceless. Especially since the advent of
+the automobile, there is no nook or corner from which it may not be
+supremely necessary, now and then, to send a message. This principle
+was acted upon recently in a most practical way by the Pennsylvania
+Railroad, which at its own expense installed five hundred and
+twenty-five telephones in the homes of its workmen in Altoona. In the
+same way, it is clearly the social duty of the telephone company
+to widen out its system until every point is covered, and then to
+distribute its gross charges as fairly as it can. The whole must
+carry the whole--that is the philosophy of rates which must finally be
+recognized by legislatures and telephone companies alike. It can never,
+of course, be reduced to a system or formula. It will always be a matter
+of opinion and compromise, requiring much skill and much patience. But
+there will seldom be any serious trouble when once its basic principles
+are understood.
+
+Like all time-saving inventions, like the railroad, the reaper, and the
+Bessemer converter, the telephone, in the last analysis, COSTS NOTHING;
+IT IS THE LACK OF IT THAT COSTS. THE NATION THAT MOST IS THE NATION
+WITHOUT IT.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. THE TELEPHONE IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES
+
+The telephone was nearly a year old before Europe was aware of its
+existence. It received no public notice of any kind whatever until
+March 3, 1877, when the London Athenaeum mentioned it in a few careful
+sentences. It was not welcomed, except by those who wished an evening's
+entertainment. And to the entire commercial world it was for four or
+five years a sort of scientific Billiken, that never could be of any
+service to serious people.
+
+One after another, several American enthusiasts rushed posthaste to
+Europe, with dreams of eager nations clamoring for telephone systems,
+and one after another they failed. Frederick A. Gower was the first
+of these. He was an adventurous chevalier of business who gave up an
+agent's contract in return for a right to become a roving propagandist.
+Later he met a prima donna, fell in love with and married her, forsook
+telephony for ballooning, and lost his life in attempting to fly across
+the English Channel.
+
+Next went William H. Reynolds, of Providence, who had bought five-eights
+of the British patent for five thousand dollars, and half the right
+to Russia, Spain, Portugal, and Italy for two thousand, five hundred
+dollars. How he was received may be seen from a letter of his which
+has been preserved. "I have been working in London for four months," he
+writes; "I have been to the Bank of England and elsewhere; and I have
+not found one man who will put one shilling into the telephone."
+
+Bell himself hurried to England and Scotland on his wedding tour in
+1878, with great expectations of having his invention appreciated in his
+native land. But from a business point of view, his mission was a total
+failure. He received dinners a-plenty, but no contracts; and came back
+to the United States an impoverished and disheartened man. Then the
+optimistic Gardiner G. Hubbard, Bell's father-in-law, threw himself
+against the European inertia and organized the International and
+Oriental Telephone Companies, which came to nothing of any importance.
+In the same year even Enos M. Barton, the sagacious founder of the
+Western Electric, went to France and England to establish an export
+trade in telephones, and failed.
+
+These able men found their plans thwarted by the indifference of the
+public, and often by open hostility. "The telephone is little better
+than a toy," said the Saturday Review; "it amazes ignorant people for a
+moment, but it is inferior to the well-established system of air-tubes."
+"What will become of the privacy of life?" asked another London editor.
+"What will become of the sanctity of the domestic hearth?" Writers
+vied with each other in inventing methods of pooh-poohing Bell and
+his invention. "It is ridiculously simple," said one. "It is only an
+electrical speaking-tube," said another. "It is a complicated form
+of speaking-trumpet," said a third. No British editor could at first
+conceive of any use for the telephone, except for divers and coal
+miners. The price, too, created a general outcry. Floods of toy
+telephones were being sold on the streets at a shilling apiece; and
+although the Government was charging sixty dollars a year for the use of
+its printing-telegraphs, people protested loudly against paying half
+as much for telephones. As late as 1882, Herbert Spencer writes: "The
+telephone is scarcely used at all in London, and is unknown in the other
+English cities."
+
+The first man of consequence to befriend the telephone was Lord Kelvin,
+then an untitled young scientist. He had seen the original telephones at
+the Centennial in Philadelphia, and was so fascinated with them that
+the impulsive Bell had thrust them into his hands as a gift. At the next
+meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science,
+Lord Kelvin exhibited these. He did more. He became the champion of the
+telephone. He staked his reputation upon it. He told the story of the
+tests made at the Centennial, and assured the sceptical scientists that
+he had not been deceived. "All this my own ears heard," he said, "spoken
+to me with unmistakable distinctness by this circular disc of iron."
+
+The scientists and electrical experts were, for the most part, split up
+into two camps. Some of them said the telephone was impossible, while
+others said that "nothing could be simpler." Almost all were agreed that
+what Bell had done was a humorous trifle. But Lord Kelvin persisted.
+He hammered the truth home that the telephone was "one of the most
+interesting inventions that has ever been made in the history of
+science." He gave a demonstration with one end of the wire in a coal
+mine. He stood side by side with Bell at a public meeting in Glasgow,
+and declared:
+
+"The things that were called telephones before Bell were as different
+from Bell's telephone as a series of hand-claps are different from the
+human voice. They were in fact electrical claps; while Bell conceived
+the idea--THE WHOLLY ORIGINAL AND NOVEL IDEA--of giving continuity to
+the shocks, so as to perfectly reproduce the human voice."
+
+One by one the scientists were forced to take the telephone seriously.
+At a public test there was one noted professor who still stood in the
+ranks of the doubters. He was asked to send a message. He went to the
+instrument with a grin of incredulity, and thinking the whole exhibition
+a joke, shouted into the mouthpiece: "Hi diddle diddle--follow up that."
+Then he listened for an answer. The look on his face changed to one of
+the utmost amazement. "It says--`The cat and the fiddle,'" he gasped,
+and forthwith he became a convert to telephony. By such tests the men
+of science were won over, and by the middle of 1877 Bell received a
+"vociferous welcome" when he addressed them at their annual convention
+at Plymouth.
+
+Soon afterwards, The London Times surrendered. It whirled
+right-about-face and praised the telephone to the skies. "Suddenly and
+quietly the whole human race is brought within speaking and hearing
+distance," it exclaimed; "scarcely anything was more desired and more
+impossible." The next paper to quit the mob of scoffers was the Tatler,
+which said in an editorial peroration, "We cannot but feel im-pressed by
+the picture of a human child commanding the subtlest and strongest force
+in Nature to carry, like a slave, some whisper around the world."
+
+Closely after the scientists and editors came the nobility. The Earl of
+Caithness led the way. He declared in public that "the telephone is the
+most extraordinary thing I ever saw in my life." And one wintry morning
+in 1878 Queen Victoria drove to the house of Sir Thomas Biddulph, in
+London, and for an hour talked and listened by telephone to Kate
+Field, who sat in a Downing Street office. Miss Field sang "Kathleen
+Mavourneen," and the Queen thanked her by telephone, saying she was
+"immensely pleased." She congratulated Bell himself, who was present,
+and asked if she might be permitted to buy the two telephones; whereupon
+Bell presented her with a pair done in ivory.
+
+This incident, as may be imagined, did much to establish the reputation
+of telephony in Great Britain. A wire was at once strung to Windsor
+Castle. Others were ordered by the Daily News, the Persian Ambassador,
+and five or six lords and baronets. Then came an order which raised the
+hopes of the telephone men to the highest heaven, from the banking house
+of J. S. Morgan & Co. It was the first recognition from the "seats of
+the mighty" in the business and financial world. A tiny exchange,
+with ten wires, was promptly started in London; and on April 2d, 1879,
+Theodore Vail, the young manager of the Bell Company, sent an order
+to the factory in Boston, "Please make one hundred hand telephones for
+export trade as early as possible." The foreign trade had begun.
+
+Then there came a thunderbolt out of a blue sky, a wholly unforeseen
+disaster. Just as a few energetic companies were sprouting up, the
+Postmaster General suddenly proclaimed that the telephone was a species
+of telegraph. According to a British law the telegraph was required to
+be a Government monopoly. This law had been passed six years before
+the telephone was born, but no matter. The telephone men protested and
+argued. Tyndall and Lord Kelvin warned the Government that it was making
+an indefensible mistake. But nothing could be done. Just as the first
+railways had been called toll-roads, so the telephone was solemnly
+declared to be a telegraph. Also, to add to the absurd humor of the
+situation, Judge Stephen, of the High Court of Justice, spoke the
+final word that compelled the telephone legally to be a telegraph, and
+sustained his opinion by a quotation from Webster's Dictionary, which
+was published twenty years before the telephone was invented.
+
+Having captured this new rival, what next? The Postmaster General did
+not know. He had, of course, no experience in telephony, and neither had
+any of his officials in the telegraph department. There was no book and
+no college to instruct him. His telegraph was then, as it is to-day, a
+business failure. It was not earning its keep. Therefore he did not dare
+to shoulder the risk of constructing a second system of wires, and at
+last consented to give licenses to private companies.
+
+But the muddle continued. In order to compel competition, according
+to the academic theories of the day, licenses were given to thir-teen
+private companies. As might have been expected, the ablest company
+quickly swallowed the other twelve. If it had been let alone, this
+company might have given good service, but it was hobbled and fenced in
+by jealous regulations. It was compelled to pay one-tenth of its gross
+earnings to the Post Office. It was to hold itself ready to sell out at
+six months' notice. And as soon as it had strung a long-distance system
+of wires, the Postmaster General pounced down upon it and took it away.
+
+Then, in 1900, the Post Office tossed aside all obligations to the
+licensed company, and threw open the door to a free-for-all competition.
+It undertook to start a second system in London, and in two years
+discovered its blunder and proposed to cooperate. It granted licenses
+to five cities that demanded municipal ownership. These cities set out
+bravely, with loud beating of drums, plunged from one mishap to another,
+and finally quit. Even Glasgow, the premier city of municipal ownership,
+met its Waterloo in the telephone. It spent one million, eight hundred
+thousand dollars on a plant that was obsolete when it was new, ran it
+for a time at a loss, and then sold it to the Post Office in 1906 for
+one million, five hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.
+
+So, from first to last, the story of the telephone in Great Britain has
+been a "comedy of errors." There are now, in the two islands, not six
+hundred thousand telephones in use. London, with its six hundred and
+forty square miles of houses, has one-quarter of these, and is gaining
+at the rate of ten thousand a year. No large improvements are under way,
+as the Post Office has given notice that it will take over and operate
+all private companies on New Year's Day, 1912. The bureaucratic muddle,
+so it seems, is to continue indefinitely.
+
+In Germany there has been the same burden of bureaucracy, but less
+backing and filling. There is a complete government monopoly. Whoever
+commits the crime of leasing telephone service to his neighbors may be
+sent to jail for six months. Here, too, the Postmaster General has been
+supreme. He has forced the telephone business into a postal mould. The
+man in a small city must pay as high a rate for a small service, as the
+man in a large city pays for a large service. There is a fair degree of
+efficiency, but no high speed or record-breaking. The German engineers
+have not kept in close touch with the progress of telephony in the
+United States. They have preferred to devise methods of their own, and
+so have created a miscellaneous assortment of systems, good, bad, and
+indifferent. All told, there is probably an investment of seventy-five
+million dollars and a total of nine hundred thousand telephones.
+
+Telephony has always been in high favor with the Kaiser. It is his
+custom, when planning a hunting party, to have a special wire strung to
+the forest headquarters, so that he can converse every morning with
+his Cabinet. He has conferred degrees and honors by telephone. Even
+his former Chancellor, Von Buelow, received his title of Count in this
+informal way. But the first friend of the telephone in Germany was
+Bismarck. The old Unifier saw instantly its value in holding a nation
+together, and ordered a line between his palace in Berlin and his farm
+at Varzin, which lay two hundred and thirty miles apart. This was as
+early as the Fall of 1877, and was thus the first long-distance line in
+Europe.
+
+In France, as in England, the Government seized upon the telephone
+business as soon as the pioneer work had been done by private citizens.
+In 1889 it practically confiscated the Paris system, and after nine
+years of litigation paid five million francs to its owners. With this
+reckless beginning, it floundered from bad to worse. It assembled
+the most complete assortment of other nations' mistakes, and invented
+several of its own. Almost every known evil of bureaucracy was
+developed. The system of rates was turned upside down; the flat rate,
+which can be profitably permitted in small cities only, was put in force
+in the large cities, and the message rate, which is applicable only to
+large cities, was put in force in small places. The girl operators were
+entangled in a maze of civil service rules. They were not allowed
+to marry without the permission of the Postmaster General; and on no
+account might they dare to marry a mayor, a policeman, a cashier, or a
+foreigner, lest they betray the secrets of the switchboard.
+
+There was no national plan, no standardization, no staff of inventors
+and improvers. Every user was required to buy his own telephone. As
+George Ade has said, "Anything attached to a wall is liable to be a
+telephone in Paris." And so, what with poor equipment and red tape,
+the French system became what it remains to-day, the most conspicuous
+example of what NOT to do in telephony.
+
+There are barely as many telephones in the whole of France as ought
+normally to be in the city of Paris. There are not as many as are now
+in use in Chicago. The exasperated Parisians have protested. They have
+presented a petition with thirty-two thousand names. They have even
+organized a "Kickers' League"--the only body of its kind in any
+country--to demand good service at a fair price. The daily loss from
+bureaucratic telephony has become enormous. "One blundering girl in a
+telephone exchange cost me five thousand dollars on the day of the panic
+in 1907," said George Kessler. But the Government clears a net profit
+of three million dollars a year from its telephone monopoly; and until
+1910, when a committee of betterment was appointed, it showed no concern
+at the discomfort of the public.
+
+There was one striking lesson in telephone efficiency which Paris
+received in 1908, when its main exchange was totally destroyed by fire.
+"To build a new switchboard," said European manufacturers, "will require
+four or five months." A hustling young Chicagoan appeared on the scene.
+"We 'll put in a new switchboard in sixty days," he said; "and agree to
+forfeit six hundred dollars a day for delay." Such quick work had never
+been known. But it was Chicago's chance to show what she could do. Paris
+and Chicago are four thousand, five hundred miles apart, a twelve days'
+journey. The switchboard was to be a hundred and eighty feet in length,
+with ten thousand wires. Yet the Western Electric finished it in three
+weeks. It was rushed on six freight-cars to New York, loaded on the
+French steamer La Provence, and deposited at Paris in thirty-six days;
+so that by the time the sixty days had expired, it was running full
+speed with a staff of ninety operators.
+
+Russia and Austria-Hungary have now about one hundred and twenty-five
+thousand telephones apiece. They are neck and neck in a race that has
+not at any time been a fast one. In each country the Government has been
+a neglectful stepmother to the telephone. It has starved the business
+with a lack of capital and used no enterprise in expanding it.
+Outside of Vienna, Budapest, St. Petersburg, and Moscow there are no
+wire-systems of any consequence. The political deadlock between Austria
+and Hungary shuts out any immediate hope of a happier life for the
+telephone in those countries; but in Russia there has recently been
+a change in policy that may open up a new era. Permits are now being
+offered to one private company in each city, in return for three per
+cent of the revenue. By this step Russia has unexpectedly swept to the
+front and is now, to telephone men, the freest country in Europe.
+
+In tiny Switzerland there has been government ownership from the
+first, but with less detriment to the business than elsewhere. Here the
+officials have actually jilted the telegraph for the telephone. They
+have seen the value of the talking wire to hold their valley villages
+together; and so have cries-crossed the Alps with a cheap and somewhat
+flimsy system of telephony that carries sixty million conversations a
+year. Even the monks of St. Bernard, who rescue snowbound travellers,
+have now equipped their mountain with a series of telephone booths.
+
+The highest telephone in the world is on the peak of Monte Rosa, in the
+Italian Alps, very nearly three miles above the level of the sea. It is
+linked to a line that runs to Rome, in order that a queen may talk to
+a professor. In this case the Queen is Margherita of Italy and the
+professor is Signor Mosso, the astronomer, who studies the heavens from
+an observatory on Monte Rosa. At her own expense, the Queen had this
+wire strung by a crew of linemen, who slipped and floundered on the
+mountain for six years before they had it pegged in place. The general
+situation in Italy is like that in Great Britain. The Government has
+always monopolized the long-distance lines, and is now about to buy out
+all private companies. There are only fifty-five thousand telephones
+to thirty-two million people--as many as in Norway and less than in
+Denmark. And in many of the southern and Sicilian provinces the jingle
+of the telephone bell is still an unfamiliar sound.
+
+The main peculiarity in Holland is that there is no national plan, but
+rather a patchwork, that resembles Joseph's coat of many colors. Each
+city engineer has designed his own type of apparatus and had it made to
+order. Also, each company is fenced in by law within a six-mile circle,
+so that Holland is dotted with thumb-nail systems, no two of which are
+alike. In Belgium there has been a government system since 1893, hence
+there is unity, but no enterprise. The plant is old-fashioned and too
+small. Spain has private companies, which give fairly good service to
+twenty thousand people. Roumania has half as many. Portugal has two
+small companies in Lisbon and Oporto. Greece, Servia, and Bulgaria have
+a scanty two thousand apiece. The frozen little isle of Iceland has
+one-quarter as many; and even into Turkey, which was a forbidden land
+under the regime of the old Sultan, the Young Turks are importing boxes
+of telephones and coils of copper wire.
+
+There is one European country, and only one, which has caught the
+telephone spirit--Sweden. Here telephony had a free swinging start.
+It was let alone by the Post Office; and better still, it had a Man, a
+business-builder of remarkable force and ability, named Henry Cedergren.
+Had this man been made the Telephone-Master of Europe, there would have
+been a different story to tell. By his insistent enterprise he made
+Stockholm the best telephoned city outside of the United States. He
+pushed his country forward until, having one hundred and sixty-five
+thousand telephones, it stood fourth among the European nations. Since
+his death the Government has entered the field with a duplicate system,
+and a war has been begun which grows yearly more costly and absurd.
+
+Asia, as yet, with her eight hundred and fifty million people, has fewer
+telephones than Philadelphia, and three-fourths of them are in the tiny
+island of Japan. The Japanese were enthusiastic telephonists from the
+first. They had a busy exchange in Tokio in 1883. This has now grown to
+have twenty-five thousand users, and might have more, if it had not been
+stunted by the peculiar policy of the Government. The public officials
+who operate the system are able men. They charge a fair price and make
+ten per cent profit for the State. But they do not keep pace with the
+demand. It is one of the oddest vagaries of public ownership that there
+is now in Tokio a WAITING LIST of eight thousand citizens, who are
+offering to pay for telephones and cannot get them. And when a Tokian
+dies, his franchise to a telephone, if he has one, is usually itemized
+in his will as a four-hundred-dollar property.
+
+India, which is second on the Asiatic list, has no more than nine
+thousand telephones--one to every thirty-three thousand of her
+population! Not quite so many, in fact, as there are in five of the
+skyscrapers of New York. The Dutch East Indies and China have only
+seven thousand apiece, but in China there has recently come a
+forward movement. A fund of twenty million dollars is to be spent in
+constructing a national system of telephone and telegraph. Peking is now
+pointing with wonder and delight to a new exchange, spick and span, with
+a couple of ten-thousand-wire switchboards. Others are being built in
+Canton, Hankow, and Tien-Tsin. Ultimately, the telephone will flourish
+in China, as it has done in the Chinese quarter in San Francisco. The
+Empress of China, after the siege of Peking, commanded that a telephone
+should be hung in her palace, within reach of her dragon throne; and
+she was very friendly with any representative of the "Speaking Lightning
+Sounds" business, as the Chinese term telephony.
+
+In Persia the telephone made its entry recently in true comic-opera
+fashion. A new Shah, in an outburst of confidence, set up a wire between
+his palace and the market-place in Teheran, and invited his people to
+talk to him whenever they had grievances. And they talked! They talked
+so freely and used such language, that the Shah ordered out his soldiers
+and attacked them. He fired upon the new Parliament, and was at once
+chased out of Persia by the enraged people. From this it would appear
+that the telephone ought to be popular in Persia, although at present
+there are not more than twenty in use.
+
+South America, outside of Buenos Ayres, has few telephones, probably not
+more than thirty thousand. Dom Pedro of Brazil, who befriended Bell at
+the Centennial, introduced telephony into his country in 1881; but it
+has not in thirty years been able to obtain ten thousand users. Canada
+has exactly the same number as Sweden--one hundred and sixty-five
+thousand. Mexico has perhaps ten thousand; New Zealand twenty-six
+thousand; and Australia fifty-five thousand.
+
+Far down in the list of continents stands Africa. Egypt and Algeria have
+twelve thousand at the north; British South Africa has as many at the
+south; and in the vast stretches between there are barely a thousand
+more. Whoever pushes into Central Africa will still hear the beat of the
+wooden drum, which is the clattering sign-language of the natives. One
+strand of copper wire there is, through the Congo region, placed there
+by order of the late King of Belgium. To string it was probably the most
+adventurous piece of work in the history of telephone linemen. There was
+one seven hundred and fifty mile stretch of the central jungle. There
+were white ants that ate the wooden poles, and wild elephants that
+pulled up the iron poles. There were monkeys that played tag on the
+lines, and savages that stole the wire for arrow-heads. But the line
+was carried through, and to-day is alive with conversations concerning
+rubber and ivory.
+
+So, we may almost say of the telephone that "there is no speech nor
+language where its voice is not heard." There are even a thousand miles
+of its wire in Abyssinia and one hundred and fifty miles in the Fiji
+Islands. Roughly speaking, there are now ten million telephones in all
+countries, employing two hundred and fifty thousand people, requiring
+twenty-one million miles of wire, representing a cost of fifteen hundred
+million dollars, and carrying fourteen thousand million conversations
+a year. All this, and yet the men who heard the first feeble cry of the
+infant telephone are still alive, and not by any means old.
+
+No foreign country has reached the high American level of telephony. The
+United States has eight telephones per hundred of population, while no
+other country has one-half as many. Canada stands second, with almost
+four per hundred; and Sweden is third. Germany has as many telephones
+as the State of New York; and Great Britain as many as Ohio. Chicago
+has more than London; and Boston twice as many as Paris. In the whole of
+Europe, with her twenty nations, there are one-third as many telephones
+as in the United States. In proportion to her population, Europe has
+only one-thirteenth as many.
+
+The United States writes half as many letters as Europe, sends one-third
+as many telegrams, and talks twice as much at the telephone. The average
+European family sends three telegrams a year, and three letters and one
+telephone message a week; while the average American family sends five
+telegrams a year, and seven letters and eleven telephone messages a
+week. This one na-tion, which owns six per cent of the earth and is five
+per cent of the human race, has SEVENTY per cent of the telephones.
+And fifty per cent, or one-half, of the telephony of the world, is now
+comprised in the Bell System of this country.
+
+There are only six nations in Europe that make a fair showing--the
+Germans, British, Swedish, Danes, Norwegians, and Swiss. The others
+have less than one telephone per hundred. Little Denmark has more than
+Austria. Little Finland has better service than France. The Belgian
+telephones have cost the most--two hundred and seventy-three dollars
+apiece; and the Finnish telephones the least--eighty-one dollars. But
+a telephone in Belgium earns three times as much as one in Norway. In
+general, the lesson in Europe is this, that the telephone is what a
+nation makes it. Its usefulness depends upon the sense and enterprise
+with which it is handled. It may be either an invaluable asset or a
+nuisance.
+
+Too much government! That has been the basic reason for failure in most
+countries. Before the telephone was invented, the telegraph had been
+made a State monopoly; and the tele-phone was regarded as a species of
+telegraph. The public officials did not see that a telephone system is a
+highly complex and technical problem, much more like a piano factory
+or a steel-mill. And so, wherever a group of citizens established a
+telephone service, the government officials looked upon it with jealous
+eyes, and usually snatched it away. The telephone thus became a part of
+the telegraph, which is a part of the post office, which is a part of
+the government. It is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction--a mere
+twig of bureaucracy. Under such conditions the telephone could not
+prosper. The wonder is that it survived.
+
+Handled on the American plan, the telephone abroad may be raised to
+American levels. There is no racial reason for failure. The slow service
+and the bungling are the natural results of treating the telephone as
+though it were a road or a fire department; and any nation that rises
+to a proper conception of the telephone, that dares to put it into
+competent hands and to strengthen it with enough capital, can secure as
+alert and brisk a service as heart can wish. Some nations are already
+on the way. China, Japan, and France have sent delegations to New York
+City--"the Mecca of telephone men," to learn the art of telephony in
+its highest development. Even Russia has rescued the telephone from her
+bureaucrats and is now offering it freely to men of enterprise.
+
+In most foreign countries telephone service is being steadily geared up
+to a faster pace. The craze for "cheap and nasty" telephony is passing;
+and the idea that the telephone is above all else a SPEED instrument,
+is gaining ground. A faster long-distance service, at double rates, is
+being well patronized. Slow-moving races are learning the value of time,
+which is the first lesson in telephony. Our reapers and mowers now go to
+seventy-five nations. Our street cars run in all great cities. Morocco
+is importing our dollar watches; Korea is learning the waste of allowing
+nine men to dig with one spade. And all this means telephones.
+
+In thirty years, the Western Electric has sold sixty-seven million
+dollars' worth of telephonic apparatus to foreign countries. But this
+is no more than a fair beginning. To put one telephone in China to every
+hundred people will mean an outlay of three hundred million dollars. To
+give Europe as fit an equipment as the United States now has, will mean
+thirty million telephones, with proper wire and switchboards to match.
+And while telephony for the masses is not yet a live question in many
+countries, sooner or later, in the relentless push of civilization, it
+must come.
+
+Possibly, in that far future of peace and goodwill among nations, when
+each country does for all the others what it can do best, the United
+States may be generally recognized as the source of skill and authority
+on telephony. It may be called in to rebuild or operate the telephone
+systems of other countries, in the same way that it is now supplying
+oil and steel rails and farm machinery. Just as the wise buyer of to-day
+asks France for champagne, Germany for toys, England for cottons, and
+the Orient for rugs, so he will learn to look upon the United States as
+the natural home and headquarters of the telephone.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. THE FUTURE OF THE TELEPHONE
+
+In the Spring of 1907 Theodore N. Vail, a rugged, ruddy, white-haired
+man, was superintending the building of a big barn in northern Vermont.
+His house stood near-by, on a balcony of rolling land that overlooked
+the town of Lyndon and far beyond, across evergreen forests to the
+massive bulk of Burke Mountain. His farm, very nearly ten square miles
+in area, lay back of the house in a great oval of field and woodland,
+with several dozen cottages in the clearings. His Welsh ponies and Swiss
+cattle were grazing on the May grass, and the men were busy with the
+ploughs and harrows and seeders. It was almost thirty years since he
+had been called in to create the business structure of telephony, and to
+shape the general plan of its development. Since then he had done many
+other things. The one city of Buenos Ayres had paid him more, merely
+for giving it a system of trolleys and electric lights, than the United
+States had paid him for putting the telephone on a business basis. He
+was now rich and retired, free to enjoy his play-work of the farm and to
+forget the troubles of the city and the telephone.
+
+But, as he stood among his barn-builders, there arrived from Boston and
+New York a delegation of telephone directors. Most of them belonged to
+the "Old Guard" of telephony. They had fought under Vail in the pioneer
+days; and now they had come to ask him to return to the telephone
+business, after twenty years of absence. Vail laughed at the suggestion.
+
+"Nonsense," he said, "I'm too old. I'm sixty-two years of age." The
+directors persisted. They spoke of the approaching storm-cloud of panic
+and the need of another strong hand at the wheel until the crisis was
+over, but Vail still refused. They spoke of old times and old memories,
+but he shook his head. "All my life," he said, "I have wanted to be a
+farmer."
+
+Then they drew a picture of the telephone situation. They showed him
+that the "grand telephonic system" which he had planned was unfinished.
+He was its architect, and it was undone. The telephone business was
+energetic and prosperous. Under the brilliant leadership of Frederick P.
+Fish, it had grown by leaps and bounds. But it was still far from being
+the SYSTEM that Vail had dreamed of in his younger days; and so, when
+the directors put before him his unfinished plan, he surrendered.
+The instinct for completeness, which is one of the dominating
+characteristics of his mind, compelled him to consent. It was the call
+of the telephone.
+
+Since that May morning, 1907, great things have been done by the men of
+the telephone and telegraph world. The Bell System was brought through
+the panic without a scratch. When the doubt and confusion were at their
+worst, Vail wrote an open letter to his stock-holders, in his practical,
+farmer-like way. He said:
+
+"Our net earnings for the last ten months were $13,715,000, as against
+$11,579,000 for the same period in 1906. We have now in the banks over
+$18,000,000; and we will not need to borrow any money for two years."
+
+Soon afterwards, the work of consolidation began. Companies that
+overlapped were united. Small local wire-clusters, several thousands
+of them, were linked to the national lines. A policy of publicity
+superseded the secrecy which had naturally grown to be a habit in the
+days of patent litigation. Visitors and reporters found an open door.
+Educational advertisements were published in the most popular magazines.
+The corps of inventors was spurred up to conquer the long-distance
+problems. And in return for a thirty million check, the control of the
+historic Western Union was transferred from the children of Jay Gould
+to the thirty thousand stock-holders of the American Telephone and
+Telegraph Company.
+
+From what has been done, therefore, we may venture a guess as to the
+future of the telephone. This "grand telephonic system" which had no
+existence thirty years ago, except in the imagination of Vail, seems to
+be at hand. The very newsboys in the streets are crying it. And while
+there is, of course, no exact blueprint of a best possible telephone
+system, we can now see the general outlines of Vail's plan.
+
+There is nothing mysterious or ominous in this plan. It has nothing
+to do with the pools and conspiracies of Wall Street. No one will be
+squeezed out except the promoters of paper companies. The simple fact is
+that Vail is organizing a complete Bell System for the same reason that
+he built one big comfortable barn for his Swiss cattle and his Welsh
+ponies, instead of half a dozen small uncomfortable sheds. He has never
+been a "high financier" to juggle profits out of other men's losses. He
+is merely applying to the telephone business the same hard sense that
+any farmer uses in the management of his farm. He is building a Big
+Barn, metaphorically, for the telephone and telegraph.
+
+Plainly, the telephone system of the future will be national, so that
+any two people in the same country will be able to talk to one another.
+It will not be competitive, for the reason that no farmer would think
+for a moment of running his farm on competitive lines. It will have
+a staff-and-line organization, to use a military phrase. Each local
+company will continue to handle its own local affairs, and exercise to
+the full the basic virtue of self-help. But there will also be, as now,
+a central body of experts to handle the larger affairs that are common
+to all companies. No separateness or secession on the one side, nor
+bureaucracy on the other--that is the typically American idea that
+underlies the ideal telephone system.
+
+The line of authority, in such a system, will begin with the local
+manager. From him it will rise to the directors of the State company;
+then higher still to the directors of the national company; and finally,
+above all corporate leaders to the Federal Government itself. The
+failure of government ownership of the telephone in so many foreign
+countries does not mean that the private companies will have absolute
+power. Quite the reverse. The lesson of thirty years' experience shows
+that a private telephone company is apt to be much more obedient to the
+will of the people than if it were a Government department. But it is
+an axiom of democracy that no company, however well conducted, will be
+permitted to control a public convenience without being held strictly
+responsible for its own acts. As politics becomes less of a game and
+more of a responsibility, the telephone of the future will doubtless be
+supervised by some sort of public committee, which will have power to
+pass upon complaints, and to prevent the nuisance of duplication and the
+swindle of watering stock.
+
+As this Federal supervision becomes more and more efficient, the present
+fear of monopoly will decrease, just as it did in the case of the
+railways. It is a fact, although now generally forgotten, that the
+first railways of the United States were run for ten years or more on
+an anti-monopoly plan. The tracks were free to all. Any one who owned
+a cart with flanged wheels could drive it on the rails and compete with
+the locomotives. There was a happy-go-lucky jumble of trains and wagons,
+all held back by the slowest team; and this continued on some railways
+until as late as 1857. By that time the people saw that com-petition on
+a railway track was absurd. They allowed each track to be monopolized by
+one company, and the era of expansion began.
+
+No one, certainly, at the present time, regrets the passing of the
+independent teamster. He was much more arbitrary and expensive than
+any railroad has ever dared to be; and as the country grew, he became
+impossible. He was not the fittest to survive. For the general good, he
+was held back from competing with the railroad, and taught to cooperate
+with it by hauling freight to and from the depots. This, to his
+surprise, he found much more profitable and pleasant. He had been
+squeezed out of a bad job into a good one. And by a similar process of
+evolution, the United States is rapidly outgrowing the small independent
+telephone companies. These will eventually, one by one, rise as the
+teamster did to a higher social value, by clasping wires with the main
+system of telephony.
+
+Until 1881 the Bell System was in the hands of a family group. It was
+a strictly private enterprise. The public had been asked to help in its
+launching, and had refused. But after 1881 it passed into the control of
+the small stock-holders, and has remained there without a break. It is
+now one of our most democratized businesses, scattering either wages or
+dividends into more than a hundred thousand homes. It has at times been
+exclusive, but never sordid. It has never been dollar-mad, nor frenzied
+by the virus of stock-gambling. There has always been a vein of
+sentiment in it that kept it in touch with human nature. Even at the
+present time, each check of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company
+carries on it a picture of a pretty Cupid, sitting on a chair upon which
+he has placed a thick book, and gayly prattling into a telephone.
+
+Several sweeping changes may be expected in the near future, now that
+there is team-play between the Bell System and the Western Union.
+Already, by a stroke of the pen, five million users of telephones
+have been put on the credit books of the Western Union; and every Bell
+telephone office is now a telegraph office. Three telephone messages and
+eight telegrams may be sent AT THE SAME TIME over two pairs of wires:
+that is one of the recent miracles of science, and is now to be tried
+out upon a gigantic scale. Most of the long-distance telephone wires,
+fully two million miles, can be used for telegraphic purposes; and a
+third of the Western Union wires, five hundred thousand miles, may with
+a few changes be used for talking.
+
+The Western Union is paying rent for twenty-two thousand, five hundred
+offices, all of which helps to make telegraphy a luxury of the few. It
+is employing as large a force of messenger-boys as the army that marched
+with General Sherman from Atlanta to the sea. Both of these items of
+expense will dwindle when a Bell wire and a Morse wire can be brought to
+a common terminal; and when a telegram can be received or delivered by
+telephone. There will also be a gain, perhaps the largest of all, in
+removing the trudging little messenger-boy from the streets and sending
+him either to school or to learn some useful trade.
+
+The fact is that the United States is the first country that has
+succeeded in putting both telephone and telegraph upon the proper basis.
+
+Elsewhere either the two are widely apart, or the telephone is a mere
+adjunct of a telegraphic department. According to the new American plan,
+the two are not competitive, but complementary. The one is a supplement
+to the other. The post office sends a package; the telegraph sends
+the contents of the package; but the telephone sends nothing. It is an
+apparatus that makes conversation possible between two separated people.
+Each of the three has a distinct field of its own, so that there has
+never been any cause for jealousy among them.
+
+To make the telephone an annex of the post office or the telegraph has
+become absurd. There are now in the whole world very nearly as many
+messages sent by telephone as by letter; and there are THIRTY-TWO
+TIMES as many telephone calls as telegrams. In the United States, the
+telephone has grown to be the big brother of the telegraph. It has six
+times the net earnings and eight times the wire. And it transmits as
+many messages as the combined total of telegrams, letters, and railroad
+passengers.
+
+This universal trend toward consolidation has introduced a variety of
+problems that will engage the ablest brains in the telephone world for
+many years to come. How to get the benefits of organization without its
+losses, to become strong without losing quickness, to become systematic
+without losing the dash and dare of earlier days, to develop the
+working force into an army of high-speed specialists without losing the
+bird's-eye view of the whole situation,--these are the riddles of the
+new type, for which the telephonists of the next generation must
+find the answers. They illustrate the nature of the big jobs that the
+telephone has to offer to an ambitious and gifted young man of to-day.
+
+"The problems never were as large or as complex as they are right now,"
+says J. J. Carty, the chief of the telephone engineers. The eternal
+struggle remains between the large and little ideas--between the men who
+see what might be and the men who only see what IS. There is still the
+race to break records. Already the girl at the switchboard can find the
+person wanted in thirty seconds. This is one-tenth of the time that was
+taken in the early centrals; but it is still too long. It is one-half of
+a valuable minute. It must be cut to twenty-five seconds, or twenty or
+fifteen.
+
+There is still the inventors' battle to gain miles. The distance over
+which conversations can be held has been increased from twenty miles
+to twenty-five hundred. But this is not far enough. There are some
+civilized human beings who are twelve thousand miles apart, and who have
+interests in common. During the Boxer Rebellion in China, for instance,
+there were Americans in Peking who would gladly have given half of their
+fortune for the use of a pair of wires to New York.
+
+In the earliest days of the telephone, Bell was fond of prophesying that
+"the time will come when we will talk across the Atlantic Ocean"; but
+this was regarded as a poetical fancy until Pupin invented his method
+of automatically propelling the electric current. Since then the
+most conservative engineer will discuss the problem of transatlantic
+telephony. And as for the poets, they are now dreaming of the time
+when a man may speak and hear his own voice come back to him around the
+world.
+
+The immediate long-distance problem is, of course, to talk from New York
+to the Pacific. The two oceans are now only three and a half days apart
+by rail. Seattle is clamoring for a wire to the East. San Diego wants
+one in time for her Panama Canal Exposition in 1915. The wires are
+already strung to San Francisco, but cannot be used in the present stage
+of the art. And Vail's captains are working now with almost breathless
+haste to give him a birthday present of a talk across the continent from
+his farm in Vermont.
+
+"I can see a universal system of telephony for the United States in the
+very near future," says Carty. "There is a statue of Seward standing in
+one of the streets of Seattle. The inscription upon it is, `To a United
+Country.' But as an Easterner stands there, he feels the isolation of
+that Far Western State, and he will always feel it, until he can
+talk from one side of the United States to the other. For my part,"
+continues Carty, "I believe we will talk across continents and across
+oceans. Why not? Are there not more cells in one human body than there
+are people in the whole earth?"
+
+Some future Carty may solve the abandoned problem of the single wire,
+and cut the copper bill in two by restoring the grounded circuit. He may
+transmit vision as well as speech. He may perfect a third-rail system
+for use on moving trains. He may conceive of an ideal insulating
+material to supersede glass, mica, paper, and enamel. He may establish
+a universal code, so that all persons of importance in the United States
+shall have call-numbers by which they may instantly be located, as books
+are in a library.
+
+Some other young man may create a commercial department on wide lines, a
+work which telephone men have as yet been too specialized to do. Whoever
+does this will be a man of comprehensive brain. He will be as closely
+in touch with the average man as with the art of telephony. He will
+know the gossip of the street, the demands of the labor unions, and the
+policies of governors and presidents. The psychology of the Western
+farmer will concern him, and the tone of the daily press, and the
+methods of department stores. It will be his aim to know the subtle
+chemistry of public opinion, and to adapt the telephone service to the
+shifting moods and necessities of the times. HE WILL FIT TELEPHONY LIKE
+A GARMENT AROUND THE HABITS OF THE PEOPLE.
+
+Also, now that the telephone business has become strong, its next
+anxiety must be to develop the virtues, and not the defects, of
+strength. Its motto must be "Ich dien"--I serve; and it will be the work
+of the future statesmen of the telephone to illustrate this motto in all
+its practical variations. They will cater and explain, and explain and
+cater. They will educate and educate, until they have created an expert
+public. They will teach by pictures and lectures and exhibitions. They
+will have charts and diagrams hung in the telephone booths, so that the
+person who is waiting for a call may learn a little and pass the time
+more pleasantly. They will, in a word, attend to those innumerable
+trifles that make the perfection of public service.
+
+Already the Bell System has gone far in this direction by organizing
+what might fairly be called a foresight department. Here is where the
+fortune-tellers of the business sit. When new lines or exchanges are to
+be built, these men study the situation with an eye to the future. They
+prepare a "fundamental plan," outlining what may reasonably be expected
+to happen in fifteen or twenty years. Invariably they are optimists.
+They make provision for growth, but none at all for shrinkage. By their
+advice, there is now twenty-five million dollars' worth of reserve plant
+in the various Bell Companies, waiting for the country to grow up to it.
+Even in the city of New York, one-half of the cable ducts are empty,
+in expectation of the greater city of eight million population which
+is scheduled to arrive in 1928. There are perhaps few more impressive
+evidences of practical optimism and confidence than a new telephone
+exchange, with two-thirds of its wires waiting for the business of the
+future.
+
+Eventually, this foresight department will expand. It may, if a leader
+of genius appear, become the first real corps of practical sociologists,
+which will substitute facts for the present hotch-potch of theories. It
+will prepare a "fundamental plan" of the whole United States, showing
+the centre of each industry and the main runways of traffic. It will
+act upon the basic fact that WHEREVER THERE IS INTERDEPENDENCE, THERE
+IS BOUND TO BE TELEPHONY; and it will therefore prepare maps of
+interdependence, showing the widely scattered groups of industry and
+finance, and the lines that weave them into a pattern of national
+cooperation.
+
+As yet, no nation, not even our own, has seen the full value of the
+long-distance telephone. Few have the imagination to see what has been
+made possible, and to realize that an actual face-to-face conversation
+may take place, even though there be a thousand miles between. Neither
+can it seem credible that a man in a distant city may be located as
+readily as though he were close at hand. It is too amazing to be true,
+and possibly a new generation will have to arrive before it will be
+taken for granted and acted upon freely. Ultimately, there can be no
+doubt that long-distance telephony will be regarded as a national asset
+of the highest value, for the reason that it can prevent so much of the
+enormous economic waste of travel.
+
+Nothing that science can say will ever decrease the marvel of a
+long-distance conversation, and there may come in the future
+an Interpreter who will put it before our eyes in the form of a
+moving-picture. He will enable us to follow the flying words in a talk
+from Boston to Denver. We will flash first to Worcester, cross the
+Hudson on the high bridge at Poughkeepsie, swing southwest through
+a dozen coal towns to the outskirts of Philadelphia, leap across
+the Susquehanna, zigzag up and down the Alleghenies into the murk
+of Pittsburg, cross the Ohio at Wheeling, glance past Columbus and
+Indianapolis, over the Wabash at Terre Haute, into St. Louis by the Eads
+bridge, through Kansas City, across the Missouri, along the corn-fields
+of Kansas, and then on--on--on with the Sante Fe Railway, across vast
+plains and past the brink of the Grand Canyon, to Pueblo and the lofty
+city of Denver. Twenty-five hundred miles along a thousand tons of
+copper wire! From Bunker Hill to Pike's Peak IN A SECOND!
+
+Herbert Spencer, in his autobiography, alludes to the impressive fact
+that while the eye is reading a single line of type, the earth has
+travelled thirty miles through space. But this, in telephony, would be
+slow travelling. It is simple everyday truth to say that while your eye
+is reading this dash,--, a telephone sound can be carried from New York
+to Chicago.
+
+There are many reasons to believe that for the practical idealists of
+the future, the supreme study will be the force that makes such miracles
+possible. Six thousand million dollars--one-twentieth of our national
+wealth--is at the present time invested in electrical development. The
+Electrical Age has not yet arrived; but it is at hand; and no one can
+tell how brilliant the result may be, when the creative minds of a
+nation are focussed upon the subdual of this mysterious force, which has
+more power and more delicacy than any other force that man has been able
+to harness.
+
+As a tame and tractable energy, Electricity is new. It has no past and
+no pedigree. It is younger than many people who are now alive. Among the
+wise men of Greece and Rome, few knew its existence, and none put it to
+any practical use. The wisest knew that a piece of amber, when rubbed,
+will attract feathery substances. But they regarded this as poetry
+rather than science. There was a pretty legend among the Phoenicians
+that the pieces of amber were the petrified tears of maidens who had
+thrown themselves into the sea because of unrequited love, and each bead
+of amber was highly prized. It was worn as an amulet and a symbol of
+purity. Not for two thousand years did any one dream that within its
+golden heart lay hidden the secret of a new electrical civilization.
+
+Not even in 1752, when Benjamin Franklin flew his famous kite on the
+banks of the Schuylkill River, and captured the first CANNED LIGHTNING,
+was there any definite knowledge of electrical energy. His lightning-rod
+was regarded as an insult to the deity of Heaven. It was blamed for
+the earthquake of 1755. And not until the telegraph of Morse came into
+general use, did men dare to think of the thunder-bolt of Jove as a
+possible servant of the human race.
+
+Thus it happened that when Bell invented the telephone, he surprised the
+world with a new idea. He had to make the thought as well as the thing.
+No Jules Verne or H. G. Wells had foreseen it. The author of the Arabian
+Nights fantasies had conceived of a flying carpet, but neither he nor
+any one else had conceived of flying conversation. In all the literature
+of ancient days, there is not a line that will apply to the telephone,
+except possibly that expressive phrase in the Bible, "And there came
+a voice." In these more privileged days, the telephone has come to
+be regarded as a commonplace fact of everyday life; and we are apt to
+forget that the wonder of it has become greater and not less; and that
+there are still honor and profit, plenty of both, to be won by the
+inventor and the scientist.
+
+The flood of electrical patents was never higher than now. There are
+literally more in a single month than the total number issued by the
+Patent Office up to 1859. The Bell System has three hundred experts who
+are paid to do nothing else but try out all new ideas and inventions;
+and before these words can pass into the printed book, new uses and
+new methods will have been discovered. There is therefore no immediate
+danger that the art of telephony will be less fascinating in the future
+than it has been in the past. It will still be the most alluring
+and elusive sprite that ever led the way through a Dark Continent of
+mysterious phenomena.
+
+There still remains for some future scientist the task of showing us in
+detail exactly what the telephone current does. Such a man will study
+vibrations as Darwin studied the differentiation of species. He will
+investigate how a child's voice, speaking from Boston to Omaha, can
+vibrate more than a million pounds of copper wire; and he will invent
+a finer system of time to fit the telephone, which can do as many
+different things in a second as a man can do in a day, transmitting with
+every tick of the clock from twenty-five to eighty thousand vibrations.
+He will deal with the various vibrations of nerves and wires and
+wireless air, that are necessary in conveying thought between two
+separated minds. He will make clear how a thought, originating in the
+brain, passes along the nerve-wires to the vocal chords, and then in
+wireless vibration of air to the disc of the transmitter. At the other
+end of the line the second disc re-creates these vibrations, which
+impinge upon the nerve-wires of an ear, and are thus carried to the
+consciousness of another brain.
+
+And so, notwithstanding all that has been done since Bell opened up
+the way, the telephone remains the acme of electrical marvels. No
+other thing does so much with so little energy. No other thing is more
+enswathed in the unknown. Not even the gray-haired pioneers who have
+lived with the telephone since its birth, can understand their protege.
+As to the why and the how, there is as yet no answer. It is as true of
+telephony to-day as it was in 1876, that a child can use what the wisest
+sages cannot comprehend.
+
+Here is a tiny disc of sheet-iron. I speak--it shudders. It has a
+different shudder for every sound. It has thousands of millions of
+different shudders. There is a second disc many miles away, perhaps
+twenty-five hundred miles away. Between the two discs runs a copper
+wire. As I speak, a thrill of electricity flits along the wire. This
+thrill is moulded by the shudder of the disc. It makes the second disc
+shudder. And the shudder of the second disc reproduces my voice. That is
+what happens. But how--not all the scientists of the world can tell.
+
+The telephone current is a phenomenon of the ether, say the theorists.
+But what is ether? No one knows. Sir Oliver Lodge has guessed that it
+is "perhaps the only substantial thing in the material universe"; but no
+one knows. There is nothing to guide us in that unknown country except
+a sign-post that points upwards and bears the one word--"Perhaps." The
+ether of space! Here is an Eldorado for the scientists of the future,
+and whoever can first map it out will go far toward discovering the
+secret of telephony.
+
+Some day--who knows?--there may come the poetry and grand opera of the
+telephone. Artists may come who will portray the marvel of the wires
+that quiver with electrified words, and the romance of the switchboards
+that tremble with the secrets of a great city. Already Puvis de
+Chavannes, by one of his superb panels in the Boston Library, has
+admitted the telephone and the telegraph to the world of art. He has
+embodied them as two flying figures, poised above the electric wires,
+and with the following inscription underneath: "By the wondrous agency
+of electricity, speech dashes through space and swift as lightning bears
+tidings of good and evil."
+
+But these random guesses as to the future of the telephone may fall far
+short of what the reality will be. In these dazzling days it is idle to
+predict. The inventor has everywhere put the prophet out of business.
+Fact has outrun Fancy. When Morse, for instance, was tacking up his
+first little line of wire around the Speedwell Iron Works, who could
+have foreseen two hundred and fifty thousand miles of submarine cables,
+by which the very oceans are all aquiver with the news of the world?
+When Fulton's tiny tea-kettle of a boat steamed up the Hudson to Albany
+in two days, who could have foreseen the steel leviathans, one-sixth of
+a mile in length, that can in the same time cut the Atlantic Ocean in
+halves? And when Bell stood in a dingy workshop in Boston and heard
+the clang of a clock-spring come over an electric wire, who could have
+foreseen the massive structure of the Bell System, built up by half the
+telephones of the world, and by the investment of more actual capital
+than has gone to the making of any other industrial association? Who
+could have foreseen what the telephone bells have done to ring out the
+old ways and to ring in the new; to ring out delay, and isolation and to
+ring in the efficiency and the friendliness of a truly united people?
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The History of the Telephone, by Herbert N. Casson
+
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