The History of the Telephone
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Herbert N. Casson >> The History of the Telephone
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THE HISTORY OF THE TELEPHONE
BY HERBERT N. CASSON
PREFACE
Thirty-five short years, and presto!
the newborn art of telephony is fullgrown.
Three million telephones are now scattered
abroad in foreign countries, and seven millions
are massed here, in the land of its birth.
So entirely has the telephone outgrown the ridicule
with which, as many people can well remember,
it was first received, that it is now in most
places taken for granted, as though it were a
part of the natural phenomena of this planet. It
has so marvellously extended the facilities of
conversation--that "art in which a man has all
mankind for competitors"--that it is now an
indispensable help to whoever would live the
convenient life. The disadvantage of being deaf and
dumb to all absent persons, which was universal
in pre-telephonic days, has now happily been
overcome; and I hope that this story of how and
by whom it was done will be a welcome addition
to American libraries.
It is such a story as the telephone itself might
tell, if it could speak with a voice of its own.
It is not technical. It is not statistical. It is
not exhaustive. It is so brief, in fact, that a
second volume could readily be made by describing
the careers of telephone leaders whose names
I find have been omitted unintentionally from
this book--such indispensable men, for instance,
as William R. Driver, who has signed more telephone
cheques and larger ones than any other
man; Geo. S. Hibbard, Henry W. Pope, and
W. D. Sargent, three veterans who know telephony
in all its phases; George Y. Wallace, the
last survivor of the Rocky Mountain pioneers;
Jasper N. Keller, of Texas and New England;
W. T. Gentry, the central figure of the Southeast,
and the following presidents of telephone
companies: Bernard E. Sunny, of Chicago; E.
B. Field, of Denver; D. Leet Wilson, of Pittsburg;
L. G. Richardson, of Indianapolis; Caspar
E. Yost, of Omaha; James E. Caldwell, of
Nashville; Thomas Sherwin, of Boston; Henry T.
Scott, of San Francisco; H. J. Pettengill, of
Dallas; Alonzo Burt, of Milwaukee; John Kil-
gour, of Cincinnati; and Chas. S. Gleed, of Kansas
City.
I am deeply indebted to most of these men for
the information which is herewith presented;
and also to such pioneers, now dead, as O. E.
Madden, the first General Agent; Frank L.
Pope, the noted electrical expert; C. H. Haskins,
of Milwaukee; George F. Ladd, of San Francisco;
and Geo. F. Durant, of St. Louis.
H. N. C.
PINE HILL, N. Y., June 1, 1910.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I THE BIRTH OF THE TELEPHONE
II THE BUILDING OF THE BUSINESS
III THE HOLDING OF THE BUSINESS
IV THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ART
V THE EXPANSION OF THE BUSINESS
VI NOTABLE USERS OF THE TELEPHONE
VII THE TELEPHONE AND NATIONAL EFFICIENCY
VIII THE TELEPHONE IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES
IX THE FUTURE OF THE TELEPHONE
THE HISTORY OF THE TELEPHONE
CHAPTER I
THE BIRTH OF THE TELEPHONE
In that somewhat distant year 1875, when the
telegraph and the Atlantic cable were the
most wonderful things in the world, a tall young
professor of elocution was desperately busy in a
noisy machine-shop that stood in one of the narrow
streets of Boston, not far from Scollay
Square. It was a very hot afternoon in June,
but the young professor had forgotten the heat
and the grime of the workshop. He was wholly
absorbed in the making of a nondescript machine,
a sort of crude harmonica with a clock-spring
reed, a magnet, and a wire. It was a most
absurd toy in appearance. It was unlike any
other thing that had ever been made in any country.
The young professor had been toiling over
it for three years and it had constantly baffled
him, until, on this hot afternoon in June, 1875,
he heard an almost inaudible sound--a faint
TWANG--come from the machine itself.
For an instant he was stunned. He had been
expecting just such a sound for several months,
but it came so suddenly as to give him the sensation
of surprise. His eyes blazed with delight,
and he sprang in a passion of eagerness to an
adjoining room in which stood a young mechanic
who was assisting him.
"Snap that reed again, Watson," cried the
apparently irrational young professor. There
was one of the odd-looking machines in each
room, so it appears, and the two were connected
by an electric wire. Watson had snapped the
reed on one of the machines and the professor
had heard from the other machine exactly the
same sound. It was no more than the gentle
TWANG of a clock-spring; but it was the first time
in the history of the world that a complete sound
had been carried along a wire, reproduced perfectly
at the other end, and heard by an expert
in acoustics.
That twang of the clock-spring was the first
tiny cry of the newborn telephone, uttered in the
clanging din of a machine-shop and happily
heard by a man whose ear had been trained to
recognize the strange voice of the little newcomer.
There, amidst flying belts and jarring
wheels, the baby telephone was born, as feeble
and helpless as any other baby, and "with no
language but a cry."
The professor-inventor, who had thus rescued
the tiny foundling of science, was a young Scottish
American. His name, now known as widely
as the telephone itself, was Alexander Graham
Bell. He was a teacher of acoustics and a student
of electricity, possibly the only man in his
generation who was able to focus a knowledge
of both subjects upon the problem of the telephone.
To other men that exceedingly faint
sound would have been as inaudible as silence
itself; but to Bell it was a thunder-clap. It was
a dream come true. It was an impossible thing
which had in a flash become so easy that he could
scarcely believe it. Here, without the use of a
battery, with no more electric current than that
made by a couple of magnets, all the waves of
a sound had been carried along a wire and
changed back to sound at the farther end. It
was absurd. It was incredible. It was something
which neither wire nor electricity had been
known to do before. But it was true.
No discovery has ever been less accidental.
It was the last link of a long chain of discoveries.
It was the result of a persistent and
deliberate search. Already, for half a year
or longer, Bell had known the correct theory of
the telephone; but he had not realized that the
feeble undulatory current generated by a magnet
was strong enough for the transmission of speech.
He had been taught to undervalue the incredible
efficiency of electricity.
Not only was Bell himself a teacher of the
laws of speech, so highly skilled that he was
an instructor in Boston University. His father,
also, his two brothers, his uncle, and his
grandfather had taught the laws of speech in the
universities of Edinburgh, Dublin, and London.
For three generations the Bells had been professors
of the science of talking. They had even
helped to create that science by several inven-
tions. The first of them, Alexander Bell, had
invented a system for the correction of stammering
and similar defects of speech. The second,
Alexander Melville Bell, was the dean of British
elocutionists, a man of creative brain and a most
impressive facility of rhetoric. He was the author
of a dozen text-books on the art of speaking
correctly, and also of a most ingenious
sign-language which he called "Visible Speech."
Every letter in the alphabet of this language
represented a certain action of the lips and
tongue; so that a new method was provided for
those who wished to learn foreign languages or
to speak their own language more correctly.
And the third of these speech-improving Bells,
the inventor of the telephone, inherited the
peculiar genius of his fathers, both inventive and
rhetorical, to such a degree that as a boy he had
constructed an artificial skull, from gutta-percha
and India rubber, which, when enlivened by a
blast of air from a hand-bellows, would actually
pronounce several words in an almost human
manner.
The third Bell, the only one of this remarkable
family who concerns us at this time, was a young
man, barely twenty-eight, at the time when his
ear caught the first cry of the telephone. But he
was already a man of some note on his own account.
He had been educated in Edinburgh, the
city of his birth, and in London; and had in one
way and another picked up a smattering of
anatomy, music, electricity, and telegraphy.
Until he was sixteen years of age, he had read
nothing but novels and poetry and romantic tales
of Scottish heroes. Then he left home to become
a teacher of elocution in various British
schools, and by the time he was of age he had
made several slight discoveries as to the nature
of vowel-sounds. Shortly afterwards, he met in
London two distinguished men, Alexander J.
Ellis and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who did far
more than they ever knew to forward Bell in
the direction of the telephone.
Ellis was the president of the London Philological
Society. Also, he was the translator
of the famous book on "The Sensations of Tone,"
written by Helmholtz, who, in the period from
1871 to 1894 made Berlin the world-centre for
the study of the physical sciences. So it happened
that when Bell ran to Ellis as a young
enthusiast and told his experiments, Ellis informed
him that Helmholtz had done the same
things several years before and done them more
completely. He brought Bell to his house and
showed him what Helmholtz had done--how he
had kept tuning-forks in vibration by the power
of electro-magnets, and blended the tones of several
tuning-forks together to produce the complex
quality of the human voice.
Now, Helmholtz had not been trying to invent
a telephone, nor any sort of message-carrier.
His aim was to point out the physical basis of
music, and nothing more. But this fact that
an electro-magnet would set a tuning-fork humming
was new to Bell and very attractive. It
appealed at once to him as a student of speech.
If a tuning-fork could be made to sing by a
magnet or an electrified wire, why would it not
be possible to make a musical telegraph--a telegraph
with a piano key-board, so that many messages
could be sent at once over a single wire?
Unknown to Bell, there were several dozen inven-
tors then at work upon this problem, which
proved in the end to be very elusive. But it gave
him at least a starting-point, and he forthwith
commenced his quest of the telephone.
As he was then in England, his first step was
naturally to visit Sir Charles Wheatstone, the
best known English expert on telegraphy.
Sir Charles had earned his title by many inventions.
He was a simple-natured scientist, and
treated Bell with the utmost kindness. He
showed him an ingenious talking-machine that
had been made by Baron de Kempelin. At this
time Bell was twenty-two and unknown; Wheatstone
was sixty-seven and famous. And the
personality of the veteran scientist made so vivid
a picture upon the mind of the impressionable
young Bell that the grand passion of science became
henceforth the master-motif of his life.
From this summit of glorious ambition he was
thrown, several months later, into the depths of
grief and despondency. The White Plague had
come to the home in Edinburgh and taken away
his two brothers. More, it had put its mark
upon the young inventor himself. Nothing but
a change of climate, said his doctor, would put
him out of danger. And so, to save his life, he
and his father and mother set sail from Glasgow
and came to the small Canadian town of Brantford,
where for a year he fought down his
tendency to consumption, and satisfied his nervous
energy by teaching "Visible Speech" to a
tribe of Mohawk Indians.
By this time it had become evident, both to
his parents and to his friends, that young Graham
was destined to become some sort of a creative
genius. He was tall and supple, with a pale
complexion, large nose, full lips, jet-black eyes,
and jet-black hair, brushed high and usually
rumpled into a curly tangle. In temperament
he was a true scientific Bohemian, with the ideals
of a savant and the disposition of an artist. He
was wholly a man of enthusiasms, more devoted
to ideas than to people; and less likely to master
his own thoughts than to be mastered by them.
He had no shrewdness, in any commercial sense,
and very little knowledge of the small practical
details of ordinary living. He was always intense,
always absorbed. When he applied his
mind to a problem, it became at once an enthralling
arena, in which there went whirling a chariot-
race of ideas and inventive fancies.
He had been fascinated from boyhood by his
father's system of "Visible Speech." He knew
it so well that he once astonished a professor of
Oriental languages by repeating correctly a sentence
of Sanscrit that had been written in "Visible
Speech" characters. While he was living in
London his most absorbing enthusiasm was the
instruction of a class of deaf-mutes, who could
be trained to talk, he believed, by means of the
"Visible Speech" alphabet. He was so deeply
impressed by the progress made by these pupils,
and by the pathos of their dumbness, that when
he arrived in Canada he was in doubt as to which
of these two tasks was the more important--the
teaching of deaf-mutes or the invention of a
musical telegraph.
At this point, and before Bell had begun to
experiment with his telegraph, the scene of the
story shifts from Canada to Massachusetts. It
appears that his father, while lecturing in Boston,
had mentioned Graham's exploits with a
class of deaf-mutes; and soon afterward the Boston
Board of Education wrote to Graham, offering
him five hundred dollars if he would come to
Boston and introduce his system of teaching in a
school for deaf-mutes that had been opened recently.
The young man joyfully agreed, and on
the first of April, 1871, crossed the line and became
for the remainder of his life an American.
For the next two years his telegraphic work
was laid aside, if not forgotten. His success as
a teacher of deaf-mutes was sudden and overwhelming.
It was the educational sensation of
1871. It won him a professorship in Boston
University; and brought so many pupils around
him that he ventured to open an ambitious
"School of Vocal Physiology," which became at
once a profitable enterprise. For a time there
seemed to be little hope of his escaping from the
burden of this success and becoming an inventor,
when, by a most happy coincidence, two of his
pupils brought to him exactly the sort of stimulation
and practical help that he needed and had
not up to this time received.
One of these pupils was a little deaf-mute
tot, five years of age, named Georgie Sanders.
Bell had agreed to give him a series of private
lessons for $350 a year; and as the child lived
with his grandmother in the city of Salem, sixteen
miles from Boston, it was agreed that Bell should
make his home with the Sanders family. Here
he not only found the keenest interest and sympathy
in his air-castles of invention, but also was
given permission to use the cellar of the house as
his workshop.
For the next three years this cellar was his
favorite retreat. He littered it with tuning-
forks, magnets, batteries, coils of wire, tin
trumpets, and cigar-boxes. No one outside of
the Sanders family was allowed to enter it, as
Bell was nervously afraid of having his ideas
stolen. He would even go to five or six stores
to buy his supplies, for fear that his intentions
should be discovered. Almost with the secrecy
of a conspirator, he worked alone in this cellar,
usually at night, and quite oblivious of the fact
that sleep was a necessity to him and to the
Sanders family.
"Often in the middle of the night Bell would
wake me up," said Thomas Sanders, the father
of Georgie. "His black eyes would be blazing
with excitement. Leaving me to go down to
the cellar, he would rush wildly to the barn and
begin to send me signals along his experimental
wires. If I noticed any improvement in his
machine, he would be delighted. He would leap
and whirl around in one of his `war-dances' and
then go contentedly to bed. But if the experiment
was a failure, he would go back to his workbench
and try some different plan."
The second pupil who became a factor--a
very considerable factor--in Bell's career was a
fifteen-year-old girl named Mabel Hubbard, who
had lost her hearing, and consequently her speech,
through an attack of scarlet-fever when a baby.
She was a gentle and lovable girl, and Bell, in his
ardent and headlong way, lost his heart to her
completely; and four years later, he had the
happiness of making her his wife. Mabel Hubbard
did much to encourage Bell. She followed each
step of his progress with the keenest interest.
She wrote his letters and copied his patents. She
cheered him on when he felt himself beaten.
And through her sympathy with Bell and his ambitions,
she led her father--a widely known Boston
lawyer named Gardiner G. Hubbard--to
become Bell's chief spokesman and defender, a
true apostle of the telephone.
Hubbard first became aware of Bell's inventive
efforts one evening when Bell was visiting
at his home in Cambridge. Bell was illustrating
some of the mysteries of acoustics by the aid of
a piano. "Do you know," he said to Hubbard,
"that if I sing the note G close to the strings of
the piano, that the G-string will answer me?"
"Well, what then?" asked Hubbard. "It is
a fact of tremendous importance," replied Bell.
"It is an evidence that we may some day have
a musical telegraph, which will send as many
messages simultaneously over one wire as there
are notes on that piano."
Later, Bell ventured to confide to Hubbard
his wild dream of sending speech over an electric
wire, but Hubbard laughed him to scorn. "Now
you are talking nonsense," he said. "Such a
thing never could be more than a scientific toy.
You had better throw that idea out of your mind
and go ahead with your musical telegraph, which
if it is successful will make you a millionaire."
But the longer Bell toiled at his musical telegraph,
the more he dreamed of replacing the telegraph
and its cumbrous sign-language by a new
machine that would carry, not dots and dashes,
but the human voice. "If I can make a deaf-
mute talk," he said, "I can make iron talk." For
months he wavered between the two ideas. He
had no more than the most hazy conception of
what this voice-carrying machine would be like.
At first he conceived of having a harp at one end
of the wire, and a speaking-trumpet at the other,
so that the tones of the voice would be reproduced
by the strings of the harp.
Then, in the early Summer of 1874, while he
was puzzling over this harp apparatus, the dim
outline of a new path suddenly glinted in front
of him. He had not been forgetful of "Visible
Speech" all this while, but had been making
experiments with two remarkable machines--the
phonautograph and the manometric capsule, by
means of which the vibrations of sound were
made plainly visible. If these could be im-
proved, he thought, then the deaf might be taught
to speak by SIGHT--by learning an alphabet of
vibrations. He mentioned these experiments to
a Boston friend, Dr. Clarence J. Blake, and he,
being a surgeon and an aurist, naturally said,
"Why don't you use a REAL EAR?"
Such an idea never had, and probably never
could have, occurred to Bell; but he accepted it
with eagerness. Dr. Blake cut an ear from a dead
man's head, together with the ear-drum and the
associated bones. Bell took this fragment of
a skull and arranged it so that a straw touched
the ear-drum at one end and a piece of moving
smoked glass at the other. Thus, when Bell
spoke loudly into the ear, the vibrations of the
drum made tiny markings upon the glass.
It was one of the most extraordinary incidents
in the whole history of the telephone. To an
uninitiated onlooker, nothing could have been
more ghastly or absurd. How could any one
have interpreted the gruesome joy of this young
professor with the pale face and the black
eyes, who stood earnestly singing, whispering,
and shouting into a dead man's ear? What
sort of a wizard must he be, or ghoul, or madman?
And in Salem, too, the home of the
witchcraft superstition! Certainly it would
not have gone well with Bell had he lived
two centuries earlier and been caught at such
black magic.
What had this dead man's ear to do with the
invention of the telephone? Much. Bell noticed
how small and thin was the ear-drum, and
yet how effectively it could send thrills and
vibrations through heavy bones. "If this tiny disc
can vibrate a bone," he thought, "then an iron
disc might vibrate an iron rod, or at least, an iron
wire." In a flash the conception of a membrane
telephone was pictured in his mind. He saw in
imagination two iron discs, or ear-drums, far
apart and connected by an electrified wire, catching
the vibrations of sound at one end, and reproducing
them at the other. At last he was on the
right path, and had a theoretical knowledge of
what a speaking telephone ought to be. What
remained to be done was to construct such a machine
and find out how the electric current could
best be brought into harness.
Then, as though Fortune suddenly felt that he
was winning this stupendous success too easily,
Bell was flung back by an avalanche of troubles.
Sanders and Hubbard, who had been paying the
cost of his experiments, abruptly announced that
they would pay no more unless he confined his
attention to the musical telegraph, and stopped
wasting his time on ear-toys that never could be
of any financial value. What these two men
asked could scarcely be denied, as one of them
was his best-paying patron and the other was the
father of the girl whom he hoped to marry. "If
you wish my daughter," said Hubbard, "you must
abandon your foolish telephone." Bell's "School
of Vocal Physiology," too, from which he had
hoped so much, had come to an inglorious end.
He had been too much absorbed in his experiments
to sustain it. His professorship had been
given up, and he had no pupils except Georgie
Sanders and Mabel Hubbard. He was poor,
much poorer than his associates knew. And his
mind was torn and distracted by the contrary
calls of science, poverty, business, and affection.
Pouring out his sorrows in a letter to his mother,
he said: "I am now beginning to realize the
cares and anxieties of being an inventor. I have
had to put off all pupils and classes, for flesh and
blood could not stand much longer such a strain
as I have had upon me."
While stumbling through this Slough of Despond,
he was called to Washington by his patent
lawyer. Not having enough money to pay the
cost of such a journey, he borrowed the price of a
return ticket from Sanders and arranged to stay
with a friend in Washington, to save a hotel bill
that he could not afford. At that time Professor
Joseph Henry, who knew more of the theory of
electrical science than any other American, was
the Grand Old Man of Washington; and poor
Bell, in his doubt and desperation, resolved to
run to him for advice.
Then came a meeting which deserves to be
historic. For an entire afternoon the two men
worked together over the apparatus that Bell had
brought from Boston, just as Henry had worked
over the telegraph before Bell was born. Henry
was now a veteran of seventy-eight, with only
three years remaining to his credit in the bank
of Time, while Bell was twenty-eight. There
was a long half-century between them; but the
youth had discovered a New Fact that the sage,
in all his wisdom, had never known.
"You are in possession of the germ of a great
invention," said Henry, "and I would advise you
to work at it until you have made it complete."
"But," replied Bell, "I have not got the
electrical knowledge that is necessary."
"Get it," responded the aged scientist.
"I cannot tell you how much these two words
have encouraged me," said Bell afterwards, in
describing this interview to his parents. "I live
too much in an atmosphere of discouragement for
scientific pursuits; and such a chimerical idea as
telegraphing VOCAL SOUNDS would indeed seem to
most minds scarcely feasible enough to spend
time in working over."
By this time Bell had moved his workshop from
the cellar in Salem to 109 Court Street, Boston,
where he had rented a room from Charles
Williams, a manufacturer of electrical supplies.
Thomas A. Watson was his assistant, and both
Bell and Watson lived nearby, in two cheap little
bedrooms. The rent of the workshop and bedrooms,
and Watson's wages of nine dollars a
week, were being paid by Sanders and Hubbard.
Consequently, when Bell returned from Washington,
he was compelled by his agreement to
devote himself mainly to the musical telegraph,
although his heart was now with the telephone.
For exactly three months after his interview with
Professor Henry, he continued to plod ahead,
along both lines, until, on that memorable hot
afternoon in June, 1875, the full TWANG of the
clock-spring came over the wire, and the telephone
was born.
From this moment, Bell was a man of one purpose.
He won over Sanders and Hubbard. He
converted Watson into an enthusiast. He forgot
his musical telegraph, his "Visible Speech,"
his classes, his poverty. He threw aside a profession
in which he was already locally famous.
And he grappled with this new mystery of electricity,
as Henry had advised him to do, encouraging
himself with the fact that Morse, who was
only a painter, had mastered his electrical
difficulties, and there was no reason why a professor
of acoustics should not do as much.
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