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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - "Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten"

Walter Hawkins - "Old John Brown"

Jerome K. Jerome - "The Master of Mrs. Chilvers"

George MacDonald - "The Princess and the Goblin"

The History of the Telephone

H >> Herbert N. Casson >> The History of the Telephone




Not even in 1752, when Benjamin Franklin
flew his famous kite on the banks of the Schuylkill
River, and captured the first CANNED LIGHTNING,
was there any definite knowledge of electrical
energy. His lightning-rod was regarded
as an insult to the deity of Heaven. It was
blamed for the earthquake of 1755. And not
until the telegraph of Morse came into general
use, did men dare to think of the thunder-bolt of
Jove as a possible servant of the human race.

Thus it happened that when Bell invented the
telephone, he surprised the world with a new
idea. He had to make the thought as well as
the thing. No Jules Verne or H. G. Wells had
foreseen it. The author of the Arabian Nights
fantasies had conceived of a flying carpet, but
neither he nor any one else had conceived of
flying conversation. In all the literature of
ancient days, there is not a line that will apply
to the telephone, except possibly that expressive
phrase in the Bible, "And there came a voice."
In these more privileged days, the telephone has
come to be regarded as a commonplace fact of
everyday life; and we are apt to forget that the
wonder of it has become greater and not less;
and that there are still honor and profit, plenty
of both, to be won by the inventor and the
scientist.

The flood of electrical patents was never higher
than now. There are literally more in a single
month than the total number issued by the Patent
Office up to 1859. The Bell System has three
hundred experts who are paid to do nothing else
but try out all new ideas and inventions; and
before these words can pass into the printed
book, new uses and new methods will have
been discovered. There is therefore no immediate
danger that the art of telephony will be
less fascinating in the future than it has been in
the past. It will still be the most alluring and
elusive sprite that ever led the way through a
Dark Continent of mysterious phenomena.

There still remains for some future scientist
the task of showing us in detail exactly what the
telephone current does. Such a man will study
vibrations as Darwin studied the differentiation
of species. He will investigate how a child's
voice, speaking from Boston to Omaha, can
vibrate more than a million pounds of copper
wire; and he will invent a finer system of time to
fit the telephone, which can do as many different
things in a second as a man can do in a day,
transmitting with every tick of the clock from twenty-
five to eighty thousand vibrations. He will deal
with the various vibrations of nerves and wires
and wireless air, that are necessary in conveying
thought between two separated minds. He will
make clear how a thought, originating in the
brain, passes along the nerve-wires to the vocal
chords, and then in wireless vibration of air to
the disc of the transmitter. At the other end
of the line the second disc re-creates these
vibrations, which impinge upon the nerve-wires of an
ear, and are thus carried to the consciousness of
another brain.

And so, notwithstanding all that has been done
since Bell opened up the way, the telephone remains
the acme of electrical marvels. No other
thing does so much with so little energy. No
other thing is more enswathed in the unknown.
Not even the gray-haired pioneers who have lived
with the telephone since its birth, can understand
their protege. As to the why and the how, there
is as yet no answer. It is as true of telephony
to-day as it was in 1876, that a child can use
what the wisest sages cannot comprehend.

Here is a tiny disc of sheet-iron. I speak--it
shudders. It has a different shudder for every
sound. It has thousands of millions of different
shudders. There is a second disc many miles
away, perhaps twenty-five hundred miles away.
Between the two discs runs a copper wire. As
I speak, a thrill of electricity flits along the wire.
This thrill is moulded by the shudder of the disc.
It makes the second disc shudder. And the
shudder of the second disc reproduces my voice.
That is what happens. But how--not all the
scientists of the world can tell.

The telephone current is a phenomenon of the
ether, say the theorists. But what is ether? No
one knows. Sir Oliver Lodge has guessed that
it is "perhaps the only substantial thing in the
material universe"; but no one knows. There
is nothing to guide us in that unknown country
except a sign-post that points upwards and bears
the one word--"Perhaps." The ether of space!
Here is an Eldorado for the scientists of the
future, and whoever can first map it out will go
far toward discovering the secret of telephony.

Some day--who knows?--there may come
the poetry and grand opera of the telephone.
Artists may come who will portray the marvel
of the wires that quiver with electrified words,
and the romance of the switchboards that trem-
ble with the secrets of a great city. Already
Puvis de Chavannes, by one of his superb panels
in the Boston Library, has admitted the telephone
and the telegraph to the world of art.
He has embodied them as two flying figures,
poised above the electric wires, and with the
following inscription underneath: "By the
wondrous agency of electricity, speech dashes
through space and swift as lightning bears
tidings of good and evil."

But these random guesses as to the future of
the telephone may fall far short of what the
reality will be. In these dazzling days it is idle
to predict. The inventor has everywhere put
the prophet out of business. Fact has outrun
Fancy. When Morse, for instance, was tacking
up his first little line of wire around the Speedwell
Iron Works, who could have foreseen two
hundred and fifty thousand miles of submarine
cables, by which the very oceans are all aquiver
with the news of the world? When Fulton's
tiny tea-kettle of a boat steamed up the Hudson
to Albany in two days, who could have foreseen
the steel leviathans, one-sixth of a mile in length,
that can in the same time cut the Atlantic Ocean
in halves? And when Bell stood in a dingy
workshop in Boston and heard the clang of a
clock-spring come over an electric wire, who
could have foreseen the massive structure of the
Bell System, built up by half the telephones of
the world, and by the investment of more actual
capital than has gone to the making of any other
industrial association? Who could have foreseen
what the telephone bells have done to ring
out the old ways and to ring in the new; to ring
out delay, and isolation and to ring in the efficiency
and the friendliness of a truly united people?

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