The History of the Telephone, Herbert N. Casson [desktop ebook reader .txt] 📗
- Author: Herbert N. Casson
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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.
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 telephone of such a mechanism as would bring it into universal service.
The first of these men was Thomas A. Watson, the young mechanic who had been hired as Bell’s helper. He began a work that to-day requires an army of twenty-six thousand people. He was for a couple of years the total engineering and manufacturing department of the telephone business, and by 1880 had taken out sixty patents for his own suggestions. It was Watson who took the telephone as Bell had made it, really a toy, with its diaphragm so delicate that a warm breath would put it out of order, and toughened it into a more rugged machine. Bell had used a disc of fragile gold-beaters’ skin with a patch of sheet-iron glued to the centre. He could not believe, for a time, that a disc of all-iron would vibrate under the slight influence of a spoken word.
But he and Watson noticed that when the patch was bigger the talking was better, and presently they threw away the gold-beaters’ skin and used the iron alone.
Also, it was Watson who spent months experimenting with all sorts and sizes of iron discs, so as to get the one that would best convey the sound. If the iron was too thick, he discovered, the voice was shrilled into a Punch-and-Judy squeal; and if it was too thin, the voice became a hollow and sepulchral groan, as if the speaker had his head in a barrel. Other months, too, were spent in finding out the proper size and shape for the air cavity in front of the disc.
And so, after the telephone had been perfected, IN PRINCIPLE, a full year was required to lift it out of the class of scientific toys, and another year or two to present it properly to the business world.
Until 1878 all Bell telephone apparatus was made by Watson in Charles Williams’s little shop in Court Street, Boston—a building long since transformed into a five-cent theatre. But the business soon grew too big for the shop.
Orders fell five weeks behind. Agents stormed and fretted. Some action had to be taken quickly, so licenses were given to four other manufacturers to make bells, switchboards, and so forth. By this time the Western Electric Company of Chicago had begun to make the infringing Gray-Edison telephones for the Western Union, so that there were soon six groups of mechanics puzzling their wits over the new talk-machinery.
By 1880 there was plenty of telephonic apparatus being made, but in too many different varieties. Not all the summer gowns of that year presented more styles and fancies. The next step, if there was to be any degree of uniformity, was plainly to buy and consolidate these six companies; and by 1881 Vail had done this.
It was the first merger in telephone history.
It was a step of immense importance. Had it not been taken, the telephone business would have been torn into fragments by the civil wars between rival inventors.
From this time the Western Electric became the headquarters of telephonic apparatus. It was the Big Shop, all roads led to it. No matter where a new idea was born, sooner or later it came knocking at the door of the Western Electric to receive a material body. Here were the skilled workmen who became the hands of the telephone business. And here, too, were many of the ablest inventors and engineers, who did most to develop the cables and switchboards of to-day.
In Boston, Watson had resigned in 1882, and in his place, a year or two later stood a timely new arrival named E. T. Gilliland. This really notable man was a friend in need to the telephone.
He had been a manufacturer of electrical apparatus in Indianapolis, until Vail’s policy of consolidation drew him into the central group of pioneers and pathfinders. For five years Gilliland led the way as a developer of better and cheaper equipment. He made the best of a most difficult situation. He was so handy, so resourceful, that he invariably found a way to unravel the mechanical tangles that perplexed the first telephone agents, and this, too, without compelling them to spend large sums of capital. He took the ideas and apparatus that were then in existence, and used them to carry the telephone business through the most critical period of its life, when there was little time or money to risk on experiments. He took the peg switchboard of the telegraph, for instance, and developed it to its highest point, to a point that was not even imagined possible by any one else. It was the most practical and complete switchboard of its day, and held the field against all comers until it was superseded by the modern type of board, vastly more elaborate and expensive.
By 1884, gathered around Gilliland in Boston and the Western Electric in Chicago, there came to be a group of mechanics and high-school graduates, very young men, mostly, who had no reputations to lose; and who, partly for a living and mainly for a lark, plunged into the difficulties of this new business that had at that time little history and less prestige. These young adventurers, most of whom are still alive, became the makers of industrial history. They were unquestionably the founders of the present science of telephone engineering.
The problem that they dashed at so lightheartedly was much larger than any of them imagined.
It was a Gibraltar of impossibilities.
It was on the face of it a fantastic nightmare of a task—to weave such a web of wires, with interlocking centres, as would put any one telephone in touch with every other. There was no help for them in books or colleges. Watson, who had acquired a little knowledge, had become a shipbuilder. Electrical engineering, as a profession, was unborn. And as for their telegraphic experience, while it certainly helped them for a time, it started them in the wrong direction and led them to do many things which had afterwards to be undone.
The peculiar electric current that these young pathfinders had to deal with is perhaps the quickest, feeblest, and most elusive force in the world.
It is so amazing a thing that any description of it seems irrational. It is as gentle as a touch of a baby sunbeam, and as swift as the lightning flash. It is so small that the electric current of a single incandescent lamp is greater 500,000,000
times. Cool a spoonful of hot water just one degree, and the energy set free by the cooling will operate a telephone for ten thousand years.
Catch the falling tear-drop of a child, and there will be sufficient water-power to carry a spoken message from one city to another.
Such is the tiny Genie of the Wire that had to be protected and trained into obedience. It was the most defenceless of all electric sprites, and it had so many enemies. Enemies! The world was populous with its enemies. There was the lightning, its elder brother, striking at it with murderous blows. There were the telegraphic and light-and-power currents, its strong and malicious cousins, chasing and assaulting it whenever it ventured too near. There were rain and sleet and snow and every sort of moisture, lying in wait to abduct it. There were rivers and trees and flecks of dust. It seemed as if all the known and unknown agencies of nature were in conspiracy to thwart or annihilate this gentle little messenger who had been conjured into life by the wizardry of Alexander Graham Bell.
All that these young men had received from Bell and Watson was that part of the telephone that we call the
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