The History of the Telephone, Herbert N. Casson [desktop ebook reader .txt] 📗

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 fullgrown, 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