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

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 backyard 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