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

for small towns and farming regions. But in a great city such a plan grew to be suicidal. In New York, for instance, the price had to be raised to $240, which lifted the telephone as high above the mass of the citizens as though it were a piano or a diamond sunburst. Such a plan was strangling the business. It was shutting out the small users. It was clogging the wires with deadhead calls. It was giving some people too little service and others too much. It was a very unsatisfactory situation.

 

How to extend the service and at the same time cheapen it to small users—that was the Gordian knot; and the man who unquestionably did most to untie it was Edward J. Hall. Mr. Hall founded the telephone business in Buffalo in 1878, and seven years afterwards became the chief of the long-distance traffic. He was then, and is to-day, one of the statesmen of the telephone.

For more than thirty years he has been the “candid friend” of the business, incessantly suggesting, probing, and criticising. Keen and dispassionate, with a genius for mercilessly cutting to the marrow of a proposition, Hall has at the same time been a zealot for the improvement and extension of telephone service. It was he who set the agents free from the ball-and-chain of royalties, allowing them to pay instead a percentage of gross receipts. And it was he who “broke the jam,” as a lumberman would say, by suggesting the MESSAGE RATE system.

 

By this plan, which U. N. Bethell developed to its highest point in New York, a user of the telephone pays a fixed minimum price for a certain number of messages per year, and extra for all messages over this number. The large user pays more, and the little user pays less. It opened up the way to such an expansion of telephone business as Bell, in his rosiest dreams, had never imagined. In three years, after 1896, there were twice as many users; in six years there were four times as many; in ten years there were eight to one. What with the message rate and the pay station, the telephone was now on its way to be universal. It was adapted to all kinds and conditions of men. A great corporation, nerved at every point with telephone wires, may now pay fifty thousand dollars to the Bell Company, while at the same time a young Irish immigrant boy, just arrived in New York City, may offer five coppers and find at his disposal a fifty million dollar telephone system.

 

When the message rate was fairly well established, Hudson died—fell suddenly to the

ground as he was about to step into a railway carriage. In his place came Frederick P. Fish, also a lawyer and a Bostonian. Fish was a popular, optimistic man, with a “full-speed-ahead”

temperament. He pushed the policy of expansion until he broke all the records. He borrowed money in stupendous amounts—$150,000,000 at one time—and flung it into a campaign of red-hot development. More business he demanded, and more, and more, until his captains, like a thirty-horse team of galloping horses, became very nearly uncontrollable.

 

It was a fast and furious period. The whole country was ablaze with a passion of prosperity.

After generations of conflict, the men with large ideas had at last put to rout the men of small ideas. The waste and folly of competition had everywhere driven men to the policy of cooperation.

Mills were linked to mills and factories to factories, in a vast mutualism of industry such as no other age, perhaps, has ever known. And as the telephone is essentially the instrument of co-working and interdependent people, it found itself suddenly welcomed as the most popular and indispensable of all the agencies that put men in touch with each other.

 

To describe this growth in a single sentence, we might say that the Bell telephone secured its first million of capital in 1879; its first million of earnings in 1882; its first million of dividends in 1884; its first million of surplus in 1885. It had paid out its first million for legal expenses by 1886; began first to send a million messages a day in 1888; had strung its first million miles of wire in 1900; and had installed its first million telephones in 1898. By 1897 it had spun as many cobwebs of wire as the mighty Western Union itself; by 1900 it had twice as many miles of wire as the Western Union, and in 1905 FIVE

TIMES as many. Such was the plunging progress of the Bell Companies in this period of expansion, that by 1905 they had swept past all European countries combined, not only in the quality of the service but in the actual number of telephones in use. This, too, without a cent of public money, or the protection of a tariff, or the prestige of a governmental bureau.

 

By 1892 Boston and New York were talking to Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburg, and Washington.

One-half of the people of the United States were within talking distance of each other.

The THOUSAND-MILE TALK had ceased to be a fairy tale. Several years later the western end of the line was pushed over the plains to Nebraska, enabling the spoken word in Boston to be heard in Omaha. Slowly and with much effort the public were taught to substitute the telephone for travel. A special long-distance salon was fitted up in New York City to entice people into the habit of talking to other cities. Cabs were sent for customers; and when one arrived, he was escorted over Oriental rugs to a gilded booth, draped with silken curtains. This was the famous “Room Nine.” By such and many other allurements a larger idea of telephone service was given to the public mind; until in 1909 at least eighteen thousand New York-Chicago conversations were held, and the revenue from strictly long-distance messages was twenty-two thousand dollars a day.

 

By 1906 even the Rocky Mountain Bell Company had grown to be a ten-million-dollar enterprise.

It began at Salt Lake City with a

hundred telephones, in 1880. Then it reached out to master an area of four hundred and thirteen thousand square miles—a great Lone Land of undeveloped resources. Its linemen groped through dense forests where their poles looked like toothpicks beside the towering pines and cedars. They girdled the mountains and basted the prairies with wire, until the lonely places were brought together and made sociable.

They drove off the Indians, who wanted the bright wire for ear-rings and bracelets; and the bears, which mistook the humming of the wires for the buzzing of bees, and persisted in gnawing the poles down. With the most heroic optimism, this Rocky Mountain Company persevered until, in 1906, it had created a seventy-thousand-mile nerve-system for the far West.

 

Chicago, in this year, had two hundred thousand telephones in use, in her two hundred square miles of area. The business had been built up by General Anson Stager, who was himself wealthy, and able to attract the support of such men as John Crerar, H. H. Porter, and Robert T. Lincoln. Since 1882 it has paid dividends, and in one glorious year its stock soared to four hundred dollars a share. The old-timers—the men who clambered over roof-tops in 1878 and tacked iron wires wherever they could without being chased off—are still for the most part in control of the Chicago company.

 

But as might have been expected, it was New York City that was the record-breaker when the era of telephone expansion arrived. Here the flood of big business struck with the force of a tidal wave. The number of users leaped from 56,000 in 1900 up to 810,000 in 1908. In a single year of sweating and breathless activity, 65,000 new telephones were put on desks or hung on walls—an average of one new user for every two minutes of the business day.

 

Literally tons, and hundreds of tons, of telephones were hauled in drays from the factory and put in place in New York’s homes and offices. More and more were demanded, until to-day there are more telephones in New York than there are in the four countries, France, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland combined.

As a user of telephones New York has risen to be unapproachable. Mass together all the telephones of London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffleld, Bristol, and Belfast, and there will even then be barely as many as are carrying the conversations of this one American city.

 

In 1879 the New York telephone directory was a small card, showing two hundred and fifty-two names; but now it has grown to be an eight-hundred-page quarterly, with a circulation of half a million, and requiring twenty drays, forty horses, and four hundred men to do the work of distribution.

There was one shabby little exchange thirty years ago; but now there are fifty-two exchanges, as the nerve-centres of a vast fifty-million-dollar system. Incredible as it may seem to foreigners, it is literally true that in a single building in New York, the Hudson Terminal, there are more telephones than in Odessa or Madrid, more than in the two kingdoms of Greece and Bulgaria combined.

 

Merely to operate this system requires an army of more than five thousand girls. Merely to keep their records requires two hundred and thirty-five million sheets of paper a year. Merely to do the writing of these records wears away five hundred and sixty thousand lead pencils. And merely to give these girls a cup of tea or coffee at noon, compels the Bell Company to buy yearly six thousand pounds of tea, seventeen thousand pounds of coffee, forty-eight thousand cans of condensed milk, and one hundred and forty barrels of sugar.

 

The myriad wires of this New York system are tingling with talk every minute of the day and night. They are most at rest between three and four o’clock in the morning, although even then there are usually ten calls a minute. Between five and six o’clock, two thousand New Yorkers are awake and at the telephone. Half an hour later there are twice as many. Between seven and eight twenty-five thousand people have called up twenty-five thousand other people, so that there are as many people talking by wire as there were in the whole city of New York in the Revolutionary period. Even this is only the dawn of the day’s business. By half-past eight it is doubled; by nine it is trebled; by ten it is multiplied sixfold; and by eleven the roar has become an incredible babel of one hundred and eighty thousand conversations an hour, with fifty new voices clamoring at the exchanges every second.

 

This is “the peak of the load.” It is the topmost pinnacle of talk. It is the utmost degree of service that the telephone has been required to give in any city. And it is as much a world’s wonder, to men and women of imagination, as the steel mills of Homestead or the turbine leviathans that curve across the Atlantic Ocean in four and a half days.

 

As to the men who built it up: Charles F.

Cutler died in 1907, but most of the others are still alive and busy. Union N. Bethell, now in Cutler’s place at the head of the New York Company, has been the operating chief for eighteen years. He is a man of shrewdness and sympathy, with a rare sagacity in solving knotty problems, a president of the new type, who regards his work as a sort of obligation he owes to the public. And just as foreigners go to Pittsburg to see the steel business at its best; just as they go to Iowa and Kansas to see the New Farmer, so they make