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

pilgrimages to Bethell’s office to learn the profession of telephony.

 

This unparalleled telephone system of New York grew up without having at any time the rivalry of competition. But in many other cities and especially in the Middle West, there sprang up in 1895 a medley of independent companies.

The time of the original patents had expired, and the Bell Companies found themselves freed from the expense of litigation only to be snarled up in a tangle of duplication. In a few years there were six thousand of these little Robinson Crusoe companies. And by 1901 they had put in use more than a million telephones and were professing to have a capital of a hundred millions.

 

Most of these companies were necessary and did much to expand the telephone business into new territory. They were in fact small mutual associations of a dozen or a hundred farmers, whose aim was to get telephone service at cost.

But there were other companies, probably a thousand or more, which were organized by promoters who built their hopes on the fact that the Bell Companies were unpopular, and on the myth that they were fabulously rich. Instead of legitimately extending telephone lines into communities that had none, these promoters proceeded to inflict the messy snarl of an overlapping system upon whatever cities would give them permission to do so.

 

In this way, masked as competition, the nuisance and waste of duplication began in most American cities. The telephone business was still so young, it was so little appreciated even by the telephone officials and engineers, that the public regarded a second or a third telephone system in one city as quite a possible and desirable innovation. “We have two ears,” said one promoter; “why not therefore have two telephones?”

 

This duplication went merrily on for years before it was generally discovered that the telephone is not an ear, but a nerve system; and that such an experiment as a duplicate nerve system has never been attempted by Nature, even in her most frivolous moods. Most people fancied that a telephone system was practically the same as a gas or electric light system, which can often be duplicated with the result of cheaper rates and better service. They did not for years discover that two telephone companies in one city means either half service or double cost, just as two fire departments or two post offices would.

 

Some of these duplicate companies built up a complete plant, and gave good local service, while others proved to be mere stock bubbles.

Most of them were over-capitalized, depending upon public sympathy to atone for deficiencies in equipment. One which had printed fifty million dollars of stock for sale was sold at auction in 1909 for four hundred thousand dollars. All told, there were twenty-three of these bubbles that burst in 1905, twenty-one in 1906, and twelve in 1907. So high has been the death-rate among these isolated companies that at a recent convention of telephone agents, the chairman’s gavel was made of thirty-five pieces of wood, taken from thirty-five switchboards of thirty-five extinct companies.

 

A study of twelve single-system cities and twenty-seven double-system cities shows that there are about eleven per cent more telephones under the double-system, and that where the second system is put in, every fifth user is obliged to pay for two telephones. The rates are alike, whether a city has one or two systems.

Duplicating companies raised their rates in sixteen cities out of the twenty-seven, and reduced them in one city. Taking the United States as a whole, there are to-day fully two hundred and fifty thousand people who are paying for two telephones instead of one, an economic waste of at least ten million dollars a year.

 

A fair-minded survey of the entire independent telephone movement would probably show that it was at first a stimulant, followed, as stimulants usually are, by a reaction. It was unquestionably for several years a spur to the Bell Companies. But it did not fulfil its promises of cheap rates, better service, and high dividends; it did little or nothing to improve telephonic apparatus, producing nothing new except the automatic switchboard—a brilliant invention, which is now in its experimental period. In the main, perhaps, it has been a reactionary and troublesome movement in the cities, and a progressive movement among the farmers.

 

By 1907 it was a wave that had spent its force.

It was no longer rolling along easily on the broad ocean of hope, but broken and turned aside by the rocks of actual conditions. One by one the telephone promoters learned the limitations of an isolated company, and asked to be included as members of the Bell family. In 1907 four hundred and fifty-eight thousand independent telephones were linked by wire to the nearest Bell Company; and in 1908 these were followed by three hundred and fifty thousand more. After this landslide to the policy of consolidation, there still remained a fairly large assortment of independent companies; but they had lost their dreams and their illusions.

 

As might have been expected, the independent movement produced a number of competent local leaders, but none of national importance. The Bell Companies, on the other hand, were officered by men who had for a quarter of a century been surveying telephone problems from a national point of view. At their head, from 1907 onwards, was Theodore N. Vail, who had returned dramatically, at the precise moment when he was needed, to finish the work that he had begun in 1878. He had been absent for twenty years, developing water-power and building street-railways in South America. In the first act of the telephone drama, it was he who put the enterprise upon a business basis, and laid down the first principles of its policy. In the second and third acts he had no place; but when the curtain rose upon the fourth act, Vail was once more the central figure, standing white-haired among his captains, and pushing forward the completion of the “grand telephonic system” that he had dreamed of when the telephone was three years old.

 

Thus it came about that the telephone business was created by Vail, conserved by Hudson, expanded by Fish, and is now in process of being consolidated by Vail. It is being knit together into a stupendous Bell System—a federation of self-governing companies, united by a central company that is the busiest of them all. It is no longer protected by any patent monopoly.

Whoever is rich enough and rash enough may enter the field. But it has all the immeasurable advantages that come from long experience, immense bulk, the most highly skilled specialists, and an abundance of capital. “The Bell System is strong,” says Vail, “because we are all tied up together; and the success of one is therefore the concern of all.”

 

The Bell System! Here we have the motif of American telephone development. Here is the most comprehensive idea that has entered any telephone engineer’s brain. Already this Bell System has grown to be so vast, so nearly akin to a national nerve system, that there is nothing else to which we can compare it. It is so wide-spread that few are aware of its greatness. It is strung out over fifty thousand cities and communities.

 

If it were all gathered together into one place, this Bell System, it would make a city of Telephonia as large as Baltimore. It would contain half of the telephone property of the world. Its actual wealth would be fully $760,000,000, and its revenue would be greater than the revenue of the city of New York.

 

Part of the property of the city of Telephonia consists of ten million poles, as many as would make a fence from New York to California, or put a stockade around Texas. If the Telephonians wished to use these poles at home, they might drive them in as piles along their water-front, and have a twenty-five thousand-acre dock; or if their city were a hundred square miles in extent, they might set up a seven-ply wall around it with these poles.

 

Wire, too! Eleven million miles of it! This city of Telephonia would be the capital of an empire of wire. Not all the men in New York State could shoulder this burden of wire and carry it. Throw all the people of Illinois in one end of the scale, and put on the other side the wire-wealth of Telephonia, and long before the last coil was in place, the Illinoisans would be in the air.

 

What would this city do for a living? It would make two-thirds of the telephones, cables, and switchboards of all countries. Nearly one-quarter of its citizens would work in factories, while the others would be busy in six thousand exchanges, making it possible for the people of the United States to talk to one another at the rate of SEVEN THOUSAND MILLION CONVERSATIONS A YEAR.

 

The pay-envelope army that moves to work every morning in Telephonia would be a host of one hundred and ten thousand men and girls, mostly girls,—as many girls as would fill Vassar College a hundred times and more, or double the population of Nevada. Put these men and girls in line, march them ten abreast, and six hours would pass before the last company would arrive at the reviewing stand. In single file this throng of Telephonians would make a living wall from New York to New Haven.

 

Such is the extraordinary city of which Alexander Graham Bell was the only resident in 1875.

It has been built up without the backing of any great bank or multimillionaire. There have been no Vanderbilts in it, no Astors, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Harrimans. There are even now only four men who own as many as ten thousand shares of the stock of the central company.

This Bell System stands as the life-work of unprivileged men, who are for the most part still alive and busy. With very few and trivial exceptions, every part of it was made in the United States. No other industrial organism of equal size owes foreign countries so little. Alike in its origin, its development, and its highest point of efficiency and expansion, the telephone is as essentially American as the Declaration of Independence or the monument on Bunker Hill.