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

which is a psychological gain of great importance. It receives its reply at once and is set free to consider other matters. There is less burden upon the memory and the WHOLE MIND can be given to each new proposition.

 

A new instinct of speed has been developed, much more fully in the United States than elsewhere. “No American goes slow,” said Ian Maclaren, “if he has the chance of going fast; he does not stop to talk if he can talk walking; and he does not walk if he can ride.” He is as pleased as a child with a new toy when some speed record is broken, when a pair of shoes is made in eleven minutes, when a man lays twelve hundred bricks in an hour, or when a ship crosses the Atlantic in four and a half days. Even seconds are now counted and split up into fractions.

The average time, for instance, taken to reply to a telephone call by a New York operator, is now three and two-fifth seconds; and even this tiny atom of time is being strenuously worn down.

 

As a witty Frenchman has said, one of our most lively regrets is that while we are at the telephone we cannot do business with our feet.

We regard it as a victory over the hostility of nature when we do an hour’s work in a minute or a minute’s work in a second. Instead of saying, as the Spanish do, “Life is too short; what can one person do?” an American is more apt to say, “Life is too short; therefore I must do today’s work to-day.” To pack a lifetime with energy—that is the American plan, and so to economize that energy as to get the largest results.

To get a question asked and answered in five minutes by means of an electric wire, instead of in two hours by the slow trudging of a messenger boy—that is the method that best suits our passion for instantaneous service.

 

It is one of the few social laws of which we are fairly sure, that a nation organizes in proportion to its velocity. We know that a four-mile-an-hour nation must remain a huge inert mass of peasants and villagers; or if, after centuries of slow toil, it should pile up a great city, the city will sooner or later fall to pieces of its own weight. In such a way Babylon rose and fell, and Nineveh, and Thebes, and Carthage, and Rome. Mere bulk, unorganized, becomes its own destroyer. It dies of clogging and congestion. But when Stephenson’s Rocket ran twenty-nine miles an hour, and Morse’s telegraph clicked its signals from Washington to Baltimore, and Bell’s telephone flashed the vibrations of speech between Boston and Salem, a new era began. In came the era of speed and the finely organized nations. In came cities of unprecedented bulk, but held together so closely by a web-work of steel rails and copper wires that they have become more alert and cooperative than any tiny hamlet of mud huts on the banks of the Congo.

 

That the telephone is now doing most of all, in this binding together of all manner of men, is perhaps not too much to claim, when we remember that there are now in the United States seventy thousand holders of Bell telephone stock and ten million users of telephone service.

There are two hundred and sixty-four wires crossing the Mississippi, in the Bell system; and five hundred and forty-four crossing Mason and Dixon’s Line. It is the telephone which does most to link together cottage and skyscraper and mansion and factory and farm. It is not limited to experts or college graduates. It reaches the man with a nickel as well as the man with a million. It speaks all languages and serves all trades. It helps to prevent sectionalism and race feuds. It gives a common meeting place to capitalists and wage-workers. It is so essentially the instrument of all the people, in fact, that we might almost point to it as a national emblem, as the trademark of democracy and the American spirit.

 

In a country like ours, where there are eighty nationalities in the public schools, the telephone has a peculiar value as a part of the national digestive apparatus. It prevents the growth of dialects and helps on the process of assimilation.

Such is the push of American life, that the humble immigrants from Southern Europe, before they have been here half a dozen years, have acquired the telephone habit and have linked on their small shops to the great wire network of intercommunication. In the one community of Brownsville, for example, settled several years ago by an overflow of Russian Jews from the East Side of New York, there are now as many telephones as in the kingdom of Greece. And in the swarming East Side itself, there is a single exchange in Orchard Street which has more wires than there are in all the exchanges of Egypt.

 

There can be few higher ideals of practical democracy than that which comes to us from the telephone engineer. His purpose is much more comprehensive than the supplying of telephones to those who want them. It is rather to make the telephone as universal as the water faucet, to bring within speaking distance every economic unit, to connect to the social organism every person who may at any time be needed. Just as the click of the reaper means bread, and the purr of the sewing-machine means clothes, and the roar of the Bessemer converter means steel, and the rattle of the press means education, so the ring of the telephone bell has come to mean unity and organization.

 

Already, by cable, telegraph, and telephone, no two towns in the civilized world are more than one hour apart. We have even girdled the earth with a cablegram in twelve minutes. We have made it possible for any man in New York City to enter into conversation with any other New Yorker in twenty-one seconds. We have not been satisfied with establishing such a system of transportation that we can start any day for anywhere from anywhere else; neither have we been satisfied with establishing such a system of communication that news and gossip are the common property of all nations. We have gone farther. We have established in every large region of population a system of voice-nerves that puts every man at every other man’s ear, and which so magically eliminates the factor of distance that the United States becomes three thousand miles of neighbors, side by side.

 

This effort to conquer Time and Space is above all else the instinct of material progress.

To shrivel up the miles and to stretch out the minutes—this has been one of the master passions of the human race. And thus the larger truth about the telephone is that it is vastly more than a mere convenience. It is not to be classed with safety razors and piano players and fountain pens. It is nothing less than the high-speed tool of civilization, gearing up the whole mechanism to more effective social service. It is the symbol of national efficiency and coperation.

 

All this the telephone is doing, at a total cost to the nation of probably $200,000,000 a year—

no more than American farmers earn in ten days.

We pay the same price for it as we do for the potatoes, or for one-third of the hay crop, or for one-eighth of the corn. Out of every nickel spent for electrical service, one cent goes to the telephone. We could settle our telephone bill, and have several millions left over, if we cut off every fourth glass of liquor and smoke of tobacco.

Whoever rents a typewriting machine, or uses a street car twice a day, or has his shoes polished once a day, may for the same expense have a very good telephone service. Merely to shovel away the snow of a single storm in 1910

cost the city government of New York as much as it will pay for five or six years of telephoning.

 

This almost incredible cheapness of telephony is still far from being generally perceived, mainly for psychological reasons. A telephone is not impressive. It has no bulk. It is not like the Singer Building or the Lusitania. Its wires and switchboards and batteries are scattered and hidden, and few have sufficient imagination to picture them in all their complexity. If only it were possible to assemble the hundred or more telephone buildings of New York in one vast plaza, and if the two thousand clerks and three thousand maintenance men and six thousand girl operators were to march to work each morning with bands and banners, then, perhaps, there might be the necessary quality of impressiveness by which any large idea must always be imparted to the public mind.

 

For lack of a seven and one-half cent coin, there is now five-cent telephony even in the largest American cities. For five cents whoever wishes has an entire wire-system at his service, a system that is kept waiting by day and night, so that it will be ready the instant he needs it.

This system may have cost from twenty to fifty millions, yet it may be hired for one-eighth the cost of renting an automobile. Even in long-distance telephony, the expense of a message dwindles when it is compared with the price of a return railway ticket. A talk from New York to Philadelphia, for instance, costs seventy-five cents, while the railway fare would be four dollars.

From New York to Chicago a talk costs five dollars as against seventy dollars by rail.

As Harriman once said, “I can’t get from my home to the depot for the price of a talk to Omaha.”

 

To say what the net profits have been, to the entire body of people who have invested money in the telephone, will always be more or less of a guess. The general belief that immense fortunes were made by the lucky holders of Bell stock, is an exaggeration that has been kept alive by the promoters of wildcat companies. No such fortunes were made. “I do not believe,”

says Theodore Vail, “that any one man ever made a clear million out of the telephone.”

There are not apt to be any get-rich-quick fortunes made in corporations that issue no watered stock and do not capitalize their franchises. On the contrary, up to 1897, the holders of stock in the Bell Companies had paid in four million, seven hundred thousand dollars more than the par value; and in the recent consolidation of Eastern companies, under the presidency of Union N. Bethell, the new stock was actually eight millions less than the stock that was retired.

 

Few telephone companies paid any profits at first. They had undervalued the cost of building and maintenance. Denver expected the cost to be two thousand, five hundred dollars and spent sixty thousand dollars. Buffalo expected to pay three thousand dollars and had to pay one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Also, they made the unwelcome discovery that an exchange of two hundred costs more than twice as much as an exchange of one hundred, because of the greater amount of traffic. Usually a dollar that is paid to a telephone company is divided as follows: Rent ………… 4c

Taxes ……….. 4c

Interest …….. 6c

Surplus ……… 8c

Maintenance …. 16c

Dividends …… 18c

Labor ………. 44c

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$1.00

 

Most of the rate troubles (and their name has been legion) have arisen because the telephone business was not understood. In fact, until recently, it did not understand itself. It persisted in holding to a local and individualistic view of its business. It was slow to put telephones in unprofitable places. It expected every instrument