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

THE TELEPHONE IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES

The telephone was nearly a year old before Europe was aware of its existence. It received no public notice of any kind whatever until March 3, 1877, when the London Athenaeum mentioned it in a few careful sentences.

It was not welcomed, except by those who wished an evening’s entertainment. And to the entire commercial world it was for four or five years a sort of scientific Billiken, that never could be of any service to serious people.

One after another, several American enthusiasts rushed posthaste to Europe, with dreams of eager nations clamoring for telephone systems, and one after another they failed. Frederick A. Gower was the first of these. He was an adventurous chevalier of business who gave up an agent’s contract in return for a right to become a roving propagandist. Later he met a prima donna, fell in love with and married her, forsook telephony for ballooning, and lost his life in attempting to fly across the English Channel.

Next went William H. Reynolds, of Providence, who had bought five-eights of the British patent for five thousand dollars, and half the right to Russia, Spain, Portugal, and Italy for two thousand, five hundred dollars. How he was received may be seen from a letter of his which has been preserved. “I have been working in London for four months,” he writes; “I have been to the Bank of England and elsewhere; and I have not found one man who will put one shilling into the telephone.”

Bell himself hurried to England and Scotland on his wedding tour in 1878, with great expectations of having his invention appreciated in his native land. But from a business point of view, his mission was a total failure. He received dinners a-plenty, but no contracts; and came back to the United States an impoverished and disheartened man. Then the optimistic Gardiner G. Hubbard, Bell’s father-in-law, threw himself against the European inertia and organized the International and Oriental Telephone Companies, which came to nothing of any importance. In the same year even Enos M.

Barton, the sagacious founder of the Western Electric, went to France and England to establish an export trade in telephones, and failed.

These able men found their plans thwarted by the indifference of the public, and often by open hostility. “The telephone is little better than a toy,” said the Saturday Review; “it amazes ignorant people for a moment, but it is inferior to the well-established system of air-tubes.” “What will become of the privacy of life?” asked another London editor. “What will become of the sanctity of the domestic hearth?” Writers vied with each other in inventing methods of pooh-poohing Bell and his invention. “It is ridiculously simple,” said one.

“It is only an electrical speaking-tube,” said another. “It is a complicated form of speaking-trumpet,” said a third. No British editor could at first conceive of any use for the telephone, except for divers and coal miners. The price, too, created a general outcry. Floods of toy telephones were being sold on the streets at a shilling apiece; and although the Government was charging sixty dollars a year for the use of its printing-telegraphs, people protested loudly against paying half as much for telephones.

As late as 1882, Herbert Spencer writes: “The telephone is scarcely used at all in London, and is unknown in the other English cities.”

The first man of consequence to befriend the telephone was Lord Kelvin, then an untitled young scientist. He had seen the original telephones at the Centennial in Philadelphia, and was so fascinated with them that the impulsive Bell had thrust them into his hands as a gift.

At the next meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Lord Kelvin exhibited these. He did more. He became the champion of the telephone. He staked his reputation upon it. He told the story of the tests made at the Centennial, and assured the sceptical scientists that he had not been deceived. “All this my own ears heard,” he said, “spoken to me with unmistakable distinctness by this circular disc of iron.”

The scientists and electrical experts were, for the most part, split up into two camps. Some of them said the telephone was impossible, while others said that “nothing could be simpler.”

Almost all were agreed that what Bell had done was a humorous trifle. But Lord Kelvin persisted.

He hammered the truth home that the

telephone was “one of the most interesting inventions that has ever been made in the history of science.” He gave a demonstration with one end of the wire in a coal mine. He stood side by side with Bell at a public meeting in Glasgow, and declared:

“The things that were called telephones before Bell were as different from Bell’s telephone as a series of hand-claps are different from the human voice. They were in fact electrical claps; while Bell conceived the idea—THE WHOLLY ORIGINAL AND

NOVEL IDEA—of giving continuity to the shocks, so as to perfectly reproduce the human voice.”

One by one the scientists were forced to take the telephone seriously. At a public test there was one noted professor who still stood in the ranks of the doubters. He was asked to send a message. He went to the instrument with a grin of incredulity, and thinking the whole exhibition a joke, shouted into the mouthpiece: “Hi diddle diddle—follow up that.” Then he listened for an answer. The look on his face changed to one of the utmost amazement. “It says—`The cat and the fiddle,’” he gasped, and forthwith he became a convert to telephony. By such tests the men of science were won over, and by the middle of 1877 Bell received a “vociferous welcome” when he addressed them at their annual convention at Plymouth.

Soon afterwards, The London Times surrendered.

It whirled right-about-face and praised the telephone to the skies. “Suddenly and quietly the whole human race is brought within speaking and hearing distance,” it exclaimed; “scarcely anything was more desired and more impossible.” The next paper to quit the mob of scoffers was the Tatler, which said in an editorial peroration, “We cannot but feel impressed by the picture of a human child commanding the subtlest and strongest force in Nature to carry, like a slave, some whisper around the world.”

Closely after the scientists and editors came the nobility. The Earl of Caithness led the way. He declared in public that “the telephone is the most extraordinary thing I ever saw in my life.” And one wintry morning in 1878

Queen Victoria drove to the house of Sir Thomas Biddulph, in London, and for an hour talked and listened by telephone to Kate Field, who sat in a Downing Street office. Miss Field sang “Kathleen Mavourneen,” and the Queen thanked her by telephone, saying she was “immensely pleased.” She congratulated Bell himself, who was present, and asked if she might be permitted to buy the two telephones; whereupon Bell presented her with a pair done in ivory.

This incident, as may be imagined, did much to establish the reputation of telephony in Great Britain. A wire was at once strung to Windsor Castle. Others were ordered by the Daily News, the Persian Ambassador, and five or six lords and baronets. Then came an order which raised the hopes of the telephone men to the highest heaven, from the banking house of J.

S. Morgan & Co. It was the first recognition from the “seats of the mighty” in the business and financial world. A tiny exchange, with ten wires, was promptly started in London; and on April 2d, 1879, Theodore Vail, the young manager of the Bell Company, sent an order to the factory in Boston, “Please make one hundred hand telephones for export trade as early as possible.” The foreign trade had begun.

Then there came a thunderbolt out of a blue sky, a wholly unforeseen disaster. Just as a few energetic companies were sprouting up, the Postmaster General suddenly proclaimed that the telephone was a species of telegraph. According to a British law the telegraph was required to be a Government monopoly. This law had been passed six years before the telephone was born, but no matter. The telephone men protested and argued. Tyndall and Lord Kelvin warned the Government that it was making an indefensible mistake. But nothing could be done. Just as the first railways had been called toll-roads, so the telephone was solemnly declared to be a telegraph. Also, to add to the absurd humor of the situation, Judge Stephen, of the High Court of Justice, spoke the final word that compelled the telephone legally to be a telegraph, and sustained his opinion by a quotation from Webster’s Dictionary, which was published twenty years before the telephone was invented.

Having captured this new rival, what next?

The Postmaster General did not know. He had, of course, no experience in telephony, and neither had any of his officials in the telegraph department. There was no book and no college to instruct him. His telegraph was then, as it is to-day, a business failure. It was not earning its keep. Therefore he did not dare to shoulder the risk of constructing a second system of wires, and at last consented to give licenses to private companies.

But the muddle continued. In order to compel competition, according to the academic theories of the day, licenses were given to thirteen private companies. As might have been expected, the ablest company quickly swallowed the other twelve. If it had been let alone, this company might have given good service, but