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

it was hobbled and fenced in by jealous regulations.

It was compelled to pay one-tenth of its gross earnings to the Post Office. It was to hold itself ready to sell out at six months’ notice.

And as soon as it had strung a long-distance system of wires, the Postmaster General pounced down upon it and took it away.

 

Then, in 1900, the Post Office tossed aside all obligations to the licensed company, and threw open the door to a free-for-all competition. It undertook to start a second system in London, and in two years discovered its blunder and proposed to cooperate. It granted licenses to five cities that demanded municipal ownership.

These cities set out bravely, with loud beating of drums, plunged from one mishap to another, and finally quit. Even Glasgow, the premier city of municipal ownership, met its Waterloo in the telephone. It spent one million, eight hundred thousand dollars on a plant that was obsolete when it was new, ran it for a time at a loss, and then sold it to the Post Office in 1906 for one million, five hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.

 

So, from first to last, the story of the telephone in Great Britain has been a “comedy of errors.”

There are now, in the two islands, not six hundred thousand telephones in use. London, with its six hundred and forty square miles of houses, has one-quarter of these, and is gaining at the rate of ten thousand a year. No large improvements are under way, as the Post Office has given notice that it will take over and operate all private companies on New Year’s Day, 1912.

The bureaucratic muddle, so it seems, is to continue indefinitely.

 

In Germany there has been the same burden of bureaucracy, but less backing and filling.

There is a complete government monopoly.

Whoever commits the crime of leasing telephone service to his neighbors may be sent to jail for six months. Here, too, the Postmaster General has been supreme. He has forced the telephone business into a postal mould. The man in a small city must pay as high a rate for a small service, as the man in a large city pays for a large service. There is a fair degree of efficiency, but no high speed or record-breaking.

The German engineers have not kept in close touch with the progress of telephony in the United States. They have preferred to devise methods of their own, and so have created a miscellaneous assortment of systems, good, bad, and indifferent. All told, there is probably an investment of seventy-five million dollars and a total of nine hundred thousand telephones.

 

Telephony has always been in high favor with the Kaiser. It is his custom, when planning a hunting party, to have a special wire strung to the forest headquarters, so that he can converse every morning with his Cabinet. He has conferred degrees and honors by telephone. Even his former Chancellor, Von Buelow, received his title of Count in this informal way. But the first friend of the telephone in Germany was Bismarck. The old Unifier saw instantly its value in holding a nation together, and ordered a line between his palace in Berlin and his farm at Varzin, which lay two hundred and thirty miles apart. This was as early as the Fall of 1877, and was thus the first long-distance line in Europe.

 

In France, as in England, the Government seized upon the telephone business as soon as the pioneer work had been done by private citizens.

In 1889 it practically confiscated the Paris system, and after nine years of litigation paid five million francs to its owners. With this reckless beginning, it floundered from bad to worse.

It assembled the most complete assortment of other nations’ mistakes, and invented several of its own. Almost every known evil of bureaucracy was developed. The system of rates was turned upside down; the flat rate, which can be profitably permitted in small cities only, was put in force in the large cities, and the message rate, which is applicable only to large cities, was put in force in small places. The girl operators were entangled in a maze of civil service rules.

They were not allowed to marry without the permission of the Postmaster General; and on no account might they dare to marry a mayor, a policeman, a cashier, or a foreigner, lest they betray the secrets of the switchboard.

 

There was no national plan, no standardization, no staff of inventors and improvers. Every user was required to buy his own telephone. As George Ade has said, “Anything attached to a wall is liable to be a telephone in Paris.” And so, what with poor equipment and red tape, the French system became what it remains to-day, the most conspicuous example of what NOT to do in telephony.

 

There are barely as many telephones in the whole of France as ought normally to be in the city of Paris. There are not as many as are now in use in Chicago. The exasperated Parisians have protested. They have presented a petition with thirty-two thousand names. They have even organized a “Kickers’ League”—the only body of its kind in any country—to demand good service at a fair price. The daily loss from bureaucratic telephony has become enormous. “One blundering girl in a telephone exchange cost me five thousand dollars on the day of the panic in 1907,” said George Kessler.

But the Government clears a net profit of three million dollars a year from its telephone monopoly; and until 1910, when a committee of betterment was appointed, it showed no concern at the discomfort of the public.

 

There was one striking lesson in telephone efficiency which Paris received in 1908, when its main exchange was totally destroyed by fire.

“To build a new switchboard,” said European manufacturers, “will require four or five months.”

A hustling young Chicagoan appeared on the scene. “We ‘ll put in a new switchboard in sixty days,” he said; “and agree to forfeit six hundred dollars a day for delay.” Such quick work had never been known. But it was Chicago’s chance to show what she could do. Paris and Chicago are four thousand, five hundred miles apart, a twelve days’ journey. The switchboard was to be a hundred and eighty feet in length, with ten thousand wires. Yet the Western Electric finished it in three weeks. It was rushed on six freight-cars to New York, loaded on the French steamer La Provence, and deposited at Paris in thirty-six days; so that by the time the sixty days had expired, it was running full speed with a staff of ninety operators.

 

Russia and Austria-Hungary have now about one hundred and twenty-five thousand telephones apiece. They are neck and neck in a race that has not at any time been a fast one. In each country the Government has been a neglectful stepmother to the telephone. It has starved the business with a lack of capital and used no enterprise in expanding it. Outside of Vienna, Budapest, St. Petersburg, and Moscow there are no wire-systems of any consequence. The political deadlock between Austria and Hungary shuts out any immediate hope of a happier life for the telephone in those countries; but in Russia there has recently been a change in policy that may open up a new era. Permits are now being offered to one private company in each city, in return for three per cent of the revenue.

By this step Russia has unexpectedly swept to the front and is now, to telephone men, the freest country in Europe.

 

In tiny Switzerland there has been government ownership from the first, but with less detriment to the business than elsewhere. Here the officials have actually jilted the telegraph for the telephone. They have seen the value of the talking wire to hold their valley villages together; and so have cries-crossed the Alps with a cheap and somewhat flimsy system of telephony that carries sixty million conversations a year. Even the monks of St. Bernard, who rescue snowbound travellers, have now equipped their mountain with a series of telephone booths.

 

The highest telephone in the world is on the peak of Monte Rosa, in the Italian Alps, very nearly three miles above the level of the sea. It is linked to a line that runs to Rome, in order that a queen may talk to a professor. In this case the Queen is Margherita of Italy and the professor is Signor Mosso, the astronomer, who studies the heavens from an observatory on Monte Rosa. At her own expense, the Queen had this wire strung by a crew of linemen, who slipped and floundered on the mountain for six years before they had it pegged in place. The general situation in Italy is like that in Great Britain. The Government has always monopolized the long-distance lines, and is now about to buy out all private companies. There are only fifty-five thousand telephones to thirty-two million people—as many as in Norway and less than in Denmark. And in many of the southern and Sicilian provinces the jingle of the telephone bell is still an unfamiliar sound.

 

The main peculiarity in Holland is that there is no national plan, but rather a patchwork, that resembles Joseph’s coat of many colors. Each city engineer has designed his own type of apparatus and had it made to order. Also, each company is fenced in by law within a six-mile circle, so that Holland is dotted with thumb-nail systems, no two of which are alike. In Belgium there has been a government system since 1893, hence there is unity, but no enterprise. The plant is old-fashioned and too small. Spain has private companies, which give fairly good service to twenty thousand people. Roumania has half as many. Portugal has two small companies in Lisbon and Oporto. Greece, Servia, and Bulgaria have a scanty two thousand apiece.

The frozen little isle of Iceland has one-quarter as many; and even into Turkey, which was a forbidden land under the regime of the old Sultan, the Young Turks are importing boxes of telephones and coils of copper wire.

 

There is one European country, and only one, which has caught the telephone spirit—Sweden.

Here telephony had a free swinging start. It was let alone by the Post Office; and better still, it had a Man, a business-builder of remarkable force and ability, named Henry Cedergren.

Had this man been made the Telephone-Master of Europe, there would have been a different story to tell. By his insistent enterprise he made Stockholm the best telephoned city outside of the United States. He pushed his country forward until, having one hundred and sixty-five thousand telephones, it stood fourth among the European nations. Since his death the Government has entered the field with a duplicate system, and a war has been begun which grows yearly more costly and absurd.

 

Asia, as yet, with her eight hundred and fifty million people, has fewer telephones than Philadelphia, and three-fourths of them are in the tiny island of Japan. The Japanese were enthusiastic telephonists from the first. They had a busy exchange in Tokio in 1883. This has now grown to have twenty-five thousand users, and might have more, if it had not been stunted by the peculiar policy of the Government. The public officials who operate the system are able men. They charge a fair price and make ten per cent profit for the State. But they do not keep pace with the demand. It is one of the oddest vagaries of public ownership that there is now in Tokio a WAITING LIST of eight thousand citizens, who are offering to pay for telephones and cannot get them. And when a Tokian dies, his franchise to a telephone, if he has one, is usually itemized