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

his mind, compelled him to consent. It was the call of the telephone.

 

Since that May morning, 1907, great things have been done by the men of the telephone and telegraph world. The Bell System was brought through the panic without a scratch. When the doubt and confusion were at their worst, Vail wrote an open letter to his stock-holders, in his practical, farmer-like way. He said: “Our net earnings for the last ten months were $13,715,000, as against $11,579,000 for the same period in 1906. We have now in the banks over $18,000,000; and we will not need to borrow any money for two years.”

 

Soon afterwards, the work of consolidation began. Companies that overlapped were united.

Small local wire-clusters, several thousands of them, were linked to the national lines. A policy of publicity superseded the secrecy which had naturally grown to be a habit in the days of patent litigation. Visitors and reporters found an open door. Educational advertisements were published in the most popular magazines. The corps of inventors was spurred up to conquer the long-distance problems. And in return for a thirty million check, the control of the historic Western Union was transferred from the children of Jay Gould to the thirty thousand stock-holders of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.

 

From what has been done, therefore, we may venture a guess as to the future of the telephone.

This “grand telephonic system” which had no existence thirty years ago, except in the imagination of Vail, seems to be at hand. The very newsboys in the streets are crying it. And while there is, of course, no exact blueprint of a best possible telephone system, we can now see the general outlines of Vail’s plan.

 

There is nothing mysterious or ominous in this plan. It has nothing to do with the pools and conspiracies of Wall Street. No one will be squeezed out except the promoters of paper companies. The simple fact is that Vail is organizing a complete Bell System for the same reason that he built one big comfortable barn for his Swiss cattle and his Welsh ponies, instead of half a dozen small uncomfortable sheds. He has never been a “high financier” to juggle profits out of other men’s losses. He is merely applying to the telephone business the same hard sense that any farmer uses in the management of his farm. He is building a Big Barn, metaphorically, for the telephone and telegraph.

 

Plainly, the telephone system of the future will be national, so that any two people in the same country will be able to talk to one another.

It will not be competitive, for the reason that no farmer would think for a moment of running his farm on competitive lines. It will have a staff-and-line organization, to use a military phrase.

Each local company will continue to handle its own local affairs, and exercise to the full the basic virtue of self-help. But there will also be, as now, a central body of experts to handle the larger affairs that are common to all companies.

No separateness or secession on the one side, nor bureaucracy on the other—that is the typically American idea that underlies the ideal telephone system.

 

The line of authority, in such a system, will begin with the local manager. From him it will rise to the directors of the State company; then higher still to the directors of the national company; and finally, above all corporate leaders to the Federal Government itself. The failure of government ownership of the telephone in so many foreign countries does not mean that the private companies will have absolute power.

Quite the reverse. The lesson of thirty years’

experience shows that a private telephone company is apt to be much more obedient to the will of the people than if it were a Government department. But it is an axiom of democracy that no company, however well conducted, will be permitted to control a public convenience without being held strictly responsible for its own acts.

As politics becomes less of a game and more of a responsibility, the telephone of the future will doubtless be supervised by some sort of public committee, which will have power to pass upon complaints, and to prevent the nuisance of duplication and the swindle of watering stock.

 

As this Federal supervision becomes more and more efficient, the present fear of monopoly will decrease, just as it did in the case of the railways.

It is a fact, although now generally forgotten, that the first railways of the United States were run for ten years or more on an anti-monopoly plan. The tracks were free to all. Any one who owned a cart with flanged wheels could drive it on the rails and compete with the locomotives.

There was a happy-go-lucky jumble of trains and wagons, all held back by the slowest team; and this continued on some railways until as late as 1857. By that time the people saw that competition on a railway track was absurd. They allowed each track to be monopolized by one company, and the era of expansion began.

 

No one, certainly, at the present time, regrets the passing of the independent teamster. He was much more arbitrary and expensive than any railroad has ever dared to be; and as the country grew, he became impossible. He was not the fittest to survive. For the general good, he was held back from competing with the railroad, and taught to cooperate with it by hauling freight to and from the depots. This, to his surprise, he found much more profitable and pleasant.

He had been squeezed out of a bad job into a good one. And by a similar process of evolution, the United States is rapidly outgrowing the small independent telephone companies.

These will eventually, one by one, rise as the teamster did to a higher social value, by clasping wires with the main system of telephony.

 

Until 1881 the Bell System was in the hands of a family group. It was a strictly private enterprise. The public had been asked to help in its launching, and had refused. But after 1881 it passed into the control of the small stock-holders, and has remained there without a break. It is now one of our most democratized businesses, scattering either wages or dividends into more than a hundred thousand homes.

It has at times been exclusive, but never sordid.

It has never been dollar-mad, nor frenzied by the virus of stock-gambling. There has always been a vein of sentiment in it that kept it in touch with human nature. Even at the present time, each check of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company carries on it a picture of a pretty Cupid, sitting on a chair upon which he has placed a thick book, and gayly prattling into a telephone.

 

Several sweeping changes may be expected in the near future, now that there is team-play between the Bell System and the Western Union.

Already, by a stroke of the pen, five million users of telephones have been put on the credit books of the Western Union; and every Bell telephone office is now a telegraph office. Three telephone messages and eight telegrams may be sent AT THE SAME TIME over two pairs of wires: that is one of the recent miracles of science, and is now to be tried out upon a gigantic scale.

Most of the long-distance telephone wires, fully two million miles, can be used for telegraphic purposes; and a third of the Western Union wires, five hundred thousand miles, may with a few changes be used for talking.

 

The Western Union is paying rent for twenty-two thousand, five hundred offices, all of which helps to make telegraphy a luxury of the few.

It is employing as large a force of messenger-boys as the army that marched with General Sherman from Atlanta to the sea. Both of these items of expense will dwindle when a Bell wire and a Morse wire can be brought to a common terminal; and when a telegram can be received or delivered by telephone. There will also be a gain, perhaps the largest of all, in removing the trudging little messenger-boy from the streets and sending him either to school or to learn some useful trade.

 

The fact is that the United States is the first country that has succeeded in putting both telephone and telegraph upon the proper basis.

 

Elsewhere either the two are widely apart, or the telephone is a mere adjunct of a telegraphic department. According to the new American plan, the two are not competitive, but complementary.

The one is a supplement to the other.

The post office sends a package; the telegraph sends the contents of the package; but the telephone sends nothing. It is an apparatus that makes conversation possible between two separated people. Each of the three has a distinct field of its own, so that there has never been any cause for jealousy among them.

 

To make the telephone an annex of the post office or the telegraph has become absurd.

There are now in the whole world very nearly as many messages sent by telephone as by letter; and there are THIRT-TWO TIMES as many telephone calls as telegrams. In the United States, the telephone has grown to be the big brother of the telegraph. It has six times the net earnings and eight times the wire. And it transmits as many messages as the combined total of telegrams, letters, and railroad passengers.

 

This universal trend toward consolidation has introduced a variety of problems that will engage the ablest brains in the telephone world for many years to come. How to get the benefits of organization without its losses, to become strong without losing quickness, to become systematic without losing the dash and dare of earlier days, to develop the working force into an army of high-speed specialists without losing the bird’s-eye view of the whole situation,—these are the riddles of the new type, for which the telephonists of the next generation must find the answers. They illustrate the nature of the big jobs that the telephone has to offer to an ambitious and gifted young man of to-day.

 

“The problems never were as large or as complex as they are right now,” says J. J. Carty, the chief of the telephone engineers. The eternal struggle remains between the large and little ideas—between the men who see what might be and the men who only see what IS. There is still the race to break records. Already the girl at the switchboard can find the person wanted in thirty seconds. This is one-tenth of the time that was taken in the early centrals; but it is still too long. It is one-half of a valuable minute.

It must be cut to twenty-five seconds, or twenty or fifteen.

 

There is still the inventors’ battle to gain miles. The distance over which conversations can be held has been increased from twenty miles to twenty-five hundred. But this is not far enough. There are some civilized human beings who are twelve thousand miles apart, and who have interests in common. During the Boxer Rebellion in China, for instance, there were Americans in Peking who would gladly have given half of their fortune for the use of a pair of wires to New York.

 

In the earliest days of the telephone, Bell was fond of prophesying that “the time will come when we will talk across the Atlantic Ocean”; but this was regarded as a poetical fancy until Pupin invented his method of automatically propelling the electric current. Since then the most conservative engineer will discuss the problem of transatlantic telephony. And as for the poets, they are now dreaming of the time when a man may speak and hear