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

in the bank of Time, while Bell was twenty-eight. There was a long half-century between them; but the youth had discovered a New Fact that the sage, in all his wisdom, had never known.

 

“You are in possession of the germ of a great invention,” said Henry, “and I would advise you to work at it until you have made it complete.”

 

“But,” replied Bell, “I have not got the electrical knowledge that is necessary.”

 

“Get it,” responded the aged scientist.

 

“I cannot tell you how much these two words have encouraged me,” said Bell afterwards, in describing this interview to his parents. “I live too much in an atmosphere of discouragement for scientific pursuits; and such a chimerical idea as telegraphing VOCAL SOUNDS would indeed seem to most minds scarcely feasible enough to spend time in working over.”

 

By this time Bell had moved his workshop from the cellar in Salem to 109 Court Street, Boston, where he had rented a room from Charles Williams, a manufacturer of electrical supplies.

Thomas A. Watson was his assistant, and both Bell and Watson lived nearby, in two cheap little bedrooms. The rent of the workshop and bedrooms, and Watson’s wages of nine dollars a week, were being paid by Sanders and Hubbard.

Consequently, when Bell returned from Washington, he was compelled by his agreement to devote himself mainly to the musical telegraph, although his heart was now with the telephone.

For exactly three months after his interview with Professor Henry, he continued to plod ahead, along both lines, until, on that memorable hot afternoon in June, 1875, the full TWANG of the clock-spring came over the wire, and the telephone was born.

 

From this moment, Bell was a man of one purpose.

He won over Sanders and Hubbard. He

converted Watson into an enthusiast. He forgot his musical telegraph, his “Visible Speech,”

his classes, his poverty. He threw aside a profession in which he was already locally famous.

And he grappled with this new mystery of electricity, as Henry had advised him to do, encouraging himself with the fact that Morse, who was only a painter, had mastered his electrical difficulties, and there was no reason why a professor of acoustics should not do as much.

 

The telephone was now in existence, but it was the youngest and feeblest thing in the nation. It had not yet spoken a word. It had to be taught, developed, and made fit for the service of the irritable business world. All manner of discs had to be tried, some smaller and thinner than a dime and others of steel boiler-plate as heavy as the shield of Achilles. In all the books of electrical science, there was nothing to help Bell and Watson in this journey they were making through an unknown country. They were as chartless as Columbus was in 1492. Neither they nor any one else had acquired any experience in the rearing of a young telephone. No one knew what to do next. There was nothing to know.

 

For forty weeks—long exasperating weeks—

the telephone could do no more than gasp and make strange inarticulate noises. Its educators had not learned how to manage it. Then, on March 10, 1876, IT TALKED. It said distinctly—

 

“MR. WATSON, COME HERE, I WANT YOU.” Watson, who was at the lower end of the wire, in the basement, dropped the receiver and rushed with wild joy up three flights of stairs to tell the glad tidings to Bell. “I can hear you!” he shouted breathlessly. “I can hear the WORDS.”

 

It was not easy, of course, for the weak young telephone to make itself heard in that noisy workshop.

No one, not even Bell and Watson, was familiar with its odd little voice. Usually Watson, who had a remarkably keen sense of hearing, did the listening; and Bell, who was a professional elocutionist, did the talking. And day by day the tone of the baby instrument grew clearer—a new note in the orchestra of civilization.

 

On his twenty-ninth birthday, Bell received his patent, No. 174,465—“the most valuable single patent ever issued” in any country. He had created something so entirely new that there was no name for it in any of the world’s languages.

In describing it to the officials of the Patent Office, he was obliged to call it “an improvement in telegraphy,” when, in truth, it was nothing of the kind. It was as different from the telegraph as the eloquence of a great orator is from the sign-language of a deaf-mute.

 

Other inventors had worked from the standpoint of the telegraph; and they never did, and never could, get any better results than signs and symbols. But Bell worked from the standpoint of the human voice. He cross-fertilized the two sciences of acoustics and electricity. His study of “Visible Speech” had trained his mind so that he could mentally SEE the shape of a word as he spoke it. He knew what a spoken word was, and how it acted upon the air, or the ether, that carried its vibrations from the lips to the ear.

He was a third-generation specialist in the nature of speech, and he knew that for the transmission of spoken words there must be “a pulsatory action of the electric current which is the exact equivalent of the aerial impulses.”

 

Bell knew just enough about electricity, and not too much. He did not know the possible from the impossible. “Had I known more about electricity, and less about sound,” he said, “I would never have invented the telephone.”

What he had done was so amazing, so foolhardy, that no trained electrician could have thought of it. It was “the very hardihood of invention,”

and yet it was not in any sense a chance discovery.

It was the natural output of a mind that had been led to assemble just the right materials for such a product.

 

As though the very stars in their courses were working for this young wizard with the talking wire, the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia opened its doors exactly two months after the telephone had learned to talk. Here was a superb opportunity to let the wide world know what had been done, and fortunately Hubbard was one of the Centennial Commissioners. By his influence a small table was placed in the Department of Education, in a narrow space between a stairway and a wall, and on this table was deposited the first of the telephones.

 

Bell had no intention of going to the Centennial himself. He was too poor. Sanders and Hubbard had never done more than pay his room-rent and the expense of his experiments.

For his three or four years of inventing he had received nothing as yet—nothing but his patent.

In order to live, he had been compelled to reorganize his classes in “Visible Speech,” and to pick up the ravelled ends of his neglected profession.

 

But one Friday afternoon, toward the end of June, his sweetheart, Mabel Hubbard, was taking the train for the Centennial; and he went to the depot to say good-bye. Here Miss Hubbard learned for the first time that Bell was not to go. She coaxed and pleaded, without effect.

Then, as the train was starting, leaving Bell on the platform, the affectionate young girl could no longer control her feelings and was overcome by a passion of tears. At this the susceptible Bell, like a true Sir Galahad, dashed after the moving train and sprang aboard, without ticket or baggage, oblivious of his classes and his poverty and of all else except this one maiden’s distress. “I never saw a man,” said Watson, “so much in love as Bell was.”

 

As it happened, this impromptu trip to the Centennial proved to be one of the most timely acts of his life. On the following Sunday afternoon the judges were to make a special tour of inspection, and Mr. Hubbard, after much trouble, had obtained a promise that they would spend a few minutes examining Bell’s telephone. By this time it had been on exhibition for more than six weeks, without attracting the serious attention of anybody.

 

When Sunday afternoon arrived, Bell was at his little table, nervous, yet confident. But hour after hour went by, and the judges did not arrive.

The day was intensely hot, and they had many wonders to examine. There was the first electric light, and the first grain-binder, and the musical telegraph of Elisha Gray, and the marvellous exhibit of printing telegraphs shown by the Western Union Company. By the time they came to Bell’s table, through a litter of school-desks and blackboards, the hour was seven o’clock, and every man in the party was hot, tired, and hungry. Several announced their intention of returning to their hotels. One took up a telephone receiver, looked at it blankly, and put it down again. He did not even place it to his ear.

Another judge made a slighting remark which raised a laugh at Bell’s expense. Then a most marvellous thing happened—such an incident as would make a chapter in “The Arabian Nights Entertainments.”

 

Accompanied by his wife, the Empress Theresa, and by a bevy of courtiers, the Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro de Alcantara, walked into the room, advanced with both hands outstretched to the bewildered Bell, and exclaimed: “Professor Bell, I am delighted to see you again.” The judges at once forgot the heat and the fatigue and the hunger. Who was this young inventor, with the pale complexion and black eyes, that he should be the friend of Emperors? They did not know, and for the moment even Bell himself had forgotten, that Dom Pedro had once visited Bell’s class of deaf-mutes at Boston University. He was especially interested in such humanitarian work, and had recently helped to organize the first Brazilian school for deaf-mutes at Rio de Janeiro. And so, with the tall, blond-bearded Dom Pedro in the centre, the assembled judges, and scientists—there were fully fifty in all—

entered with unusual zest into the proceedings of this first telephone exhibition.

 

A wire had been strung from one end of the room to the other, and while Bell went to the transmitter, Dom Pedro took up the receiver and placed it to his ear. It was a moment of tense expectancy. No one knew clearly what was about to happen, when the Emperor, with a dramatic gesture, raised his head from the receiver and exclaimed with a look of utter amazement: “MY GOD—IT TALKS!”

 

Next came to the receiver the oldest scientist in the group, the venerable Joseph Henry, whose encouragement to Bell had been so timely. He stopped to listen, and, as one of the bystanders afterwards said, no one could forget the look of awe that came into his face as he heard that iron disc talking with a human voice. “This,” said he, “comes nearer to overthrowing the doctrine of the conservation of energy than anything I ever saw.”

 

Then came Sir William Thomson, latterly known as Lord Kelvin. It was fitting that he should be there, for he was the foremost electrical scientist at that time in the world, and had been the engineer of the first Atlantic Cable.

He listened and learned what even he had not known before, that a solid metallic body could take up from the air all the countless varieties of vibrations produced by speech, and that these vibrations could be carried along a wire and reproduced exactly by a second metallic body. He nodded his head solemnly as he rose from the receiver. “It DOES speak,” he said emphatically.

“It is the most wonderful thing I have seen in America.”

 

So, one after another, this notable company of men listened to the voice of the first telephone, and the more they knew