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

in the largest halls. At one lecture two Japanese gentlemen were induced to talk to one another in their own language, via the telephone. At a second lecture a band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” in Boston, and was heard by an audience of two thousand people in Providence. At a third, Signor Ferranti, who was in Providence, sang a selection from “The Marriage of Figaro” to an audience in Boston. At a fourth, an exhortation from Moody and a song from Sankey came over the vibrating wire. And at a fifth, in New Haven, Bell stood sixteen Yale professors in line, hand in hand, and talked through their bodies—a feat which was then, and is to-day, almost too wonderful to believe.

 

Very slowly these lectures, and the tireless activity of Hubbard, pushed back the ridicule and the incredulity; and in the merry month of May, 1877, a man named Emery drifted into Hubbard’s office from the near-by city of Charlestown, and leased two telephones for twenty actual dollars—the first money ever paid for a telephone. This was the first feeble sign that such a novelty as the telephone business could be established; and no money ever looked handsomer than this twenty dollars did to Bell, Sanders, Hubbard, and Watson. It was the tiny first-fruit of fortune.

 

Greatly encouraged, they prepared a little circular which was the first advertisement of the telephone business. It is an oddly simple little document to-day, but to the 1877 brain it was startling. It modestly claimed that a telephone was superior to a telegraph for three reasons: “(1) No skilled operator is required, but direct communication may be had by speech without the intervention of a third person.

 

“(2) The communication is much more rapid, the average number of words transmitted in a minute by the Morse sounder being from fifteen to twenty, by telephone from one to two hundred.

 

“(3) No expense is required, either for its operation or repair. It needs no battery and has no complicated machinery. It is unsurpassed for economy and simplicity.”

 

The only telephone line in the world at this time was between the Williams’ workshop in Boston and the home of Mr. Williams in Somerville.

But in May, 1877, a young man named

E. T. Holmes, who was running a burglar-alarm business in Boston, proposed that a few telephones be linked to his wires. He was a friend and customer of Williams, and suggested this plan half in jest and half in earnest. Hubbard was quick to seize this opportunity, and at once lent Holmes a dozen telephones. Without asking permission, Holmes went into six banks and nailed up a telephone in each. Five bankers made no protest, but the sixth indignantly ordered “that playtoy” to be taken out. The other five telephones could be connected by a switch in Holmes’s office, and thus was born the first tiny and crude Telephone Exchange. Here it ran for several weeks as a telephone system by day and a burglar-alarm by night. No money was paid by the bankers. The service was given to them as an exhibition and an advertisement.

The little shelf with its five telephones was no more like the marvellous exchanges of to-day than a canoe is like a Cunarder, but it was unquestionably the first place where several telephone wires came together and could be united.

 

Soon afterwards, Holmes took his telephones out of the banks, and started a real telephone business among the express companies of Boston.

But by this time several exchanges had been opened for ordinary business, in New Haven, Bridgeport, New York, and Philadelphia.

Also, a man from Michigan had arrived, with the hardihood to ask for a State agency—George W. Balch, of Detroit. He was so welcome that Hubbard joyfully gave him everything he asked —a perpetual right to the whole State of Michigan.

Balch was not required to pay a cent in advance, except his railway fare, and before he was many years older he had sold his lease for a handsome fortune of a quarter of a million dollars, honestly earned by his initiative and enterprise.

 

By August, when Bell’s patent was sixteen months old, there were 778 telephones in use.

This looked like success to the optimistic Hubbard.

He decided that the time had come to organize the business, so he created a simple agreement which he called the “Bell Telephone Association.” This agreement gave Bell, Hubbard and Sanders a three-tenths interest apiece in the patents, and Watson one-tenth. THERE WAS

NO CAPITAL. There was none to be had.

The four men had at this time an absolute monopoly of the telephone business; and everybody else was quite willing that they should have it.

 

The only man who had money and dared to stake it on the future of the telephone was Thomas Sanders, and he did this not mainly for business reasons. Both he and Hubbard were attached to Bell primarily by sentiment, as Bell had removed the blight of dumbness from Sanders’s little son, and was soon to marry Hubbard’s daughter.

 

Also, Sanders had no expectation, at first, that so much money would be needed. He was not rich. His entire business, which was that of cutting out soles for shoe manufacturers, was not at any time worth more than thirty-five thousand dollars. Yet, from 1874 to 1878, he had advanced nine-tenths of the money that was spent on the telephone. He had paid Bell’s room-rent, and Watson’s wages, and Williams’s expenses, and the cost of the exhibit at the Centennial.

The first five thousand telephones, and more, were made with his money. And so many long, expensive months dragged by before any relief came to Sanders, that he was compelled, much against his will and his business judgment, to stretch his credit within an inch of the breaking-point to help Bell and the telephone.

Desperately he signed note after note until he faced a total of one hundred and ten thousand dollars. If the new “scientific toy”

succeeded, which he often doubted, he would be the richest citizen in Haverhill; and if it failed, which he sorely feared, he would be a bankrupt.

 

A disheartening series of rebuffs slowly forced the truth in upon Sanders’s mind that the business world refused to accept the telephone as an article of commerce. It was a toy, a plaything, a scientific wonder, but not a necessity to be bought and used for ordinary purposes by ordinary people. Capitalists treated it exactly as they treated the Atlantic Cable project when Cyrus Field visited Boston in 1862. They admired and marvelled; but not a man subscribed a dollar. Also, Sanders very soon learned that it was a most unpropitious time for the setting afloat of a new enterprise. It was a period of turmoil and suspicion. What with the Jay Cooke failure, the Hayes-Tilden deadlock, and the bursting of a hundred railroad bubbles, there was very little in the news of the day to encourage investors.

 

It was impossible for Sanders, or Bell, or Hubbard, to prepare any definite plan. No matter what the plan might have been, they had no money to put it through. They believed that they had something new and marvellous, which some one, somewhere, would be willing to buy.

Until this good genie should arrive, they could do no more than flounder ahead, and take whatever business was the nearest and the cheapest. So while Bell, in eloquent rhapsodies, painted word-pictures of a universal telephone service to applauding audiences, Sanders and Hubbard were leasing telephones two by two, to business men who previously had been using the private lines of the Western Union Telegraph Company.

 

This great corporation was at the time their natural and inevitable enemy. It had swallowed most of its competitors, and was reaching out to monopolize all methods of communication by wire. The rosiest hope that shone in front of Sanders and Hubbard was that the Western Union might conclude to buy the Bell patents, just as it had already bought many others. In one moment of discouragement they had offered the telephone to President Orton, of the Western Union, for $100,000; and Orton had refused it.

“What use,” he asked pleasantly, “could this company make of an electrical toy?”

 

But besides the operation of its own wires, the Western Union was supplying customers with various kinds of printing-telegraphs and dial telegraphs, some of which could transmit sixty words a minute. These accurate instruments, it believed, could never be displaced by such a scientific oddity as the telephone. And it continued to believe this until one of its subsidiary companies—the Gold and Stock—reported that several of its machines had been superseded by telephones.

 

At once the Western Union awoke from its indifference. Even this tiny nibbling at its business must be stopped. It took action quickly and organized the “American Speaking-Telephone Company,” with $300,000 capital, and with three electrical inventors, Edison, Gray, and Dolbear, on its staff. With all the bulk of its great wealth and prestige, it swept down upon Bell and his little bodyguard. It trampled upon Bell’s patent with as little concern as an elephant can have when he tramples upon an ant’s nest.

To the complete bewilderment of Bell, it coolly announced that it had “the only original telephone,”

and that it was ready to supply “superior telephones with all the latest improvements made by the original inventors—Dolbear, Gray, and Edison.”

 

The result was strange and unexpected. The Bell group, instead of being driven from the field, were at once lifted to a higher level in the business world. The effect was as if the Standard Oil Company were to commence the manufacture of aeroplanes. In a flash, the telephone ceased to be a “scientific toy,” and became an article of commerce. It began for the first time to be taken seriously. And the Western Union, in the endeavor to protect its private lines, became involuntarily a bell-wether to lead capitalists in the direction of the telephone.

 

Sanders’s relatives, who were many and rich, came to his rescue. Most of them were well-known business men—the Bradleys, the Saltonstalls, Fay, Silsbee, and Carlton. These men, together with Colonel William H. Forbes, who came in as a friend of the Bradleys, were the first capitalists who, for purely business reasons, invested money in the Bell patents. Two months after the Western Union had given its weighty endorsement to the telephone, these men organized a company to do business in New England only, and put fifty thousand dollars in its treasury.

 

In a short time the delighted Hubbard found himself leasing telephones at the rate of a thousand a month. He was no longer a promoter, but a general manager. Men were standing in line to ask for agencies. Crude little telephone exchanges were being started in a dozen or more cities. There was a spirit of confidence and enterprise; and the next step, clearly, was to create a business organization. None of the partners were competent to undertake such a work.

Hubbard had little aptitude as an organizer; Bell had none; and Sanders was held fast by his leather interests. Here, at last, after four years of the most heroic effort, were the raw materials out of which a telephone business could be constructed. But who was to be the builder, and where was he to be found?

 

One morning the indefatigable Hubbard solved the problem. “Watson,” he said, “there’s a young man in Washington who can handle this situation, and I want you to run down and see what you think of him.” Watson went, reported favorably, and in a day or so the young man received a letter from Hubbard, offering him the position of General Manager, at a salary of thirty-five hundred dollars a year. “We rely,” Hubbard said, “upon your executive ability, your fidelity, and unremitting