



Produced by Charles Keller





THE HISTORY OF THE TELEPHONE

By Herbert N. Casson




PREFACE


Thirty-five short years, and presto! the newborn art of telephony is
fullgrown. Three million telephones are now scattered abroad in foreign
countries, and seven millions are massed here, in the land of its birth.

So entirely has the telephone outgrown the ridicule with which, as many
people can well remember, it was first received, that it is now in
most places taken for granted, as though it were a part of the natural
phenomena of this planet. It has so marvellously extended the
facilities of conversation--that "art in which a man has all mankind for
competitors"--that it is now an indispensable help to whoever would
live the convenient life. The disadvantage of being deaf and dumb to
all absent persons, which was universal in pre-telephonic days, has now
happily been overcome; and I hope that this story of how and by whom it
was done will be a welcome addition to American libraries.

It is such a story as the telephone itself might tell, if it could speak
with a voice of its own. It is not technical. It is not statistical. It
is not exhaustive. It is so brief, in fact, that a second volume could
readily be made by describing the careers of telephone leaders whose
names I find have been omitted unintentionally from this book--such
indispensable men, for instance, as William R. Driver, who has signed
more telephone cheques and larger ones than any other man; Geo. S.
Hibbard, Henry W. Pope, and W. D. Sargent, three veterans who know
telephony in all its phases; George Y. Wallace, the last survivor of the
Rocky Mountain pioneers; Jasper N. Keller, of Texas and New England;
W. T. Gentry, the central figure of the Southeast, and the following
presidents of telephone companies: Bernard E. Sunny, of Chicago; E. B.
Field, of Denver; D. Leet Wilson, of Pittsburg; L. G. Richardson, of
Indianapolis; Caspar E. Yost, of Omaha; James E. Caldwell, of Nashville;
Thomas Sherwin, of Boston; Henry T. Scott, of San Francisco; H. J.
Pettengill, of Dallas; Alonzo Burt, of Milwaukee; John Kilgour, of
Cincinnati; and Chas. S. Gleed, of Kansas City.

I am deeply indebted to most of these men for the information which
is herewith presented; and also to such pioneers, now dead, as O. E.
Madden, the first General Agent; Frank L. Pope, the noted electrical
expert; C. H. Haskins, of Milwaukee; George F. Ladd, of San Francisco;
and Geo. F. Durant, of St. Louis.

H. N. C. PINE HILL, N. Y., June 1, 1910.



CONTENTS


CHAPTER

     I    THE BIRTH OF THE TELEPHONE

     II   THE BUILDING OF THE BUSINESS

     III  THE HOLDING OF THE BUSINESS

     IV   THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ART

     V    THE EXPANSION OF THE BUSINESS

     VI   NOTABLE USERS OF THE TELEPHONE

     VII THE TELEPHONE AND NATIONAL EFFICIENCY

     VIII THE TELEPHONE IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES

     IX THE FUTURE OF THE TELEPHONE




THE HISTORY OF THE TELEPHONE



CHAPTER I. THE BIRTH OF THE TELEPHONE

In that somewhat distant year 1875, when the telegraph and the Atlantic
cable were the most wonderful things in the world, a tall young
professor of elocution was desperately busy in a noisy machine-shop
that stood in one of the narrow streets of Boston, not far from Scollay
Square. It was a very hot afternoon in June, but the young professor had
forgotten the heat and the grime of the workshop. He was wholly absorbed
in the making of a nondescript machine, a sort of crude harmonica with
a clock-spring reed, a magnet, and a wire. It was a most absurd toy in
appearance. It was unlike any other thing that had ever been made in any
country. The young professor had been toiling over it for three years
and it had constantly baffled him, until, on this hot afternoon in June,
1875, he heard an almost inaudible sound--a faint TWANG--come from the
machine itself.

For an instant he was stunned. He had been expecting just such a sound
for several months, but it came so suddenly as to give him the sensation
of surprise. His eyes blazed with delight, and he sprang in a passion of
eagerness to an adjoining room in which stood a young mechanic who was
assisting him.

"Snap that reed again, Watson," cried the apparently irrational young
professor. There was one of the odd-looking machines in each room, so
it appears, and the two were connected by an electric wire. Watson had
snapped the reed on one of the machines and the professor had heard from
the other machine exactly the same sound. It was no more than the gentle
TWANG of a clock-spring; but it was the first time in the history of the
world that a complete sound had been carried along a wire, reproduced
perfectly at the other end, and heard by an expert in acoustics.

That twang of the clock-spring was the first tiny cry of the newborn
telephone, uttered in the clanging din of a machine-shop and happily
heard by a man whose ear had been trained to recognize the strange voice
of the little newcomer. There, amidst flying belts and jarring wheels,
the baby telephone was born, as feeble and helpless as any other baby,
and "with no language but a cry."

The professor-inventor, who had thus rescued the tiny foundling of
science, was a young Scottish American. His name, now known as widely
as the telephone itself, was Alexander Graham Bell. He was a teacher
of acoustics and a student of electricity, possibly the only man in his
generation who was able to focus a knowledge of both subjects upon the
problem of the telephone. To other men that exceedingly faint sound
would have been as inaudible as silence itself; but to Bell it was a
thunder-clap. It was a dream come true. It was an impossible thing which
had in a flash become so easy that he could scarcely believe it. Here,
without the use of a battery, with no more electric current than that
made by a couple of magnets, all the waves of a sound had been carried
along a wire and changed back to sound at the farther end. It was
absurd. It was incredible. It was something which neither wire nor
electricity had been known to do before. But it was true.

No discovery has ever been less accidental. It was the last link of
a long chain of discoveries. It was the result of a persistent and
deliberate search. Already, for half a year or longer, Bell had known
the correct theory of the telephone; but he had not realized that the
feeble undulatory current generated by a magnet was strong enough
for the transmission of speech. He had been taught to undervalue the
incredible efficiency of electricity.

Not only was Bell himself a teacher of the laws of speech, so highly
skilled that he was an instructor in Boston University. His father,
also, his two brothers, his uncle, and his grandfather had taught the
laws of speech in the universities of Edinburgh, Dublin, and London.
For three generations the Bells had been professors of the science
of talking. They had even helped to create that science by several
inven-tions. The first of them, Alexander Bell, had invented a system
for the correction of stammering and similar defects of speech. The
second, Alexander Melville Bell, was the dean of British elocutionists,
a man of creative brain and a most impressive facility of rhetoric. He
was the author of a dozen text-books on the art of speaking correctly,
and also of a most ingenious sign-language which he called "Visible
Speech." Every letter in the alphabet of this language represented a
certain action of the lips and tongue; so that a new method was provided
for those who wished to learn foreign languages or to speak their own
language more correctly. And the third of these speech-improving Bells,
the inventor of the telephone, inherited the peculiar genius of his
fathers, both inventive and rhetorical, to such a degree that as a boy
he had constructed an artificial skull, from gutta-percha and India
rubber, which, when enlivened by a blast of air from a hand-bellows,
would actually pronounce several words in an almost human manner.

The third Bell, the only one of this remarkable family who concerns us
at this time, was a young man, barely twenty-eight, at the time when his
ear caught the first cry of the telephone. But he was already a man of
some note on his own account. He had been educated in Edinburgh, the
city of his birth, and in London; and had in one way and another picked
up a smattering of anatomy, music, electricity, and telegraphy. Until he
was sixteen years of age, he had read nothing but novels and poetry and
romantic tales of Scottish heroes. Then he left home to become a teacher
of elocution in various British schools, and by the time he was of age
he had made several slight discoveries as to the nature of vowel-sounds.
Shortly afterwards, he met in London two distinguished men, Alexander J.
Ellis and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who did far more than they ever knew
to forward Bell in the direction of the telephone.

Ellis was the president of the London Philological Society. Also, he was
the translator of the famous book on "The Sensations of Tone," written
by Helmholtz, who, in the period from 1871 to 1894 made Berlin the
world-centre for the study of the physical sciences. So it happened that
when Bell ran to Ellis as a young enthusiast and told his experiments,
Ellis informed him that Helmholtz had done the same things several years
before and done them more completely. He brought Bell to his house and
showed him what Helmholtz had done--how he had kept tuning-forks in
vibration by the power of electro-magnets, and blended the tones of
several tuning-forks together to produce the complex quality of the
human voice.

Now, Helmholtz had not been trying to invent a telephone, nor any sort
of message-carrier. His aim was to point out the physical basis of
music, and nothing more. But this fact that an electro-magnet would set
a tuning-fork humming was new to Bell and very attractive. It appealed
at once to him as a student of speech. If a tuning-fork could be made to
sing by a magnet or an electrified wire, why would it not be possible
to make a musical telegraph--a telegraph with a piano key-board, so that
many messages could be sent at once over a single wire? Unknown to Bell,
there were several dozen inven-tors then at work upon this problem,
which proved in the end to be very elusive. But it gave him at least a
starting-point, and he forthwith commenced his quest of the telephone.

As he was then in England, his first step was naturally to visit Sir
Charles Wheatstone, the best known English expert on telegraphy. Sir
Charles had earned his title by many inventions. He was a simple-natured
scientist, and treated Bell with the utmost kindness. He showed him an
ingenious talking-machine that had been made by Baron de Kempelin. At
this time Bell was twenty-two and unknown; Wheatstone was sixty-seven
and famous. And the personality of the veteran scientist made so vivid
a picture upon the mind of the impressionable young Bell that the grand
passion of science became henceforth the master-motif of his life.

From this summit of glorious ambition he was thrown, several months
later, into the depths of grief and despondency. The White Plague had
come to the home in Edinburgh and taken away his two brothers. More, it
had put its mark upon the young inventor himself. Nothing but a change
of climate, said his doctor, would put him out of danger. And so, to
save his life, he and his father and mother set sail from Glasgow and
came to the small Canadian town of Brantford, where for a year he fought
down his tendency to consumption, and satisfied his nervous energy by
teaching "Visible Speech" to a tribe of Mohawk Indians.

By this time it had become evident, both to his parents and to his
friends, that young Graham was destined to become some sort of a
creative genius. He was tall and supple, with a pale complexion, large
nose, full lips, jet-black eyes, and jet-black hair, brushed high
and usually rumpled into a curly tangle. In temperament he was a true
scientific Bohemian, with the ideals of a savant and the disposition
of an artist. He was wholly a man of enthusiasms, more devoted to ideas
than to people; and less likely to master his own thoughts than to be
mastered by them. He had no shrewdness, in any commercial sense, and
very little knowledge of the small practical details of ordinary living