



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