THE HISTORY OF THE TELEPHONE

By Herbert N. Casson

PREFACE

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

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

It is such a story as the telephone itself might tell, if it could speakwith a voice of its own. It is not technical. It is not statistical. Itis not exhaustive. It is so brief, in fact, that a second volume couldreadily be made by describing the careers of telephone leaders whosenames I find have been omitted unintentionally from this book--suchindispensable men, for instance, as William R. Driver, who has signedmore telephone cheques and larger ones than any other man; Geo. S. Hibbard, Henry W. Pope, and W. D. Sargent, three veterans who knowtelephony in all its phases; George Y. Wallace, the last survivor of theRocky Mountain pioneers; Jasper N. Keller, of Texas and New England;W. T. Gentry, the central figure of the Southeast, and the followingpresidents of telephone companies: Bernard E. Sunny, of Chicago; E. B. Field, of Denver; D. Leet Wilson, of Pittsburg; L. G. Richardson, ofIndianapolis; 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, ofCincinnati; and Chas. S. Gleed, of Kansas City. 

I am deeply indebted to most of these men for the information whichis herewith presented; and also to such pioneers, now dead, as O. E. Madden, the first General Agent; Frank L. Pope, the noted electricalexpert; 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 Atlanticcable were the most wonderful things in the world, a tall youngprofessor of elocution was desperately busy in a noisy machine-shopthat stood in one of the narrow streets of Boston, not far from ScollaySquare. It was a very hot afternoon in June, but the young professor hadforgotten the heat and the grime of the workshop. He was wholly absorbedin the making of a nondescript machine, a sort of crude harmonica witha clock-spring reed, a magnet, and a wire. It was a most absurd toy inappearance. It was unlike any other thing that had ever been made in anycountry. The young professor had been toiling over it for three yearsand it had constantly baffled him, until, on this hot afternoon in June, 1875, he heard an almost inaudible sound--a faint TWANG--come from themachine itself. 

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

"Snap that reed again, Watson, " cried the apparently irrational youngprofessor. There was one of the odd-looking machines in each room, soit appears, and the two were connected by an electric wire. Watson hadsnapped the reed on one of the machines and the professor had heard fromthe other machine exactly the same sound. It was no more than the gentleTWANG of a clock-spring; but it was the first time in the history of theworld that a complete sound had been carried along a wire, reproducedperfectly at the other end, and heard by an expert in acoustics. 

That twang of the clock-spring was the first tiny cry of the newborntelephone, uttered in the clanging din of a machine-shop and happilyheard by a man whose ear had been trained to recognize the strange voiceof 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 ofscience, was a young Scottish American. His name, now known as widelyas the telephone itself, was Alexander Graham Bell. He was a teacherof acoustics and a student of electricity, possibly the only man in hisgeneration who was able to focus a knowledge of both subjects upon theproblem of the telephone. To other men that exceedingly faint soundwould have been as inaudible as silence itself; but to Bell it was athunder-clap. It was a dream come true. It was an impossible thing whichhad 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 thatmade by a couple of magnets, all the waves of a sound had been carriedalong a wire and changed back to sound at the farther end. It wasabsurd. It was incredible. It was something which neither wire norelectricity had been known to do before. But it was true. 

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

Not only was Bell himself a teacher of the laws of speech, so highlyskilled that he was an instructor in Boston University. His father, also, his two brothers, his uncle, and his grandfather had taught thelaws of speech in the universities of Edinburgh, Dublin, and London. For three generations the Bells had been professors of the scienceof talking. They had even helped to create that science by severalinven-tions. The first of them, Alexander Bell, had invented a systemfor the correction of stammering and similar defects of speech. Thesecond, Alexander Melville Bell, was the dean of British elocutionists, a man of creative brain and a most impressive facility of rhetoric. Hewas the author of a dozen text-books on the art of speaking correctly, and also of a most ingenious sign-language which he called "VisibleSpeech. " Every letter in the alphabet of this language represented acertain action of the lips and tongue; so that a new method was providedfor those who wished to learn foreign languages or to speak their ownlanguage more correctly. And the third of these speech-improving Bells, the inventor of the telephone, inherited the peculiar genius of hisfathers, both inventive and rhetorical, to such a degree that as a boyhe had constructed an artificial skull, from gutta-percha and Indiarubber, 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 usat this time, was a young man, barely twenty-eight, at the time when hisear caught the first cry of the telephone. But he was already a man ofsome note on his own account. He had been educated in Edinburgh, thecity of his birth, and in London; and had in one way and another pickedup a smattering of anatomy, music, electricity, and telegraphy. Until hewas sixteen years of age, he had read nothing but novels and poetry andromantic tales of Scottish heroes. Then he left home to become a teacherof elocution in various British schools, and by the time he was of agehe 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 knewto forward Bell in the direction of the telephone. 

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

Now, Helmholtz had not been trying to invent a telephone, nor any sortof message-carrier. His aim was to point out the physical basis ofmusic, and nothing more. But this fact that an electro-magnet would seta tuning-fork humming was new to Bell and very attractive. It appealedat once to him as a student of speech. If a tuning-fork could be made tosing by a magnet or an electrified wire, why would it not be possibleto make a musical telegraph--a telegraph with a piano key-board, so thatmany 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 astarting-point, and he forthwith commenced his quest of the telephone. 

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

From this summit of glorious ambition he was thrown, several monthslater, into the depths of grief and despondency. The White Plague hadcome to the home in Edinburgh and taken away his two brothers. More, ithad put its mark upon the young inventor himself. Nothing but a changeof climate, said his doctor, would put him out of danger. And so, tosave his life, he and his father and mother set sail from Glasgow andcame to the small Canadian town of Brantford, where for a year he foughtdown his tendency to consumption, and satisfied his nervous energy byteaching "Visible Speech" to a tribe of Mohawk Indians. 

By this time it had become evident, both to his parents and to hisfriends, that young Graham was destined to become some sort of acreative genius. He was tall and supple, with a pale complexion, largenose, full lips, jet-black eyes, and jet-black hair, brushed highand usually rumpled into a curly tangle. In temperament he was a truescientific Bohemian, with the ideals of a savant and the dispositionof an artist. He was wholly a man of enthusiasms, more devoted to ideasthan to people; and less likely to master his own thoughts than to bemastered by them. He had no shrewdness, in any commercial sense, andvery little knowledge of the small practical details of ordinary living. He was always intense, always absorbed. When he applied his mind to aproblem, it became at once an enthralling arena, in which there wentwhirling a chariot-race of ideas and inventive fancies. 

He had been fascinated from boyhood by his father's system of "VisibleSpeech. " He knew it so well that he once astonished a professor ofOriental languages by repeating correctly a sentence of Sanscrit thathad been written in "Visible Speech" characters. While he was living inLondon his most absorbing enthusiasm was the instruction of a class ofdeaf-mutes, who could be trained to talk, he believed, by means of the"Visible Speech" alphabet. He was so deeply impressed by the progressmade by these pupils, and by the pathos of their dumbness, that when hearrived in Canada he was in doubt as to which of these two tasks was themore important--the teaching of deaf-mutes or the invention of a musicaltelegraph. 

At this point, and before Bell had begun to experiment with histelegraph, the scene of the story shifts from Canada to Massachusetts. It appears that his father, while lecturing in Boston, had mentionedGraham's exploits with a class of deaf-mutes; and soon afterward theBoston Board of Education wrote to Graham, offering him five hundreddollars if he would come to Boston and introduce his system of teachingin a school for deaf-mutes that had been opened recently. The young manjoyfully agreed, and on the first of April, 1871, crossed the line andbecame for the remainder of his life an American. 

For the next two years his telegraphic work was laid aside, if notforgotten. His success as a teacher of deaf-mutes was sudden andoverwhelming. It was the educational sensation of 1871. It won him aprofessorship in Boston University; and brought so many pupils aroundhim that he ventured to open an ambitious "School of Vocal Physiology, "which became at once a profitable enterprise. For a time there seemedto be little hope of his escaping from the burden of this success andbecoming an inventor, when, by a most happy coincidence, two of hispupils brought to him exactly the sort of stimulation and practical helpthat he needed and had not up to this time received. 

One of these pupils was a little deaf-mute tot, five years of age, namedGeorgie Sanders. Bell had agreed to give him a series of private lessonsfor $350 a year; and as the child lived with his grandmother in the cityof Salem, sixteen miles from Boston, it was agreed that Bell should makehis home with the Sanders family. Here he not only found the keenestinterest and sympathy in his air-castles of invention, but also wasgiven permission to use the cellar of the house as his workshop. 

For the next three years this cellar was his favorite retreat. Helittered it with tuning-forks, magnets, batteries, coils of wire, tintrumpets, and cigar-boxes. No one outside of the Sanders family wasallowed to enter it, as Bell was nervously afraid of having his ideasstolen. He would even go to five or six stores to buy his supplies, forfear that his intentions should be discovered. Almost with the secrecyof a conspirator, he worked alone in this cellar, usually at night, andquite oblivious of the fact that sleep was a necessity to him and to theSanders family. 

"Often in the middle of the night Bell would wake me up, " said ThomasSanders, the father of Georgie. "His black eyes would be blazing withexcitement. Leaving me to go down to the cellar, he would rush wildly tothe barn and begin to send me signals along his experimental wires. If Inoticed any improvement in his machine, he would be delighted. He wouldleap and whirl around in one of his `war-dances' and then go contentedlyto bed. But if the experiment was a failure, he would go back to hisworkbench and try some different plan. "

The second pupil who became a factor--a very considerable factor--inBell's career was a fifteen-year-old girl named Mabel Hubbard, who hadlost her hearing, and consequently her speech, through an attack ofscarlet-fever when a baby. She was a gentle and lovable girl, and Bell, in his ardent and headlong way, lost his heart to her completely; andfour years later, he had the happiness of making her his wife. MabelHubbard did much to encourage Bell. She followed each step of hisprogress with the keenest interest. She wrote his letters and copied hispatents. She cheered him on when he felt himself beaten. And through hersympathy with Bell and his ambitions, she led her father--a widelyknown Boston lawyer named Gardiner G. Hubbard--to become Bell's chiefspokesman and defender, a true apostle of the telephone. 

Hubbard first became aware of Bell's inventive efforts one evening whenBell was visiting at his home in Cambridge. Bell was illustrating someof the mysteries of acoustics by the aid of a piano. "Do you know, " hesaid to Hubbard, "that if I sing the note G close to the strings ofthe piano, that the G-string will answer me?" "Well, what then?" askedHubbard. "It is a fact of tremendous importance, " replied Bell. "It isan evidence that we may some day have a musical telegraph, which willsend as many messages simultaneously over one wire as there are notes onthat piano. "

Later, Bell ventured to confide to Hubbard his wild dream of sendingspeech over an electric wire, but Hubbard laughed him to scorn. "Now youare talking nonsense, " he said. "Such a thing never could be more thana scientific toy. You had better throw that idea out of your mind and goahead with your musical telegraph, which if it is successful will makeyou a millionaire. "

But the longer Bell toiled at his musical telegraph, the more he dreamedof replacing the telegraph and its cumbrous sign-language by a newmachine that would carry, not dots and dashes, but the human voice. "If I can make a deaf-mute talk, " he said, "I can make iron talk. " Formonths he wavered between the two ideas. He had no more than the mosthazy conception of what this voice-carrying machine would be like. At first he conceived of having a harp at one end of the wire, and aspeaking-trumpet at the other, so that the tones of the voice would bereproduced by the strings of the harp. 

Then, in the early Summer of 1874, while he was puzzling over this harpapparatus, the dim outline of a new path suddenly glinted in front ofhim. He had not been forgetful of "Visible Speech" all this while, but had been making experiments with two remarkable machines--thephonautograph and the manometric capsule, by means of which thevibrations of sound were made plainly visible. If these could beim-proved, he thought, then the deaf might be taught to speak bySIGHT--by learning an alphabet of vibrations. He mentioned theseexperiments to a Boston friend, Dr. Clarence J. Blake, and he, being asurgeon and an aurist, naturally said, "Why don't you use a REAL EAR?"

Such an idea never had, and probably never could have, occurred to Bell;but he accepted it with eagerness. Dr. Blake cut an ear from a deadman's head, together with the ear-drum and the associated bones. Belltook this fragment of a skull and arranged it so that a straw touchedthe ear-drum at one end and a piece of moving smoked glass at the other. Thus, when Bell spoke loudly into the ear, the vibrations of the drummade tiny markings upon the glass. 

It was one of the most extraordinary incidents in the whole history ofthe telephone. To an uninitiated onlooker, nothing could have been moreghastly or absurd. How could any one have interpreted the gruesome joyof this young professor with the pale face and the black eyes, who stoodearnestly singing, whispering, and shouting into a dead man's ear? Whatsort of a wizard must he be, or ghoul, or madman? And in Salem, too, thehome of the witchcraft superstition! Certainly it would not have gonewell with Bell had he lived two centuries earlier and been caught atsuch black magic. 

What had this dead man's ear to do with the invention of the telephone?Much. Bell noticed how small and thin was the ear-drum, and yet howeffectively it could send thrills and vibrations through heavy bones. "If this tiny disc can vibrate a bone, " he thought, "then an iron discmight vibrate an iron rod, or at least, an iron wire. " In a flash theconception of a membrane telephone was pictured in his mind. He saw inimagination two iron discs, or ear-drums, far apart and connected byan electrified wire, catching the vibrations of sound at one end, andreproducing them at the other. At last he was on the right path, and hada theoretical knowledge of what a speaking telephone ought to be. Whatremained to be done was to construct such a machine and find out how theelectric current could best be brought into harness. 

Then, as though Fortune suddenly felt that he was winning thisstupendous success too easily, Bell was flung back by an avalancheof troubles. Sanders and Hubbard, who had been paying the cost of hisexperiments, abruptly announced that they would pay no more unless heconfined his attention to the musical telegraph, and stopped wasting histime on ear-toys that never could be of any financial value. Whatthese two men asked could scarcely be denied, as one of them was hisbest-paying patron and the other was the father of the girl whom hehoped to marry. "If you wish my daughter, " said Hubbard, "you mustabandon your foolish telephone. " Bell's "School of Vocal Physiology, "too, from which he had hoped so much, had come to an inglorious end. He had been too much absorbed in his experiments to sustain it. Hisprofessorship had been given up, and he had no pupils except GeorgieSanders and Mabel Hubbard. He was poor, much poorer than his associatesknew. And his mind was torn and distracted by the contrary calls ofscience, poverty, business, and affection. Pouring out his sorrows in aletter to his mother, he said: "I am now beginning to realize the caresand anxieties of being an inventor. I have had to put off all pupils andclasses, for flesh and blood could not stand much longer such a strainas I have had upon me. "

While stumbling through this Slough of Despond, he was called toWashington by his patent lawyer. Not having enough money to pay the costof such a journey, he borrowed the price of a return ticket from Sandersand arranged to stay with a friend in Washington, to save a hotel billthat he could not afford. At that time Professor Joseph Henry, who knewmore of the theory of electrical science than any other American, was the Grand Old Man of Washington; and poor Bell, in his doubt anddesperation, resolved to run to him for advice. 

Then came a meeting which deserves to be historic. For an entireafternoon the two men worked together over the apparatus that Bell hadbrought from Boston, just as Henry had worked over the telegraph beforeBell was born. Henry was now a veteran of seventy-eight, with onlythree years remaining to his credit in the bank of Time, while Bell wastwenty-eight. There was a long half-century between them; but the youthhad discovered a New Fact that the sage, in all his wisdom, had neverknown. 

"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 isnecessary. "

"Get it, " responded the aged scientist. 

"I cannot tell you how much these two words have encouraged me, " saidBell afterwards, in describing this interview to his parents. "I livetoo much in an atmosphere of discouragement for scientific pursuits; andsuch a chimerical idea as telegraphing VOCAL SOUNDS would indeed seem tomost minds scarcely feasible enough to spend time in working over. "

By this time Bell had moved his workshop from the cellar in Salem to 109Court Street, Boston, where he had rented a room from Charles Williams, a manufacturer of electrical supplies. Thomas A. Watson was hisassistant, and both Bell and Watson lived nearby, in two cheap littlebedrooms. The rent of the workshop and bedrooms, and Watson's wagesof nine dollars a week, were being paid by Sanders and Hubbard. Consequently, when Bell returned from Washington, he was compelledby his agreement to devote himself mainly to the musical telegraph, although his heart was now with the telephone. For exactly three monthsafter 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 telephonewas born. 

From this moment, Bell was a man of one purpose. He won over Sanders andHubbard. He converted Watson into an enthusiast. He forgot his musicaltelegraph, his "Visible Speech, " his classes, his poverty. He threwaside a profession in which he was already locally famous. And hegrappled with this new mystery of electricity, as Henry had advisedhim to do, encouraging himself with the fact that Morse, who was onlya painter, had mastered his electrical difficulties, and there was noreason why a professor of acoustics should not do as much. 

The telephone was now in existence, but it was the youngest and feeblestthing 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 thana dime and others of steel boiler-plate as heavy as the shield ofAchilles. In all the books of electrical science, there was nothing tohelp Bell and Watson in this journey they were making through an unknowncountry. They were as chartless as Columbus was in 1492. Neither theynor any one else had acquired any experience in the rearing of a youngtelephone. No one knew what to do next. There was nothing to know. 

For forty weeks--long exasperating weeks--the telephone could do no morethan gasp and make strange inarticulate noises. Its educators had notlearned how to manage it. Then, on March 10, 1876, IT TALKED. It saiddistinctly--

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

It was not easy, of course, for the weak young telephone to make itselfheard in that noisy workshop. No one, not even Bell and Watson, wasfamiliar with its odd little voice. Usually Watson, who had aremarkably keen sense of hearing, did the listening; and Bell, who wasa professional elocutionist, did the talking. And day by day the toneof the baby instrument grew clearer--a new note in the orchestra ofcivilization. 

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 itin any of the world's languages. In describing it to the officialsof the Patent Office, he was obliged to call it "an improvement intelegraphy, " when, in truth, it was nothing of the kind. It was asdifferent from the telegraph as the eloquence of a great orator is fromthe sign-language of a deaf-mute. 

Other inventors had worked from the standpoint of the telegraph; andthey never did, and never could, get any better results than signs andsymbols. But Bell worked from the standpoint of the human voice. Hecross-fertilized the two sciences of acoustics and electricity. Hisstudy of "Visible Speech" had trained his mind so that he could mentallySEE 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 vibrationsfrom the lips to the ear. He was a third-generation specialist in thenature of speech, and he knew that for the transmission of spoken wordsthere must be "a pulsatory action of the electric current which is theexact equivalent of the aerial impulses. "

Bell knew just enough about electricity, and not too much. He didnot know the possible from the impossible. "Had I known more aboutelectricity, and less about sound, " he said, "I would never haveinvented the telephone. " What he had done was so amazing, so foolhardy, that no trained electrician could have thought of it. It was "thevery hardihood of invention, " and yet it was not in any sense a chancediscovery. It was the natural output of a mind that had been led toassemble just the right materials for such a product. 

As though the very stars in their courses were working for this youngwizard with the talking wire, the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphiaopened its doors exactly two months after the telephone had learned totalk. Here was a superb opportunity to let the wide world know whathad been done, and fortunately Hubbard was one of the CentennialCommissioners. By his influence a small table was placed in theDepartment of Education, in a narrow space between a stairway and awall, and on this table was deposited the first of the telephones. 

Bell had no intention of going to the Centennial himself. He was toopoor. Sanders and Hubbard had never done more than pay his room-rent andthe expense of his experiments. For his three or four years of inventinghe had received nothing as yet--nothing but his patent. In orderto live, he had been compelled to reorganize his classes in "VisibleSpeech, " and to pick up the ravelled ends of his neglected profession. 

But one Friday afternoon, toward the end of June, his sweetheart, MabelHubbard, was taking the train for the Centennial; and he went to thedepot to say good-bye. Here Miss Hubbard learned for the first time thatBell was not to go. She coaxed and pleaded, without effect. Then, as thetrain was starting, leaving Bell on the platform, the affectionate younggirl could no longer control her feelings and was overcome by a passionof tears. At this the susceptible Bell, like a true Sir Galahad, dashedafter the moving train and sprang aboard, without ticket or baggage, oblivious of his classes and his poverty and of all else except this onemaiden's distress. "I never saw a man, " said Watson, "so much in love asBell was. "

As it happened, this impromptu trip to the Centennial proved to be oneof the most timely acts of his life. On the following Sunday after-noonthe judges were to make a special tour of inspection, and Mr. Hubbard, after much trouble, had obtained a promise that they would spend afew minutes examining Bell's telephone. By this time it had been onexhibition for more than six weeks, without attracting the seriousattention 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 notarrive. The day was intensely hot, and they had many wonders to examine. There was the first electric light, and the first grain-binder, and themusical telegraph of Elisha Gray, and the marvellous exhibit of printingtelegraphs shown by the Western Union Company. By the time they came toBell's table, through a litter of school-desks and blackboards, thehour was seven o'clock, and every man in the party was hot, tired, andhungry. Several announced their intention of returning to their hotels. One took up a telephone receiver, looked at it blankly, and put itdown again. He did not even place it to his ear. Another judge made aslighting remark which raised a laugh at Bell's expense. Then a mostmarvellous 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 ofcourtiers, the Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro de Alcantara, walked intothe room, advanced with both hands outstretched to the bewildered Bell, and exclaimed: "Professor Bell, I am delighted to see you again. " Thejudges at once forgot the heat and the fatigue and the hunger. Who wasthis young inventor, with the pale complexion and black eyes, that heshould be the friend of Emperors? They did not know, and for the momenteven Bell himself had forgotten, that Dom Pedro had once visited Bell'sclass of deaf-mutes at Boston University. He was especially interestedin such humanitarian work, and had recently helped to organize the firstBrazilian school for deaf-mutes at Rio de Janeiro. And so, with thetall, blond-bearded Dom Pedro in the centre, the assembled judges, andscientists--there were fully fifty in all--entered with unusual zestinto the proceedings of this first telephone exhibition. 

A wire had been strung from one end of the room to the other, and whileBell went to the transmitter, Dom Pedro took up the receiver and placedit to his ear. It was a moment of tense expectancy. No one knew clearlywhat was about to happen, when the Emperor, with a dramatic gesture, raised his head from the receiver and exclaimed with a look of utteramazement: "MY GOD--IT TALKS!"

Next came to the receiver the oldest scientist in the group, thevenerable 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 heardthat iron disc talking with a human voice. "This, " said he, "comesnearer to overthrowing the doctrine of the conservation of energy thananything I ever saw. "

Then came Sir William Thomson, latterly known as Lord Kelvin. It wasfitting that he should be there, for he was the foremost electricalscientist at that time in the world, and had been the engineer of thefirst Atlantic Cable. He listened and learned what even he had not knownbefore, that a solid metallic body could take up from the air all thecountless varieties of vibrations produced by speech, and that thesevibrations could be carried along a wire and reproduced exactly by asecond metallic body. He nodded his head solemnly as he rose fromthe receiver. "It DOES speak, " he said emphatically. "It is the mostwonderful thing I have seen in America. "

So, one after another, this notable company of men listened to the voiceof the first telephone, and the more they knew of science, the less theywere inclined to believe their ears. The wiser they were, the more theywondered. To Henry and Thomson, the masters of electrical magic, thisinstrument was as surprising as it was to the man in the street. Andboth were noble enough to admit frankly their astonishment in thereports which they made as judges, when they gave Bell a Certificateof Award. "Mr. Bell has achieved a result of transcendent scientificinterest, " wrote Sir William Thomson. "I heard it speak distinctlyseveral sentences. . . . I was astonished and delighted. . . . It is thegreatest marvel hitherto achieved by the electric telegraph. "

Until nearly ten o'clock that night the judges talked and listened byturns at the telephone. Then, next morning, they brought the apparatusto the judges' pavilion, where for the remainder of the summer it wasmobbed by judges and scientists. Sir William Thomson and his wife ranback and forth between the two ends of the wire like a pair of delightedchildren. And thus it happened that the crude little instrument thathad been tossed into an out-of-the-way corner became the star ofthe Centennial. It had been given no more than eighteen words in theofficial catalogue, and here it was acclaimed as the wonder of wonders. It had been conceived in a cellar and born in a machine-shop; and now, of all the gifts that our young American Republic had received on itsone-hundredth birthday, the telephone was honored as the rarest and mostwelcome of them all. 

CHAPTER II. THE BUILDING OF THE BUSINESS

After the telephone had been born in Boston, baptized in the PatentOffice, and given a royal reception at the Philadelphia Centennial, itmight be supposed that its life thenceforth would be one of peace andpleasantness. But as this is history, and not fancy, there must beset down the very surprising fact that the young newcomer received nowelcome and no notice from the great business world. "It is a scientifictoy, " said the men of trade and commerce. "It is an interestinginstrument, of course, for professors of electricity and acoustics; butit can never be a practical necessity. As well might you propose to puta telescope into a steel-mill or to hitch a balloon to a shoe-factory. "

Poor Bell, instead of being applauded, was pelted with a hailstorm ofridicule. He was an "impostor, " a "ventriloquist, " a "crank who sayshe can talk through a wire. " The London Times alluded pompously to thetelephone as the latest American humbug, and gave many profound reasonswhy speech could not be sent over a wire, because of the intermittentnature of the electric current. Almost all electricians--the men whowere supposed to know--pronounced the telephone an impossible thing; andthose who did not openly declare it to be a hoax, believed that Bell hadstumbled upon some freakish use of electricity, which could never be ofany practical value. 

Even though he came late in the succession of inventors, Bell had to runthe gantlet of scoffing and adversity. By the reception that the publicgave to his telephone, he learned to sympathize with Howe, whose firstsewing-machine was smashed by a Boston mob; with McCormick, whose firstreaper was called "a cross between an Astley chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a flying-machine"; with Morse, whom ten Congresses regarded as anuisance; with Cyrus Field, whose Atlantic Cable was denounced as "a madfreak of stubborn ignorance"; and with Westinghouse, who was called afool for proposing "to stop a railroad train with wind. "

The very idea of talking at a piece of sheet-iron was so new andextraordinary that the normal mind repulsed it. Alike to the laborerand the scientist, it was incomprehensible. It was too freakish, toobizarre, to be used outside of the laboratory and the museum. No one, literally, could understand how it worked; and the only man who offereda clear solution of the mystery was a Boston mechanic, who maintainedthat there was "a hole through the middle of the wire. "

People who talked for the first time into a telephone box had a sort ofstage fright. They felt foolish. To do so seemed an absurd performance, especially when they had to shout at the top of their voices. Plainly, whatever of convenience there might be in this new contrivance wasfar outweighed by the loss of personal dignity; and very few menhad sufficient imagination to picture the telephone as a part of themachinery of their daily work. The banker said it might do well enoughfor grocers, but that it would never be of any value to banking; and thegrocer said it might do well enough for bankers, but that it would neverbe of any value to grocers. 

As Bell had worked out his invention in Salem, one editor displayed theheadline, "Salem Witchcraft. " The New York Herald said: "The effect isweird and almost supernatural. " The Providence Press said: "It is hardto resist the notion that the powers of darkness are somehow in leaguewith it. " And The Boston Times said, in an editorial of banteringridicule: "A fellow can now court his girl in China as well as in EastBoston; but the most serious aspect of this invention is the awful andirresponsible power it will give to the average mother-in-law, who willbe able to send her voice around the habitable globe. "

There were hundreds of shrewd capitalists in American cities in 1876, looking with sharp eyes in all directions for business chances; but notone of them came to Bell with an offer to buy his patent. Not one camerunning for a State contract. And neither did any legislature, or citycouncil, come forward to the task of giving the people a cheap andefficient telephone service. As for Bell himself, he was not a man ofaffairs. In all practical business matters, he was as incompetent as aByron or a Shelley. He had done his part, and it now remained for menof different abilities to take up his telephone and adapt it to the usesand conditions of the business world. 

The first man to undertake this work was Gardiner G. Hubbard, whobecame soon afterwards the father-in-law of Bell. He, too, was a manof enthusiasm rather than of efficiency. He was not a man of wealthor business experience, but he was admirably suited to introduce thetelephone to a hostile public. His father had been a judge of theMassachusetts Supreme Court; and he himself was a lawyer whose practicehad been mainly in matters of legislation. He was, in 1876, a man ofvenerable appearance, with white hair, worn long, and a patriarchalbeard. He was a familiar figure in Washington, and well known among thepublic men of his day. A versatile and entertaining companion, by turnsprosperous and impecunious, and an optimist always, Gardiner Hubbardbecame a really indispensable factor as the first advance agent of thetelephone business. 

No other citizen had done more for the city of Cambridge than Hubbard. It was he who secured gas for Cambridge in 1853, and pure water, and astreet-railway to Boston. He had gone through the South in 1860 inthe patriotic hope that he might avert the impending Civil War. Hehad induced the legislature to establish the first public school fordeaf-mutes, the school that drew Bell to Boston in 1871. And he had beenfor years a most restless agitator for improvements in telegraphy andthe post office. So, as a promoter of schemes for the public good, Hubbard was by no means a novice. His first step toward capturingthe attention of an indifferent nation was to beat the big drum ofpublicity. He saw that this new idea of telephoning must be madefamiliar to the public mind. He talked telephone by day and by night. Whenever he travelled, he carried a pair of the magical instrumentsin his valise, and gave demonstrations on trains and in hotels. He buttonholed every influential man who crossed his path. He was averitable "Ancient Mariner" of the telephone. No possible listener wasallowed to escape. 

Further to promote this campaign of publicity, Hubbard encouraged Belland Watson to perform a series of sensational feats with the telephone. A telegraph wire between New York and Boston was borrowed for half anhour, and in the presence of Sir William Thomson, Bell sent a tuneover the two-hundred-and-fifty-mile line. "Can you hear?" he asked theoperator at the New York end. "Elegantly, " responded the operator. "Whattune?" asked Bell. "Yankee Doodle, " came the answer. Shortly afterwards, while Bell was visiting at his father's house in Canada, he boughtup all the stove-pipe wire in the town, and tacked it to a rail fencebetween the house and a telegraph office. Then he went to a villageeight miles distant and sent scraps of songs and Shakespeareanquotations over the wire. 

There was still a large percentage of people who denied that spokenwords could be transmitted by a wire. When Watson talked to Bellat public demonstrations, there were newspaper editors who referredsceptically to "the supposititious Watson. " So, to silence thesedoubters, Bell and Watson planned a most severe test of the telephone. They borrowed the telegraph line between Boston and the CambridgeObservatory, and attached a telephone to each end. Then they maintained, for three hours or longer, the FIRST SUSTAINED conversation bytelephone, each one taking careful notes of what he said and of whathe heard. These notes were published in parallel columns in The BostonAdvertiser, October 19, 1876, and proved beyond question that thetelephone was now a practical success. 

After this, one event crowded quickly on the heels of another. A seriesof ten lectures was arranged for Bell, at a hundred dollars a lecture, which was the first money payment he had received for his invention. Hisopening night was in Salem, before an audience of five hundred people, and with Mrs. Sand-ers, the motherly old lady who had sheltered Bell inthe days of his experiment, sitting proudly in one of the front seats. A pole was set up at the front of the hall, supporting the end of atelegraph wire that ran from Salem to Boston. And Watson, who became thefirst public talker by telephone, sent messages from Boston to variousmembers of the audience. An account of this lecture was sent bytelephone to The Boston Globe, which announced the next morning--

"This special despatch of the Globe has been transmitted by telephonein the presence of twenty people, who have thus been witnesses to a featnever before attempted--the sending of news over the space of sixteenmiles by the human voice. "

This Globe despatch awoke the newspaper editors with an unexpected jolt. For the first time they began to notice that there was a new word in thelanguage, and a new idea in the scientific world. No newspaper had madeany mention whatever of the telephone for seventy-five days after Bellreceived his patent. Not one of the swarm of reporters who thronged thePhiladelphia Centennial had regarded the telephone as a matter of anypublic interest. But when a column of news was sent by telephone toThe Boston Globe, the whole newspaper world was agog with excitement. A thousand pens wrote the name of Bell. Requests to repeat his lecturecame to Bell from Cyrus W. Field, the veteran of the Atlantic Cable, from the poet Longfellow, and from many others. 

As he was by profession an elocutionist, Bell was able to make the mostof these opportunities. His lectures became popular entertainments. Theywere given in the largest halls. At one lecture two Japanese gentlemenwere induced to talk to one another in their own language, via thetelephone. At a second lecture a band played "The Star-Spangled Banner, "in Boston, and was heard by an audience of two thousand people inProvidence. At a third, Signor Ferranti, who was in Providence, sang aselection from "The Marriage of Figaro" to an audience in Boston. At afourth, an exhortation from Moody and a song from Sankey came over thevibrating wire. And at a fifth, in New Haven, Bell stood sixteen Yaleprofessors in line, hand in hand, and talked through their bodies--afeat which was then, and is to-day, almost too wonderful to believe. 

Very slowly these lectures, and the tireless activity of Hubbard, pushedback 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-bycity of Charlestown, and leased two telephones for twenty actualdollars--the first money ever paid for a telephone. This was the firstfeeble sign that such a novelty as the telephone business could beestablished; and no money ever looked handsomer than this twenty dollarsdid to Bell, Sanders, Hubbard, and Watson. It was the tiny first-fruitof fortune. 

Greatly encouraged, they prepared a little circular which was the firstadvertisement of the telephone business. It is an oddly simple littledocument to-day, but to the 1877 brain it was startling. It modestlyclaimed that a telephone was superior to a telegraph for three reasons:

"(1) No skilled operator is required, but direct communication may behad by speech without the intervention of a third person. 

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

"(3) No expense is required, either for its operation or repair. Itneeds no battery and has no complicated machinery. It is unsurpassed foreconomy and simplicity. "

The only telephone line in the world at this time was between theWilliams' 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 aburglar-alarm business in Boston, proposed that a few telephones belinked to his wires. He was a friend and customer of Williams, andsuggested this plan half in jest and half in earnest. Hubbard was quickto seize this opportunity, and at once lent Holmes a dozen telephones. Without asking permission, Holmes went into six banks and nailed upa telephone in each. Five bankers made no protest, but the sixthindignantly ordered "that playtoy" to be taken out. The other fivetelephones could be connected by a switch in Holmes's office, and thuswas born the first tiny and crude Telephone Exchange. Here it ran forseveral 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 asan exhibition and an advertisement. The little shelf with its fivetelephones was no more like the marvellous exchanges of to-day thana canoe is like a Cunarder, but it was unquestionably the first placewhere several telephone wires came together and could be united. 

Soon afterwards, Holmes took his telephones out of the banks, andstarted a real telephone business among the express companies ofBoston. But by this time several exchanges had been opened for ordinarybusiness, in New Haven, Bridgeport, New York, and Philadelphia. Also, a man from Michigan had arrived, with the hardihood to ask for a Stateagency--George W. Balch, of Detroit. He was so welcome that Hubbardjoyfully gave him everything he asked--a perpetual right to the wholeState 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 soldhis 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 778telephones in use. This looked like success to the optimistic Hubbard. He decided that the time had come to organize the business, sohe created a simple agreement which he called the "Bell TelephoneAssociation. " This agreement gave Bell, Hubbard and Sanders athree-tenths interest apiece in the patents, and Watson one-tenth. THEREWAS NO CAPITAL. There was none to be had. The four men had at this timean absolute monopoly of the telephone business; and everybody else wasquite willing that they should have it. 

The only man who had money and dared to stake it on the future of thetelephone was Thomas Sanders, and he did this not mainly for businessreasons. Both he and Hubbard were attached to Bell primarily bysentiment, as Bell had removed the blight of dumbness from Sanders'slittle son, and was soon to marry Hubbard's daughter. 

Also, Sanders had no expectation, at first, that so much money would beneeded. He was not rich. His entire business, which was that of cuttingout soles for shoe manufacturers, was not at any time worth more thanthirty-five thousand dollars. Yet, from 1874 to 1878, he had advancednine-tenths of the money that was spent on the telephone. He had paidBell's room-rent, and Watson's wages, and Williams's expenses, andthe cost of the exhibit at the Centennial. The first five thousandtelephones, and more, were made with his money. And so many long, expensive months dragged by before any relief came to Sanders, thathe was compelled, much against his will and his business judgment, tostretch his credit within an inch of the breaking-point to help Bell andthe telephone. Desperately he signed note after note until he faced atotal of one hundred and ten thousand dollars. If the new "scientifictoy" succeeded, which he often doubted, he would be the richest citizenin Haverhill; and if it failed, which he sorely feared, he would be abankrupt. 

A disheartening series of rebuffs slowly forced the truth in uponSanders's mind that the business world refused to accept the telephoneas an article of commerce. It was a toy, a plaything, a scientificwonder, but not a necessity to be bought and used for ordinary purposesby ordinary people. Capitalists treated it exactly as they treated theAtlantic Cable project when Cyrus Field visited Boston in 1862. Theyadmired and marvelled; but not a man subscribed a dollar. Also, Sandersvery soon learned that it was a most unpropitious time for the settingafloat of a new enterprise. It was a period of turmoil and suspicion. What with the Jay Cooke failure, the Hayes-Tilden deadlock, and thebursting of a hundred railroad bubbles, there was very little in thenews of the day to encourage investors. 

It was impossible for Sanders, or Bell, or Hubbard, to prepare anydefinite plan. No matter what the plan might have been, they had nomoney to put it through. They believed that they had something new andmarvellous, which some one, somewhere, would be willing to buy. Untilthis good genie should arrive, they could do no more than flounderahead, and take whatever business was the nearest and the cheapest. Sowhile Bell, in eloquent rhapsodies, painted word-pictures of a universaltelephone service to applauding audiences, Sanders and Hubbard wereleasing telephones two by two, to business men who previously had beenusing the private lines of the Western Union Telegraph Company. 

This great corporation was at the time their natural and inevitableenemy. It had swallowed most of its competitors, and was reaching out tomonopolize all methods of communication by wire. The rosiest hope thatshone in front of Sanders and Hubbard was that the Western Union mightconclude to buy the Bell patents, just as it had already bought manyothers. In one moment of discouragement they had offered the telephoneto President Orton, of the Western Union, for $100, 000; and Orton hadrefused it. "What use, " he asked pleasantly, "could this company make ofan electrical toy?"

But besides the operation of its own wires, the Western Union wassupplying customers with various kinds of printing-telegraphs and dialtelegraphs, some of which could transmit sixty words a minute. Theseaccurate instruments, it believed, could never be displaced by such ascientific oddity as the telephone. And it continued to believe thisuntil one of its subsidiary companies--the Gold and Stock--reported thatseveral of its machines had been superseded by telephones. 

At once the Western Union awoke from its indifference. Even this tinynibbling at its business must be stopped. It took action quickly andorganized the "American Speaking-Telephone Company, " with $300, 000capital, and with three electrical inventors, Edison, Gray, and Dolbear, on its staff. With all the bulk of its great wealth and prestige, itswept down upon Bell and his little bodyguard. It trampled upon Bell'spatent with as little concern as an elephant can have when he tramplesupon an ant's nest. To the complete bewilderment of Bell, it coollyannounced that it had "the only original telephone, " and that it wasready to supply "superior telephones with all the latest improvementsmade by the original inventors--Dolbear, Gray, and Edison. "

The result was strange and unexpected. The Bell group, instead of beingdriven from the field, were at once lifted to a higher level in thebusiness world. The effect was as if the Standard Oil Company were tocommence the manufacture of aeroplanes. In a flash, the telephone ceasedto be a "scientific toy, " and became an article of commerce. It beganfor the first time to be taken seriously. And the Western Union, inthe endeavor to protect its private lines, became involuntarily abell-wether to lead capitalists in the direction of the telephone. 

Sanders's relatives, who were many and rich, came to his rescue. Most ofthem were well-known business men--the Bradleys, the Saltonstalls, Fay, Silsbee, and Carlton. These men, together with Colonel WilliamH. Forbes, who came in as a friend of the Bradleys, were the firstcapitalists who, for purely business reasons, invested money in theBell patents. Two months after the Western Union had given its weightyendorsement to the telephone, these men organized a company to dobusiness in New England only, and put fifty thousand dollars in itstreasury. 

In a short time the delighted Hubbard found himself leasing telephonesat the rate of a thousand a month. He was no longer a promoter, but ageneral manager. Men were standing in line to ask for agencies. Crudelittle 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 partnerswere competent to undertake such a work. Hubbard had little aptitude asan organizer; Bell had none; and Sanders was held fast by his leatherinterests. Here, at last, after four years of the most heroic effort, were the raw materials out of which a telephone business could beconstructed. But who was to be the builder, and where was he to befound?

One morning the indefatigable Hubbard solved the problem. "Watson, " hesaid, "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 letterfrom Hubbard, offering him the position of General Manager, at a salaryof thirty-five hundred dollars a year. "We rely, " Hubbard said, "uponyour executive ability, your fidelity, and unremitting zeal. " Theyoung man replied, in one of those dignified letters more usual in thenineteenth than in the twentieth century. "My faith in the success ofthe enterprise is such that I am willing to trust to it, " he wrote, "andI have confidence that we shall establish the harmony and cooperationthat is essential to the success of an enterprise of this kind. " Oneweek later the young man, Theodore N. Vail, took his seat as GeneralManager in a tiny office in Reade Street, New York, and the building ofthe business began. 

This arrival of Vail at the critical moment emphasized the fact thatBell was one of the most fortunate of inventors. He was not robbed ofhis invention, as might easily have happened. One by one there arrivedto help him a number of able men, with all the various abilities thatthe changing situation required. There was such a focussing of factorsthat the whole matter appeared to have been previously rehearsed. Nosooner had Bell appeared on the stage than his supporting players, eachin his turn, received his cue and took part in the action of the drama. There was not one of these men who could have done the work of anyother. Each was distinctive and indispensable. Bell invented thetelephone; Watson constructed it; Sanders financed it; Hubbardintroduced it; and Vail put it on a business basis. 

The new General Manager had, of course, no experience in the telephonebusiness. Neither had any one else. But he, like Bell, came to his taskwith a most surprising fitness. He was a member of the historic Vailfamily of Morristown, New Jersey, which had operated the Speedwell IronWorks for four or five generations. His grand-uncle Stephen had builtthe engines for the Savannah, the first American steamship to cross theAtlantic Ocean; and his cousin Alfred was the friend and co-worker ofMorse, the inventor of the telegraph. Morse had lived for several yearsat the Vail homestead in Morristown; and it was here that he erectedhis first telegraph line, a three-mile circle around the Iron Works, in1838. He and Alfred Vail experimented side by side in the making of thetelegraph, and Vail eventually received a fortune for his share of theMorse patent. 

Thus it happened that young Theodore Vail learned the dramatic storyof Morse at his mother's knee. As a boy, he played around the firsttelegraph line, and learned to put messages on the wire. His favoritetoy was a little telegraph that he constructed for himself. Attwenty-two he went West, in the vague hope of possessing a bonanza farm;then he swung back into telegraphy, and in a few years found himself inthe Government Mail Service at Washington. By 1876, he was at the headof this Department, which he completely reorganized. He introduced thebag system in postal cars, and made war on waste and clumsiness. Byvirtue of this position he was the one man in the United States who hada comprehensive view of all railways and telegraphs. He was much moreapt, consequently, than other men to develop the idea of a nationaltelephone system. 

While in the midst of this bureaucratic house-cleaning he met Hubbard, who had just been appointed by President Hayes as the head of acommission on mail transportation. He and Hubbard were constantly throwntogether, on trains and in hotels; and as Hubbard invariably had a pairof telephones in his valise, the two men soon became co-enthusiasts. Vail found himself painting brain-pictures of the future of thetelephone, and by the time that he was asked to become its GeneralManager, he had become so confident that, as he said afterwards, he "waswilling to leave a Government job with a small salary for a telephonejob with no salary. "

So, just as Amos Kendall had left the post office service thirty yearsbefore to establish the telegraph business, Theodore N. Vail left thepost office service to establish the telephone business. He had beenin authority over thirty-five hundred postal employees, and was thedeveloper of a system that covered every inhabited portion of thecountry. Consequently, he had a quality of experience that was immenselyvaluable in straightening out the tangled affairs of the telephone. Lineby line, he mapped out a method, a policy, a system. He introduceda larger view of the telephone business, and swept off the table allschemes for selling out. He persuaded half a dozen of his post officefriends to buy stock, so that in less than two months the first "BellTelephone Company" was organized, with $450, 000 capital and a service oftwelve thousand telephones. 

Vail's first step, naturally, was to stiffen up the backbone of thislittle company, and to prevent the Western Union from frightening itinto a surrender. He immediately sent a copy of Bell's patent to everyagent, with orders to hold the fort against all opposition. "We havethe only original telephone patents, " he wrote; "we have organized andintroduced the business, and we do not propose to have it taken from usby any corporation. " To one agent, who was showing the white feather, hewrote:

"You have too great an idea of the Western Union. If it was all massedin your one city you might well fear it; but it is represented there byone man only, and he has probably as much as he can attend to outside ofthe telephone. For you to acknowledge that you cannot compete with hisinfluence when you make it your special business, is hardly the thing. There may be a dozen concerns that will all go to the Western Union, butthey will not take with them all their friends. I would advise that yougo ahead and keep your present advantage. We must organize companieswith sufficient vitality to carry on a fight, as it is simply useless toget a company started that will succumb to the first bit of oppositionit may encounter. "

Next, having encouraged his thoroughly alarmed agents, Vail proceeded tobuild up a definite business policy. He stiffened up the contracts andmade them good for five years only. He confined each agent to one place, and reserved all rights to connect one city with another. He establisheda department to collect and protect any new inventions that concernedthe telephone. He agreed to take part of the royalties in stock, whenany local company preferred to pay its debts in this way. And he tooksteps toward standardizing all telephonic apparatus by controlling thefactories that made it. 

These various measures were part of Vail's plan to create a nationaltelephone system. His central idea, from the first, was not the mereleasing of telephones, but rather the creation of a Federal company thatwould be a permanent partner in the entire telephone business. Even inthat day of small things, and amidst the confusion and rough-and-tumbleof pioneering, he worked out the broad policy that prevails to-day; andthis goes far to explain the fact that there are in the United Statestwice as many telephones as there are in all other countries combined. 

Vail arrived very much as Blucher did at the battle of Waterloo--atrifle late, but in time to prevent the telephone forces from beingrouted by the Old Guard of the Western Union. He was scarcely seated inhis managerial chair, when the Western Union threw the entire Bell armyinto confusion by launching the Edison transmitter. Edison, who wasat that time fairly started in his career of wizardry, had made aninstrument of marvellous alertness. It was beyond all argument superiorto the telephones then in use and the lessees of Bell telephonesclamored with one voice for "a transmitter as good as Edison's. " This, of course, could not be had in a moment, and the five months thatfollowed were the darkest days in the childhood of the telephone. 

How to compete with the Western Union, which had this superiortransmitter, a host of agents, a network of wires, forty millions ofcapital, and a first claim upon all newspapers, hotels, railroads, andrights of way--that was the immediate problem that confronted the newGeneral Manager. Every inch of progress had to be fought for. Severalof his captains deserted, and he was compelled to take control of theirunprofitable exchanges. There was scarcely a mail that did not bring himsome bulletin of discouragement or defeat. 

In the effort to conciliate a hostile public, the telephone rates hadeverywhere been made too low. Hubbard had set a price of twenty dollarsa year, for the use of two telephones on a private line; and whenexchanges were started, the rate was seldom more than three dollarsa month. There were deadheads in abundance, mostly officials andpoliticians. In St. Louis, one of the few cities that charged asufficient price, nine-tenths of the merchants refused to becomesubscribers. In Boston, the first pay-station ran three months before itearned a dollar. Even as late as 1880, when the first National TelephoneConvention was held at Niagara Falls, one of the delegates expressed thegeneral situation very correctly when he said: "We were all in a stateof enthusiastic uncertainty. We were full of hope, yet when we analyzedthose hopes they were very airy indeed. There was probably not onecompany that could say it was making a cent, nor even that it EXPECTEDto make a cent. "

Especially in the largest cities, where the Western Union had mostpower, the lives of the telephone pioneers were packed with hardshipsand adventures. In Philadelphia, for instance, a resolute young mannamed Thomas E. Cornish was attacked as though he had suddenly become apublic enemy, when he set out to establish the first telephone service. No official would grant him a permit to string wires. His workmen werearrested. The printing-telegraph men warned him that he must either quitor be driven out. When he asked capitalists for money, they replied thathe might as well expect to lease jew's-harps as telephones. Finally, hewas compelled to resort to strategy where argument had failed. He hadreceived an order from Colonel Thomas Scott, who wanted a wire betweenhis house and his office. Colonel Scott was the President of thePennsylvania Railroad, and therefore a man of the highest prestige inthe city. So as soon as Cornish had put this line in place, he kept hismen at work stringing other lines. When the police interfered, he showedthem Colonel Scott's signature and was let alone. In this way he putfifteen wires up before the trick was discovered; and soon afterwards, with eight subscribers, he founded the first Philadelphia exchange. 

As may be imagined, such battling as this did not put much money intothe treasury of the parent company; and the letters written by Sandersat this time prove that it was in a hard plight. 

The following was one of the queries put to Hubbard by the overburdenedSanders:

"How on earth do you expect me to meet a draft of two hundred andseventy-five dollars without a dollar in the treasury, and with a debtof thirty thousand dollars staring us in the face?" "Vail's salary issmall enough, " he continued in a second letter, "but as to where it iscoming from I am not so clear. Bradley is awfully blue and discouraged. Williams is tormenting me for money and my personal credit will notstand everything. I have advanced the Company two thousand dollarsto-day, and Williams must have three thousand dollars more this month. His pay-day has come and his capital will not carry him another inch. If Bradley throws up his hand, I will unfold to you my last desperateplan. "

And if the company had little money, it had less credit. Once when Vailhad ordered a small bill of goods from a merchant named Tillotson, of15 Dey Street, New York, the merchant replied that the goods were ready, and so was the bill, which was seven dollars. By a strange coincidence, the magnificent building of the New York Telephone Company stands to-dayon the site of Tillotson's store. 

Month after month, the little Bell Company lived from hand to mouth. Nosalaries were paid in full. Often, for weeks, they were not paid at all. In Watson's note-book there are such entries during this period as"Lent Bell fifty cents, " "Lent Hubbard twenty cents, " "Bought one bottlebeer--too bad can't have beer every day. " More than once Hubbard wouldhave gone hungry had not Devonshire, the only clerk, shared with himthe contents of a dinner-pail. Each one of the little group was beset bytaunts and temptations. Watson was offered ten thousand dollars forhis one-tenth interest, and hesitated three days before refusing it. Railroad companies offered Vail a salary that was higher and sure, if hewould superintend their mail business. And as for Sanders, his folly wasthe talk of Haverhill. One Haverhill capitalist, E. J. M. Hale, stoppedhim on the street and asked, "Have n't you got a good leather business, Mr. Sanders?" "Yes, " replied Sanders. "Well, " said Hale, "you had betterattend to it and quit playing on wind instruments. " Sanders's banker, too, became uneasy on one occasion and requested him to call at thebank. "Mr. Sanders, " he said, "I will be obliged if you will take thattelephone stock out of the bank, and give me in its place your note forthirty thousand dollars. I am expecting the examiner here in a few days, and I don't want to get caught with that stuff in the bank. "

Then, in the very midnight of this depression, poor Bell returned fromEngland, whither he and his bride had gone on their honeymoon, andannounced that he had no money; that he had failed to establish atelephone business in England; and that he must have a thousand dollarsat once to pay his urgent debts. He was thoroughly discouraged and sick. As he lay in the Massachusetts General Hospital, he wrote a cry for helpto the embattled little company that was making its desperate fight toprotect his patents. "Thousands of telephones are now in operation inall parts of the country, " he said, "yet I have not yet received onecent from my invention. On the contrary, I am largely out of pocketby my researches, as the mere value of the profession that I havesacrificed during my three years' work, amounts to twelve thousanddollars. "

Fortunately, there came, in almost the same mail with Bell's letter, another letter from a young Bostonian named Francis Blake, with the goodnews that he had invented a transmitter as satisfactory as Edison's, andthat he would prefer to sell it for stock instead of cash. If ever a mancame as an angel of light, that man was Francis Blake. The possession ofhis transmitter instantly put the Bell Company on an even footing withthe Western Union, in the matter of apparatus. It encouraged the fewcapitalists who had invested money, and it stirred others to comeforward. The general business situation had by this time becomemore settled, and in four months the company had twenty-two thousandtelephones in use, and had reorganized into the National Bell TelephoneCompany, with $850, 000 capital and with Colonel Forbes as its firstPresident. Forbes now picked up the load that had been carried so longby Sanders. As the son of an East India merchant and the son-in-law ofRalph Waldo Emerson, he was a Bostonian of the Brahmin caste. He wasa big, four-square man who was both popular and efficient; and hisleadership at this crisis was of immense value. 

This reorganization put the telephone business into the hands ofcompetent business men at every point. It brought the heroic andexperimental period to an end. From this time onwards the telephonehad strong friends in the financial world. It was being attacked bythe Western Union and by rival inventors who were jealous of Bell'sachievement. It was being half-starved by cheap rates and crippled byclumsy apparatus. It was being abused and grumbled at by an impatientpublic. But the art of making and marketing it had at last been builtup into a commercial enterprise. It was now a business, fighting for itslife. 

CHAPTER III. THE HOLDING OF THE BUSINESS

For seventeen months no one disputed Bell's claim to be the originalinventor of the telephone. All the honor, such as it was, had been givento him freely, and no one came forward to say that it was not rightfullyhis. No one, so far as we know, had any strong desire to do so. No oneconceived that the telephone would ever be any more than a whimsicaloddity of science. It was so new, so unexpected, that from LordKelvin down to the messenger boys in the telegraph offices, it was anincomprehensible surprise. But after Bell had explained his inventionin public lectures before more than twenty thousand people, after ithad been on exhibition for months at the Philadelphia Centennial, afterseveral hundred articles on it had appeared in newspapers and scientificmagazines, and after actual sales of telephones had been made invarious parts of the country, there began to appear such a succession ofclaimants and infringers that the forgetful public came to believe thatthe telephone, like most inventions, was the product of many minds. 

Just as Morse, who was the sole inventor of the American telegraph in1837, was confronted by sixty-two rivals in 1838, so Bell, who was thesole inventor in 1876, found himself two years later almost mobbed bythe "Tichborne claimants" of the telephone. The inventors who had beenhis competitors in the attempt to produce a musical telegraph, persuadedthemselves that they had unconsciously done as much as he. Any possessorof a telegraphic patent, who had used the common phrase "talking wire, "had a chance to build up a plausible story of prior invention. Andothers came forward with claims so vague and elusive that Bell wouldscarcely have been more surprised if the heirs of Goethe had demanded ashare of the telephone royalties on the ground that Faust had spoken of"making a bridge through the moving air. "

This babel of inventors and pretenders amazed Bell and disconcerted hisbackers. But it was no more than might have been expected. Here wasa patent--"the most valuable single patent ever issued"--and yet theinvention itself was so simple that it could be duplicated easily by anysmart boy or any ordinary mechanic. The making of a telephone was likethe trick of Columbus standing an egg on end. Nothing was easier tothose who knew how. And so it happened that, as the crude littlemodel of Bell's original telephone lay in the Patent Office open andunprotected except by a few phrases that clever lawyers might evade, there sprang up inevitably around it the most costly and persistentPatent War that any country has ever known, continuing for eleven yearsand comprising SIX HUNDRED LAWSUITS. 

The first attack upon the young telephone business was made by theWestern Union Telegraph Company. It came charging full tilt upon Bell, driving three inventors abreast--Edison, Gray, and Dolbear. It expectedan easy victory; in fact, the disparity between the two opponents was soevident, that there seemed little chance of a contest of any kind. "The Western Union will swallow up the telephone people, " said publicopinion, "just as it has already swallowed up all improvements intelegraphy. "

At that time, it should be remembered, the Western Union was the onlycorporation that was national in its extent. It was the most powerfulelectrical company in the world, and, as Bell wrote to his parents, "probably the largest corporation that ever existed. " It had behind itnot only forty millions of capital, but the prestige of the Vanderbilts, and the favor of financiers everywhere. Also, it met the telephonepioneers at every point because it, too, was a WIRE company. It ownedrights-of-way along roads and on house-tops. It had a monopoly of hotelsand railroad offices. No matter in what direction the Bell Companyturned, the live wire of the Western Union lay across its path. 

From the first, the Western Union relied more upon its strength thanupon the merits of its case. Its chief electrical expert, Frank L. Pope, had made a six months' examination of the Bell patents. He had boughtevery book in the United States and Europe that was likely to have anyreference to the transmission of speech, and employed a professorwho knew eight languages to translate them. He and his men ransackedlibraries and patent offices; they rummaged and sleuthed andinterviewed; and found nothing of any value. In his final report tothe Western Union, Mr. Pope announced that there was no way to makea telephone except Bell's way, and advised the purchase of the Bellpatents. "I am entirely unable to discover any apparatus or methodanticipating the invention of Bell as a whole, " he said; "and I concludethat his patent is valid. " But the officials of the great corporationrefused to take this report seriously. They threw it aside and employedEdison, Gray, and Dolbear to devise a telephone that could be put intocompetition with Bell's. 

As we have seen in the previous chapter, there now came a periodof violent competition which is remembered as the Dark Ages of thetelephone business. The Western Union bought out several of the Bellexchanges and opened up a lively war on the others. As befitting itssize, it claimed everything. It introduced Gray as the original inventorof the telephone, and ordered its lawyers to take action at once againstthe Bell Company for infringement of the Gray patent. This high-handedaction, it hoped, would most quickly bring the little Bell group intoa humble and submissive frame of mind. Every morning the Western Unionlooked to see the white flag flying over the Bell headquarters. Butno white flag appeared. On the contrary, the news came that the BellCompany had secured two eminent lawyers and were ready to give battle. 

The case began in the Autumn of 1878 and lasted for a year. Then itcame to a sudden and most unexpected ending. The lawyer-in-chief ofthe Western Union was George Gifford, who was perhaps the ablest patentattorney of his day. He was versed in patent lore from Alpha to Omega;and as the trial proceeded, he became convinced that the Bell patent wasvalid. He notified the Western Union confidentially, of course, that itscase could not be proven, and that "Bell was the original inventor ofthe telephone. " The best policy, he suggested, was to withdraw theirclaims and make a settlement. This wise advice was accepted, and thenext day the white flag was hauled up, not by the little group of Bellfighters, who were huddled together in a tiny, two-room office, but bythe mighty Western Union itself, which had been so arrogant when theencounter began. 

A committee of three from each side was appointed, and after months ofdisputation, a treaty of peace was drawn up and signed. By the terms ofthis treaty the Western Union agreed--

(1) To admit that Bell was the original inventor. 

(2) To admit that his patents were valid. 

(3) To retire from the telephone business. 

The Bell Company, in return for this surrender, agreed--

(1) To buy the Western Union telephone system. 

(2) To pay the Western Union a royalty of twenty per cent on alltelephone rentals. 

(3) To keep out of the telegraph business. 

This agreement, which was to remain in force for seventeen years, was amaster-stroke of diplomacy on the part of the Bell Company. It was theMagna Charta of the telephone. It transformed a giant competitor intoa friend. It added to the Bell System fifty-six thousand telephones infifty-five cities. And it swung the valiant little company up to such apinnacle of prosperity that its stock went skyrocketing until it touchedone thousand dollars a share. 

The Western Union had lost its case, for several very simple reasons:It had tried to operate a telephone system on telegraphic lines, aplan that has invariably been unsuccessful, it had a low idea of thepossibilities of the telephone business; and its already busy agents hadlittle time or knowledge or enthusiasm to give to the new enterprise. With all its power, it found itself outfought by this compact body ofpicked men, who were young, zealous, well-handled, and protected by amost invulnerable patent. 

The Bell Telephone now took its place with the Telegraph, the Railroad, the Steamboat, the Harvester, and the other necessities of a civilizedcountry. Its pioneer days were over. There was no more ridicule andincredulity. Every one knew that the Bell people had whipped theWestern Union, and hastened to join in the grand Te Deum of applause. Within five months from the signing of the agreement, there had to bea reorganization; and the American Bell Telephone Company was created, with six million dollars capital. In the following year, 1881, twelvehundred new towns and cities were marked on the telephone map, andthe first dividends were paid--$178, 500. And in 1882 there came sucha telephone boom that the Bell System was multiplied by two, with morethan a million dollars of gross earnings. 

At this point all the earliest pioneers of the telephone, except Vail, pass out of its history. Thomas Sanders sold his stock for somewhat lessthan a million dollars, and presently lost most of it in a Colorado goldmine. His mother, who had been so good a friend to Bell, had her fortunedoubled. Gardiner G. Hubbard withdrew from business life, and as it wasimpossible for a man of his ardent temperament to be idle, he plungedinto the National Geographical Society. He was a Colonel Sellers whosedream of millions (for the telephone) had come true; and when he died, in 1897, he was rich both in money and in the affection of his friends. Charles Williams, in whose workshop the first telephones were made, soldhis factory to the Bell Company in 1881 for more money than he had everexpected to possess. Thomas A. Watson resigned at the same time, findinghimself no longer a wage-worker but a millionaire. Several years laterhe established a shipbuilding plant near Boston, which grew until itemployed four thousand workmen and had built half a dozen warships forthe United States Navy. 

As for Bell, the first cause of the telephone business, he did what atrue scientific Bohemian might have been expected to do; he gave allhis stock to his bride on their marriage-day and resumed his work as aninstructor of deaf-mutes. Few kings, if any, had ever given so rich awedding present; and certainly no one in any country ever obtained andtossed aside an immense fortune as incidentally as did Bell. When theBell Company offered him a salary of ten thousand dollars a year toremain its chief inventor, he refused the offer cheerfully on the groundthat he could not "invent to order. " In 1880, the French Government gavehim the Volta Prize of fifty thousand francs and the Cross of the Legionof Honor. He has had many honors since then, and many interests. Hehas been for thirty years one of the most brilliant and picturesquepersonalities in American public life. But none of his laterachievements can in any degree compare with what he did in a cellar inSalem, at twenty-eight years of age. 

They had all become rich, these first friends of the telephone, but notfabulously so. There was not at that time, nor has there been since, anyone who became a multimillionaire by the sale of telephone service. Ifthe Bell Company had sold its stock at the highest price reached, in1880, it would have received less than nine million dollars--a hugesum, but not too much to pay for the invention of the telephone and thebuilding up of a new art and a new industry. It was not as much as thevalue of the eggs laid during the last twelve months by the hens ofIowa. 

But, as may be imagined, when the news of the Western Union agreementbecame known, the story of the telephone became a fairy tale of success. Theodore Vail was given a banquet by his old-time friends in theWashington postal service, and toasted as "the Monte Cristo of theTelephone. " It was said that the actual cost of the Bell plant was onlyone-twenty-fifth of its capital, and that every four cents of investmenthad thus become a dollar. Even Jay Gould, carried beyond his usualcaution by these stories, ran up to New Haven and bought its telephonecompany, only to find out later that its earnings were less than itsexpenses. 

Much to the bewilderment of the Bell Company, it soon learned that thetroubles of wealth are as numerous as those of poverty. It was beset bya throng of promoters and stock-jobbers, who fell upon it and uponthe public like a swarm of seventeen-year locusts. In three years, one hundred and twenty-five competing companies were started, in opendefiance of the Bell patents. The main object of these companies wasnot, like that of the Western Union, to do a legitimate telephonebusiness, but to sell stock to the public. The face value of their stockwas $225, 000, 000, although few of them ever sent a message. One companyof unusual impertinence, without money or patents, had capitalized itsaudacity at $15, 000, 000. 

How to HOLD the business that had been established--that was now theproblem. None of the Bell partners had been mere stock-jobbers. At onetime they had even taken a pledge not to sell any of their stock tooutsiders. They had financed their company in a most honest and simpleway; and they were desperately opposed to the financial banditti whosepurpose was to transform the telephone business into a cheat and agamble. At first, having held their own against the Western Union, theyexpected to make short work of the stock-jobbers. But it was a vainhope. These bogus companies, they found, did not fight in the open, asthe Western Union had done. 

All manner of injurious rumors were presently set afloat concerningthe Bell patent. Other inventors--some of them honest men, and someshameless pretenders--were brought forward with strangely concoctedtales of prior invention. The Granger movement was at that time a strongpolitical factor in the Middle West, and its blind fear of patents and"monopolies" was turned aggressively against the Bell Company. A fewSenators and legitimate capitalists were lifted up as the figureheads ofthe crusade. And a loud hue-and-cry was raised in the newspapers against"high rates and monopoly" to distract the minds of the people from thereal issue of legitimate business versus stock-company bubbles. 

The most plausible and persistent of all the various inventors whosnatched at Bell's laurels, was Elisha Gray. He refused to abide by theadverse decision of the court. Several years after his defeat, he cameforward with new weapons and new methods of attack. He became morehostile and irreconcilable; and until his death, in 1901, neverrenounced his claim to be the original inventor of the telephone. 

The reason for this persistence is very evident. Gray was a professionalinventor, a highly competent man who had begun his career as ablacksmith's apprentice, and risen to be a professor of Oberlin. Hemade, during his lifetime, over five million dollars by his patents. In 1874, he and Bell were running a neck-and-neck race to see who couldfirst invent a musical telegraph--when, presto! Bell suddenly turnedaside, because of his acoustical knowledge, and invented the telephone, while Gray kept straight ahead. Like all others who were in quest of abetter telegraph instrument, Gray had glimmerings of the possibility ofsending speech by wire, and by one of the strangest of coincidenceshe filed a caveat on the subject on the SAME DAY that Bell filed theapplication for a patent. Bell had arrived first. As the record bookshows, the fifth entry on that day was: "A. G. Bell, $15"; and thethirty-ninth entry was "E. Gray, $10. "

There was a vast difference between Gray's caveat and Bell'sapplication. A caveat is a declaration that the writer has NOT inventeda thing, but believes that he is about to do so; while an APPLICATION isa declaration that the writer has already perfected the invention. ButGray could never forget that he had seemed to be, for a time, so closeto the golden prize; and seven years after he had been set aside by theWestern Union agreement, he reappeared with claims that had grown largerand more definite. 

When all the evidence in the various Gray lawsuits is sifted out, thereappear to have been three distinctly different Grays: first, Gray theSCOFFER, who examined Bell's telephone at the Centennial and said itwas "nothing but the old lover's telegraph. It is impossible to makea practical speaking telephone on the principle shown by ProfessorBell. . . . The currents are too feeble"; second, Gray the CONVERT, whowrote frankly to Bell in 1877, "I do not claim the credit of inventingit"; and third, Gray the CLAIMANT, who endeavored to prove in 1886 thathe was the original inventor. His real position in the matter was oncewell and wittily described by his partner, Enos M. Barton, who said: "Ofall the men who DIDN'T invent the telephone, Gray was the nearest. "

It is now clearly seen that the telephone owes nothing to Gray. Thereare no Gray telephones in use in any country. Even Gray himself, as headmitted in court, failed when he tried to make a telephone on the lineslaid down in his caveat. The final word on the whole matter was recentlyspoken by George C. Maynard, who established the telephone business inthe city of Washington. Said Mr. Maynard:

"Mr. Gray was an intimate and valued friend of mine, but it is nodisrespect to his memory to say that on some points involved in thetelephone matter, he was mistaken. No subject was ever so thoroughlyinvestigated as the invention of the speaking telephone. No patent hasever been submitted to such determined assault from every direction asBell's; and no inventor has ever been more completely vindicated. Bellwas the first inventor, and Gray was not. "

After Gray, the weightiest challenger who came against Bell wasProfessor Amos E. Dolbear, of Tufts College. He, like Gray, had writtena letter of applause to Bell in 1877. "I congratulate you, sir, " hesaid, "upon your very great invention, and I hope to see it supplantall forms of existing telegraphs, and that you will be successful inobtaining the wealth and honor which is your due. " But one year later, Dolbear came to view with an opposition telephone. It was not animitation of Bell's, he insisted, but an improvement upon an electricaldevice made by a German named Philip Reis, in 1861. 

Thus there appeared upon the scene the so-called "Reis telephone, " whichwas not a telephone at all, in any practical sense, but which servedwell enough for nine years or more as a weapon to use against the Bellpatents. Poor Philip Reis himself, the son of a baker in Frankfort, Germany, had hoped to make a telephone, but he had failed. His machinewas operated by a "make-and-break" current, and so could not carrythe infinitely delicate vibrations made by the human voice. It couldtransmit the pitch of a sound, but not the QUALITY. At its best, itcould carry a tune, but never at any time a spoken sentence. Reis, inhis later years, realized that his machine could never be used for thetransmission of conversation; and in a letter to a friend he tells of acode of signals that he has invented. 

Bell had once, during his three years of experimenting, made a Reismachine, although at that time he had not seen one. But he soon threwit aside, as of no practical value. As a teacher of acoustics, Bell knewthat the one indispensable requirement of a telephone is that it shalltransmit the WHOLE of a sound, and not merely the pitch of it. Suchscientists as Lord Kelvin, Joseph Henry, and Edison had seen the littleReis instrument years before Bell invented the telephone; but theyregarded it as a mere musical toy. It was "not in any sense a speakingtelephone, " said Lord Kelvin. And Edison, when trying to put the Reismachine in the most favorable light, admitted humorously that when heused a Reis transmitter he generally "knew what was coming; and knowingwhat was coming, even a Reis transmitter, pure and simple, reproducessounds which seem almost like that which was being transmitted; butwhen the man at the other end did not know what was coming, it was veryseldom that any word was recognized. "

In the course of the Dolbear lawsuit, a Reis machine was brought intocourt, and created much amusement. It was able to squeak, but not tospeak. Experts and professors wrestled with it in vain. It refusedto transmit one intelligible sentence. "It CAN speak, but it WON'T, "explained one of Dolbear's lawyers. It is now generally known that whilea Reis machine, when clogged and out of order, would transmit a word ortwo in an imperfect way, it was built on wrong lines. It was no more atelephone than a wagon is a sleigh, even though it is possible to chainthe wheels and make them slide for a foot or two. Said Judge Lowell, inrendering his famous decision:

"A century of Reis would never have produced a speaking telephone bymere improvement of construction. It was left for Bell to discover thatthe failure was due not to workmanship but to the principle which wasadopted as the basis of what had to be done. . . . Bell discovered a newart--that of transmitting speech by electricity, and his claim is not asbroad as his invention. . . . To follow Reis is to fail; but to follow Bellis to succeed. "

After the victory over Dolbear, the Bell stock went soaring skywards;and the higher it went, the greater were the number of infringers andblowers of stock bubbles. To bait the Bell Company became almost anational sport. Any sort of claimant, with any sort of wild tale ofprior invention, could find a speculator to support him. On they came, a motley array, "some in rags, some on nags, and some in velvet gowns. "One of them claimed to have done wonders with an iron hoop and a filein 1867; a second had a marvellous table with glass legs; a third sworethat he had made a telephone in 1860, but did not know what it was untilhe saw Bell's patent; and a fourth told a vivid story of having hearda bullfrog croak via a telegraph wire which was strung into a certaincellar in Racine, in 1851. 

This comic opera phase came to a head in the famous Drawbaugh case, which lasted for nearly four years, and filled ten thousand pages withits evidence. Having failed on Reis, the German, the opponents of Bellnow brought forward an American inventor named Daniel Drawbaugh, andopened up a noisy newspaper campaign. To secure public sympathy forDrawbaugh, it was said that he had invented a complete telephone andswitchboard before 1876, but was in such "utter and abject poverty" thathe could not get himself a patent. Five hundred witnesses were examined;and such a general turmoil was aroused that the Bell lawyers werecompelled to take the attack seriously, and to fight back with everypound of ammunition they possessed. 

The fact about Drawbaugh is that he was a mechanic in a country villagenear Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He was ingenious but not inventive; andloved to display his mechanical skill before the farmers and villagers. He was a subscriber to The Scientific American; and it had become thefixed habit of his life to copy other people's inventions and exhibitthem as his own. He was a trailer of inventors. More than fortyinstances of this imitative habit were shown at the trial, and hewas severely scored by the judge, who accused him of "deliberatelyfalsifying the facts. " His ruling passion of imitation, apparently, wasnot diminished by the loss of his telephone claims, as he came to publicview again in 1903 as a trailer of Marconi. 

Drawbaugh's defeat sent the Bell stock up once more, and brought on aXerxes' army of opposition which called itself the "Overland Company. "Having learned that no one claim-ant could beat Bell in the courts, thiscompany massed the losers together and came forward with a scrap-basketfull of patents. Several powerful capitalists undertook to pay theexpenses of this adventure. Wires were strung; stock was sold; and theenterprise looked for a time so genuine that when the Bell lawyers askedfor an injunction against it, they were refused. This was as hard a blowas the Bell people received in their eleven years of litigation; andthe Bell stock tumbled thirty-five points in a few days. Infringingcompanies sprang up like gourds in the night. And all went merrily withthe promoters until the Overland Company was thrown out of court, ashaving no evidence, except "the refuse and dregs of former cases--theheel-taps found in the glasses at the end of the frolic. "

But even after this defeat for the claimants, the frolic was not whollyended. They next planned to get through politics what they could not getthrough law; they induced the Government to bring suit for the annulmentof the Bell patents. It was a bold and desperate move, and enabled thepromoters of paper companies to sell stock for several years longer. Thewhole dispute was re-opened, from Gray to Drawbaugh. Every battle wasre-fought; and in the end, of course, the Government officials learnedthat they were being used to pull telephone chestnuts out of the fire. The case was allowed to die a natural death, and was informally droppedin 1896. 

In all, the Bell Company fought out thirteen lawsuits that were ofnational interest, and five that were carried to the Supreme Court inWashington. It fought out five hundred and eighty-seven other lawsuitsof various natures; and with the exception of two trivial contractsuits, IT NEVER LOST A CASE. 

Its experience is an unanswerable indictment of our system of protectinginventors. No inventor had ever a clearer title than Bell. The PatentOffice itself, in 1884, made an eighteen-months' investigation of alltelephone patents, and reported: "It is to Bell that the world owes thepossession of the speaking telephone. " Yet his patent was continuouslyunder fire, and never at any time secure. Stock companies whose papercapital totalled more than $500, 000, 000 were organized to break it down;and from first to last the success of the telephone was based muchless upon the monopoly of patents than upon the building up of a wellorganized business. 

Fortunately for Bell and the men who upheld him, they were defended bytwo master-lawyers who have seldom, if ever, had an equal for team workand efficiency--Chauncy Smith and James J. Storrow. These two men weremarvellously well mated. Smith was an old-fashioned attorney of theWebsterian sort, dignified, ponderous, and impressive. By 1878, when hecame in to defend the little Bell Company against the towering WesternUnion, Smith had become the most noted patent lawyer in Boston. He was alarge, thick-set man, a reminder of Benjamin Franklin, with clean-shavenface, long hair curling at the ends, frock coat, high collar, and beaverhat. 

Storrow, on the contrary, was a small man, quiet in manner, conversational in argument, and an encyclopedia of definite information. He was so thorough that, when he became a Bell lawyer, he first spentan entire summer at his country home in Petersham, studying the lawsof physics and electricity. He was never in the slightest degreespectacular. Once only, during the eleven years of litigation, didhe lose control of his temper. He was attacking the credibility of awitness whom he had put on the stand, but who had been tampered with bythe opposition lawyers. "But this man is your own witness, " protestedthe lawyers. "Yes, " shouted the usually soft-speaking Storrow; "he WASmy witness, but now he is YOUR LIAR. "

The efficiency of these two men was greatly increased by a third--ThomasD. Lockwood, who was chosen by Vail in 1879 to establish a PatentDepartment. Two years before, Lockwood had heard Bell lecture inChickering Hall, New York, and was a "doubting Thomas. " But a closerstudy of the telephone transformed him into an enthusiast. Having amemory like a filing system, and a knack for invention, Lockwood waswell fitted to create such a department. He was a man born for theplace. And he has seen the number of electrical patents grow from a fewhundred in 1878 to eighty thousand in 1910. 

These three men were the defenders of the Bell patents. As Vail built upthe young telephone business, they held it from being torn to shredsin an orgy of speculative competition. Smith prepared the comprehensiveplan of defence. By his sagacity and experience he was enabled tomark out the general principles upon which Bell had a right to stand. Usually, he closed the case, and he was immensely effective as he woulddeclaim, in his deep voice: "I submit, Your Honor, that the literatureof the world does not afford a passage which states how the human voicecan be electrically transmitted, previous to the patent of Mr. Bell. "His death, like his life, was dramatic. He was on his feet in thecourtroom, battling against an infringer, when, in the middle ofa sentence, he fell to the floor, overcome by sickness and theresponsibilities he had carried for twelve years. Storrow, in adifferent way, was fully as indispensable as Smith. It was he who builtup the superstructure of the Bell defence. He was a master of details. His brain was keen and incisive; and some of his briefs will be studiedas long as the art of telephony exists. He might fairly have beencompared, in action, to a rapid-firing Gatling gun; while Smith was ahundred-ton cannon, and Lockwood was the maker of the ammunition. 

Smith and Storrow had three main arguments that never were, and nevercould be, answered. Fifty or more of the most eminent lawyers of thatday tried to demolish these arguments, and failed. The first wasBell's clear, straightforward story of HOW HE DID IT, which rebuked andconfounded the mob of pretenders. The second was the historical factthat the most eminent electrical scientists of Europe and Americahad seen Bell's telephone at the Centennial and had declared it to beNEW--"not only new but marvellous, " said Tyndall. And the third wasthe very significant fact that no one challenged Bell's claim to be theoriginal inventor of the telephone until his patent was seventeen monthsold. 

The patent itself, too, was a remarkable document. It was a Gibraltar ofsecurity to the Bell Company. For eleven years it was attacked from allsides, and never dented. It covered an entire art, yet it was sustainedduring its whole lifetime. Printed in full, it would make ten pages ofthis book; but the core of it is in the last sentence: "The method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically, by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrationsof the air accompanying the said vocal or other sounds. " These wordsexpressed an idea that had never been written before. It could not beevaded or overcome. There were only thirty-two words, but in six yearsthese words represented an investment of a million dollars apiece. 

Now that the clamor of this great patent war has died away, it isevident that Bell received no more credit and no more reward than hedeserved. There was no telephone until he made one, and since he madeone, no one has found out any other way. Hundreds of clever men havebeen trying for more than thirty years to outrival Bell, and yet everytelephone in the world is still made on the plan that Bell discovered. 

No inventor who preceded Bell did more, in the invention of thetelephone, than to help Bell indirectly, in the same way that Fra Mauroand Toscanelli helped in the discovery of America by making the map andchart that were used by Columbus. Bell was helped by his father, whotaught him the laws of acoustics; by Helmholtz, who taught him theinfluence of magnets upon sound vibrations; by Koenig and Leon Scott, who taught him the infinite variety of these vibrations; by Dr. ClarenceJ. Blake, who gave him a human ear for his experiments; and by JosephHenry and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who encouraged him to persevere. Ina still more indirect way, he was helped by Morse's invention ofthe telegraph; by Faraday's discovery of the phenomena of magneticinduction; by Sturgeon's first electro-magnet; and by Volta's electricbattery. All that scientists had achieved, from Galileo and Newton toFranklin and Simon Newcomb, helped Bell in a general way, by creating ascientific atmosphere and habit of thought. But in the actual making ofthe telephone, there was no one with Bell nor before him. He invented itfirst, and alone. 

CHAPTER IV. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ART

Four wire-using businesses were already in the field when the telephonewas born: the fire-alarm, burglar-alarm, telegraph, and messenger-boyservice; and at first, as might have been expected, the humble littletelephone was huddled in with these businesses as a sort of poorrelation. To the general public, it was a mere scientific toy; but therewere a few men, not many, in these wire-stringing trades, who saw aglimmering chance of creating a telephone business. They put telephoneson the wires that were then in use. As these became popular, they addedothers. Each of their customers wished to be able to talk to everyone else. And so, having undertaken to give telephone service, theypresently found themselves battling with the most intricate and bafflingengineering problem of modern times--the construction around thetele-phone of such a mechanism as would bring it into universal service. 

The first of these men was Thomas A. Watson, the young mechanic who hadbeen hired as Bell's helper. He began a work that to-day requires anarmy of twenty-six thousand people. He was for a couple of yearsthe total engineering and manufacturing department of the telephonebusiness, and by 1880 had taken out sixty patents for his ownsuggestions. It was Watson who took the telephone as Bell had made it, really a toy, with its diaphragm so delicate that a warm breath wouldput it out of order, and toughened it into a more rugged machine. Bellhad used a disc of fragile gold-beaters' skin with a patch of sheet-ironglued to the centre. He could not believe, for a time, that a disc ofall-iron would vibrate under the slight influence of a spoken word. Buthe and Watson noticed that when the patch was bigger the talking wasbetter, and presently they threw away the gold-beaters' skin and usedthe iron alone. 

Also, it was Watson who spent months experimenting with all sorts andsizes of iron discs, so as to get the one that would best convey thesound. If the iron was too thick, he discovered, the voice was shrilledinto a Punch-and-Judy squeal; and if it was too thin, the voice became ahollow and sepulchral groan, as if the speaker had his head in a barrel. Other months, too, were spent in finding out the proper size and shapefor the air cavity in front of the disc. And so, after the telephone hadbeen perfected, IN PRINCIPLE, a full year was required to lift it outof the class of scientific toys, and another year or two to present itproperly to the business world. 

Until 1878 all Bell telephone apparatus was made by Watson in CharlesWilliams's little shop in Court Street, Boston--a building long sincetransformed into a five-cent theatre. But the business soon grew too bigfor the shop. Orders fell five weeks behind. Agents stormed and fretted. Some action had to be taken quickly, so licenses were given to fourother manufacturers to make bells, switchboards, and so forth. By thistime the Western Electric Company of Chicago had begun to make theinfringing Gray-Edison telephones for the Western Union, so that therewere soon six groups of mechanics puzzling their wits over the newtalk-machinery. 

By 1880 there was plenty of telephonic apparatus being made, but intoo many different varieties. Not all the summer gowns of that yearpresented more styles and fancies. The next step, if there was to beany degree of uniformity, was plainly to buy and consolidate these sixcompanies; and by 1881 Vail had done this. It was the first merger intelephone history. It was a step of immense importance. Had it not beentaken, the telephone business would have been torn into fragments by thecivil wars between rival inventors. 

From this time the Western Electric became the headquarters oftelephonic apparatus. It was the Big Shop, all roads led to it. Nomatter where a new idea was born, sooner or later it came knocking atthe door of the Western Electric to receive a material body. Here werethe skilled workmen who became the hands of the telephone business. Andhere, too, were many of the ablest inventors and engineers, who did mostto develop the cables and switchboards of to-day. 

In Boston, Watson had resigned in 1882, and in his place, a year ortwo later stood a timely new arrival named E. T. Gilliland. Thisreally notable man was a friend in need to the telephone. He had beena manufacturer of electrical apparatus in Indianapolis, until Vail'spolicy of consolidation drew him into the central group of pioneersand pathfinders. For five years Gilliland led the way as a developerof better and cheaper equipment. He made the best of a most difficultsituation. He was so handy, so resourceful, that he invariably found away to unravel the mechanical tangles that perplexed the first telephoneagents, and this, too, without compelling them to spend large sums ofcapital. He took the ideas and apparatus that were then in existence, and used them to carry the telephone business through the most criticalperiod of its life, when there was little time or money to riskon experiments. He took the peg switchboard of the telegraph, forin-stance, and developed it to its highest point, to a point that wasnot even imagined possible by any one else. It was the most practicaland complete switchboard of its day, and held the field against allcomers until it was superseded by the modern type of board, vastly moreelaborate and expensive. 

By 1884, gathered around Gilliland in Boston and the Western Electricin Chicago, there came to be a group of mechanics and high-schoolgraduates, very young men, mostly, who had no reputations to lose;and who, partly for a living and mainly for a lark, plunged into thedifficulties of this new business that had at that time little historyand less prestige. These young adventurers, most of whom are stillalive, became the makers of industrial history. They were unquestionablythe founders of the present science of telephone engineering. 

The problem that they dashed at so lightheartedly was much larger thanany of them imagined. It was a Gibraltar of impossibilities. It was onthe face of it a fantastic nightmare of a task--to weave such a web ofwires, with interlocking centres, as would put any one telephone intouch with every other. There was no help for them in books or colleges. Watson, who had acquired a little knowledge, had become a shipbuilder. Electrical engineering, as a profession, was unborn. And as for theirtelegraphic experience, while it certainly helped them for a time, itstarted them in the wrong direction and led them to do many things whichhad afterwards to be undone. 

The peculiar electric current that these young pathfinders had to dealwith is perhaps the quickest, feeblest, and most elusive force inthe world. It is so amazing a thing that any description of it seemsirrational. It is as gentle as a touch of a baby sunbeam, and as swiftas the lightning flash. It is so small that the electric current of asingle incandescent lamp is greater 500, 000, 000 times. Cool a spoonfulof hot water just one degree, and the energy set free by the coolingwill operate a telephone for ten thousand years. Catch the fallingtear-drop of a child, and there will be sufficient water-power to carrya spoken message from one city to another. 

Such is the tiny Genie of the Wire that had to be protected and trainedinto obedience. It was the most defenceless of all electric sprites, and it had so many enemies. Enemies! The world was populous with itsenemies. There was the lightning, its elder brother, striking at itwith murderous blows. There were the telegraphic and light-and-powercurrents, its strong and malicious cousins, chasing and assaulting itwhenever it ventured too near. There were rain and sleet and snow andevery sort of moisture, lying in wait to abduct it. There were riversand trees and flecks of dust. It seemed as if all the known and unknownagencies of nature were in conspiracy to thwart or annihilate thisgentle little messenger who had been conjured into life by the wizardryof Alexander Graham Bell. 

All that these young men had received from Bell and Watson was that partof the telephone that we call the receiver. This was practically thesum total of Bell's invention, and remains to-day as he made it. It wasthen, and is yet, the most sensitive instrument that has ever been putto general use in any country. It opened up a new world of sound. Itwould echo the tramp of a fly that walked across a table, or repeat inNew Orleans the prattle of a child in New York. This was what theyoung men received, and this was all. There were no switchboards ofany account, no cables of any value, no wires that were in any senseadequate, no theory of tests or signals, no exchanges, NO TELEPHONESYSTEM OF ANY SORT WHATEVER. 

As for Bell's first telephone lines, they were as simple asclothes-lines. Each short little wire stood by itself, with oneinstrument at each end. There were no operators, switchboards, orexchanges. But there had now come a time when more than two personswanted to be in the same conversational group. This was a larger use ofthe telephone; and while Bell himself had foreseen it, he had not workedout a plan whereby it could be carried out. Here was the new problem, and a most stupendous one--how to link together three telephones, orthree hundred, or three thousand, or three million, so that any two ofthem could be joined at a moment's notice. 

And that was not all. These young men had not only to battle againstmystery and "the powers of the air"; they had not only to protect theirtiny electric messenger, and to create a system of wire highways alongwhich he could run up and down safely; they had to do more. They hadto make this system so simple and fool-proof that every one--every oneexcept the deaf and dumb--could use it without any previous experience. They had to educate Bell's Genie of the Wire so that he would not onlyobey his masters, but anybody--anybody who could speak to him in anylanguage. 

No doubt, if the young men had stopped to consider their life-work asa whole, some of them might have turned back. But they had no time tophilosophize. They were like the boy who learns how to swim by beingpushed into deep water. Once the telephone business was started, it hadto be kept going; and as it grew, there came one after another a seriesof congestions. Two courses were open; either the business had to bekept down to suit the apparatus, or the apparatus had to be developed tokeep pace with the business. The telephone men, most of them, at least, chose development; and the brilliant inventions that afterwards madesome of them famous were compelled by sheer necessity and desperation. 

The first notable improvement upon Bell's invention was the making ofthe transmitter, in 1877, by Emile Berliner. This, too, was a romance. Berliner, as a poor German youth of nineteen, had landed in CastleGarden in 1870 to seek his fortune. He got a job as "a sort ofbottle-washer at six dollars a week, " he says, in a chemical shop in NewYork. At nights he studied science in the free classes of Cooper Union. Then a druggist named Engel gave him a copy of Muller's book on physics, which was precisely the stimulus needed by his creative brain. In 1876he was fascinated by the telephone, and set out to construct one on adifferent plan. Several months later he had succeeded and was overjoyedto receive his first patent for a telephone transmitter. He had by thistime climbed up from his bottle-washing to be a clerk in a drygoodsstore in Washington; but he was still poor and as unpractical as mostinventors. Joseph Henry, the Sage of the American scientific world, was his friend, though too old to give him any help. Consequently, whenEdison, two weeks later, also invented a transmitter, the prior claimof Berliner was for a time wholly ignored. Later the Bell Companybought Berliner's patent and took up his side of the case. There wasa seemingly endless succession of delays--fourteen years of the mostvexatious delays--until finally the Supreme Court of the United Statesruled that Berliner, and not Edison, was the original inventor of thetransmitter. 

From first to last, the transmitter has been the product of severalminds. Its basic idea is the varying of the electric current by varyingthe pressure between two points. Bell unquestionably suggested it inhis famous patent, when he wrote of "increasing and diminishing theresistance. " Berliner was the first actually to construct one. Edisongreatly improved it by using soft carbon instead of a steel point. AKentucky professor, David E. Hughes, started a new line of developmentby adapting a Bell telephone into a "microphone, " a fantastic littleinstrument that would detect the noise made by a fly in walking acrossa table. Francis Blake, of Boston, changed a microphone into a practicaltransmitter. The Rev. Henry Hunnings, an English clergyman, hit upon thehappy idea of using carbon in the form of small granules. And one of theBell experts, named White, improved the Hunnings transmitter into itspresent shape. Both transmitter and receiver seem now to be as completean artificial tongue and ear as human ingenuity can make them. They havepersistently grown more elaborate, until today a telephone set, as itstands on a desk, contains as many as one hundred and thirty separatepieces, as well as a saltspoonful of glistening granules of carbon. 

Next after the transmitter came the problem of the MYSTERIOUS NOISES. This was, perhaps, the most weird and mystifying of all the telephoneproblems. The fact was that the telephone had brought within hearingdistance a new wonder-world of sound. All wires at that time weresingle, and ran into the earth at each end, making what was called a"grounded circuit. " And this connection with the earth, which is reallya big magnet, caused all manner of strange and uncouth noises on thetelephone wires. 

Noises! Such a jangle of meaningless noises had never been heard byhuman ears. There were spluttering and bubbling, jerking and rasping, whistling and screaming. There were the rustling of leaves, the croakingof frogs, the hissing of steam, and the flapping of birds' wings. Therewere clicks from telegraph wires, scraps of talk from other telephones, and curious little squeals that were unlike any known sound. The linesrunning east and west were noisier than the lines running north andsouth. The night was noisier than the day, and at the ghostly hour ofmidnight, for what strange reason no one knows, the babel was at itsheight. Watson, who had a fanciful mind, suggested that perhaps thesesounds were signals from the inhabitants of Mars or some other sociableplanet. But the matter-of-fact young telephonists agreed to lay theblame on "induction"--a hazy word which usually meant the naturalmeddlesomeness of electricity. 

Whatever else the mysterious noises were, they were a nuisance. The poorlittle telephone business was plagued almost out of its senses. It waslike a dog with a tin can tied to its tail. No matter where it went, itwas pursued by this unearthly clatter. "We were ashamed to present ourbills, " said A. A. Adee, one of the first agents; "for no matter howplainly a man talked into his telephone, his language was apt to soundlike Choctaw at the other end of the line. "

All manner of devices were solemnly tried to hush the wires, and eachone usually proved to be as futile as an incantation. What was to bedone? Step by step the telephone men were driven back. They were beaten. There was no way to silence these noises. Reluctantly, they agreedthat the only way was to pull up the ends of each wire from the taintedearth, and join them by a second wire. This was the "metallic circuit"idea. It meant an appalling increase in the use of wire. It would compelthe rebuild-ing of the switchboards and the invention of new signalsystems. But it was inevitable; and in 1883, while the dispute about itwas in full blast, one of the young men quietly slipped it into use ona new line between Boston and Providence. The effect was magical. "Atlast, " said the delighted manager, "we have a perfectly quiet line. "

This young man, a small, slim youth who was twenty-two years oldand looked younger, was no other than J. J. Carty, now the first oftelephone engineers and almost the creator of his profession. Threeyears earlier he had timidly asked for a job as operator in the Bostonexchange, at five dollars a week, and had shown such an aptitude for thework that he was soon made one of the captains. At thirty years of agehe became a central figure in the development of the art of telephony. 

What Carty has done is known by telephone men in all countries; but thestory of Carty himself--who he is, and why--is new. First of all, he isIrish, pure Irish. His father had left Ireland as a boy in 1825. Duringthe Civil War his father made guns in the city of Cambridge, where youngJohn Joseph was born; and afterwards he made bells for church steeples. He was instinctively a mechanic and proud of his calling. He couldtell the weight of a bell from the sound of it. Moses G. Farmer, theelectrical inventor, and Howe, the creator of the sewing-machine, werehis friends. 

At five years of age, little John J. Carty was taken by his father tothe shop where the bells were made, and he was profoundly impressed bythe magical strength of a big magnet, that picked up heavy weights asthough they were feathers. At the high school his favorite studywas physics; and for a time he and another boy named Rolfe--now adistinguished man of science--carried on electrical experiments oftheir own in the cellar of the Rolfe house. Here they had a "TomThumb" telegraph, a telephone which they had ventured to improve, and ahopeless tangle of wires. Whenever they could afford to buy more wiresand batteries, they went to a near-by store which supplied electricalapparatus to the professors and students of Harvard. This store, withits workshop in the rear, seemed to the two boys a veritable wonderland;and when Carty, a youth of eighteen, was compelled to leave schoolbecause of his bad eyesight, he ran at once and secured the glorious jobof being boy-of-all-work in this store of wonders. So, when he became anoperator in the Boston telephone exchange, a year later, he had alreadydeveloped to a remarkable degree his natural genius for telephony. 

Since then, Carty and the telephone business have grown up together, he always a little distance in advance. No other man has touched theapparatus of telephony at so many points. He fought down the flimsy, clumsy methods, which led from one snarl to another. He found out howto do with wires what Dickens did with words. "Let us do it right, boys, and then we won't have any bad dreams"--this has been his motif. And, as the crown and climax of his work, he mapped out the profession oftelephone engineering on the widest and most comprehensive lines. 

In Carty, the engineer evolved into the educator. His end of theAmerican Telephone and Telegraph Company became the University of theTelephone. He was himself a student by disposition, with a special tastefor the writings of Faraday, the forerunner; Tyndall, the expounder; andSpencer, the philosopher. And in 1890, he gathered around him a winnowedgroup of college graduates--he has sixty of them on his staff to-day--sothat he might bequeath to the telephone an engineering corps of loyaland efficient men. 

The next problem that faced the young men of the telephone, as soonas they had escaped from the clamor of the mysterious noises, was thenecessity of taking down the wires in the city streets and putting themunderground. At first, they had strung the wires on poles and roof-tops. They had done this, not because it was cheap, but because it was theonly possible way, so far as any one knew in that kindergarten period. A telephone wire required the daintiest of handling. To bury it was tosmother it, to make it dull or perhaps entirely useless. But nowthat the number of wires had swollen from hundreds to thousands, theoverhead method had been outgrown. Some streets in the larger cities hadbecome black with wires. Poles had risen to fifty feet in height, thensixty--seventy--eighty. Finally the highest of all pole lines was builtalong West Street, New York--every pole a towering Norway pine, with itstop ninety feet above the roadway, and carrying thirty cross-arms andthree hundred wires. 

From poles the wires soon overflowed to housetops, until in New Yorkalone they had overspread eleven thousand roofs. These roofs had to bekept in repair, and their chimneys were the deadly enemies of the ironwires. Many a wire, in less than two or three years, was withered to themerest shred of rust. As if these troubles were not enough, there werethe storms of winter, which might wipe out a year's revenue in a singleday. The sleet storms were the worst. Wires were weighted down with ice, often three pounds of ice per foot of wire. And so, what with sleet, andcorrosion, and the cost of roof-repairing, and the lack of room formore wires, the telephone men were between the devil and the deepsea--between the urgent necessity of burying their wires, and theinexorable fact that they did not know how to do it. 

Fortunately, by the time that this problem arrived, the telephonebusiness was fairly well established. It had outgrown its early daysof ridicule and incredulity. It was paying wages and salaries andeven dividends. Evidently it had arrived on the scene in the nick oftime--after the telegraph and before the trolleys and electric lights. Had it been born ten years later, it might not have been able tosurvive. So delicate a thing as a baby telephone could scarcely haveprotected itself against the powerful currents of electricity that cameinto general use in 1886, if it had not first found out a way of hidingsafely underground. 

The first declaration in favor of an underground system was made by theBoston company in 1880. "It may be expedient to place our entire systemunderground, " said the sorely perplexed manager, "whenever a practicablemethod is found of accomplishing: it. " All manner of theories wereafloat but Theodore N. Vail, who was usually the man of constructiveimagination in emergencies, began in 1882 a series of actual experimentsat Attleborough, Massachusetts, to find out exactly what could, and whatcould not, be done with wires that were buried in the earth. 

A five-mile trench was dug beside a railway track. The work was donehandily and cheaply by the labor-saving plan of hitching a locomotive toa plough. Five ploughs were jerked apart before the work was finished. Then, into this trench were laid wires with every known sort ofcovering. Most of them, naturally, were wrapped with rubber orgutta-percha, after the fashion of a submarine cable. When all were inplace, the willing locomotive was harnessed to a huge wooden drag, whichthrew the ploughed soil back into the trench and covered the wires afoot deep. It was the most professional cable-laying that any one atthat time could do, and it succeeded, not brilliantly, but well enoughto encourage the telephone engineers to go ahead. 

Several weeks later, the first two cables for actual use were laid inBoston and Brooklyn; and in 1883 Engineer J. P. Davis was set to grapplewith the Herculean labor of putting a complete underground system in thewire-bound city of New York. This he did in spite of a bombardment ofexplosions from leaky gas-pipes, and with a woeful lack of experts andstandard materials. All manner of makeshifts had to be tried in place oftile ducts, which were not known in 1883. Iron pipe was used at first, then asphalt, concrete, boxes of sand and creosoted wood. As for thewires, they were first wrapped in cotton, and then twisted into cables, usually of a hundred wires each. And to prevent the least taint ofmoisture, which means sudden death to a telephone current, these cableswere invariably soaked in oil. 

This oil-filled type of cable carried the telephone business safelythrough half a dozen years. But it was not the final type. It waspreliminary only, the best that could be made at that time. Not oneis in use to-day. In 1888 Theodore Vail set on foot a second series ofexperiments, to see if a cable could be made that was better suited asa highway for the delicate electric currents of the telephone. A youngengineer named John A. Barrett, who had already made his mark as anexpert, by finding a way to twist and transpose the wires, was set apartto tackle this problem. Being an economical Vermonter, Barrett went towork in a little wooden shed in the backyard of a Brooklyn foundry. Inthis foundry he had seen a unique machine that could be made to mouldhot lead around a rope of twisted wires. This was a notable discovery. It meant TIGHT COVERINGS. It meant a victory over that most troublesomeof enemies--moisture. Also, it meant that cables could henceforth bemade longer, with fewer sleeves and splices, and without the oil, whichhad always been an unmitigated nuisance. 

Next, having made the cable tight, Barrett set out to produce it morecheaply and by accident stumbled upon a way to make it immensely moreefficient. All wires were at that time wrapped with cotton, and his planwas to find some less costly material that would serve the same purpose. One of his workmen, a Virginian, suggested the use of paper twine, whichhad been used in the South during the Civil War, when cotton was scarceand expensive. Barrett at once searched the South for paper twine andfound it. He bought a barrel of it from a small factory in Richmond, butafter a trial it proved to be too flimsy. If such paper could be puton flat, he reasoned, it would be stronger. Just then he heard of anerratic genius who had an invention for winding paper tape on wire forthe use of milliners. 

Paper-wound bonnet-wire! Who could imagine any connection between thisand the telephone? Yet this hint was exactly what Barrett needed. Heexperimented until he had devised a machine that crumpled the paperaround the wire, instead of winding it tightly. This was the finishingtouch. For a time these paper-wound cables were soaked in oil, but in1890 Engineer F. A. Pickernell dared to trust to the tightness of thelead sheathing, and laid a "dry core" cable, the first of the moderntype, in one of the streets of Philadelphia. This cable was the eventof the year. It was not only cheaper. It was the best-talking cable thathad ever been harnessed to a telephone. 

What Barrett had done was soon made clear. By wrapping the wire withloose paper, he had in reality cushioned it with AIR, which is thebest possible insulator. Not the paper, but the air in the paper, hadimproved the cable. More air was added by the omission of the oil. Andpresently Barrett perceived that he had merely reproduced in a cable, as far as possible, the conditions of the overhead wires, which areseparated by nothing but air. 

By 1896 there were two hundred thousand miles of wire snugly wrapped inpaper and lying in leaden caskets beneath the streets of the cities, andto-day there are six million miles of it owned by the affiliated Bellcompanies. Instead of blackening the streets, the wire nerves of thetelephone are now out of sight under the roadway, and twining into thebasements of buildings like a new sort of metallic ivy. Some cables areso large that a single spool of cable will weigh twenty-six tonsand require a giant truck and a sixteen-horse team to haul it to itsresting-place. As many as twelve hundred wires are often bunched intoone sheath, and each cable lies loosely in a little duct of its own. It is reached by manholes where it runs under the streets and in littleswitching-boxes placed at intervals it is frayed out into separate pairsof wires that blossom at length into telephones. 

Out in the open country there are still the open wires, which in pointof talking are the best. In the suburbs of cities there are neat greenposts with a single gray cable hung from a heavy wire. Usually, atelephone pole is made from a sixty-year-old tree, a cedar, chestnut, or juniper. It lasts twelve years only, so that the one item of poles isstill costing the telephone companies several millions a year. Thetotal number of poles now in the United States, used by telephone andtelegraph companies, once covered an area, before they were cut down, aslarge as the State of Rhode Island. 

But the highest triumph of wire-laying came when New York swept into theSkyscraper Age, and when hundreds of tall buildings, as high as the fallof the waters of Niagara, grew up like a range of magical cliffs uponthe precious rock of Manhattan. Here the work of the telephone engineerhas been so well done that although every room in these cliff-buildingshas its telephone, there is not a pole in sight, not a cross-arm, nota wire. Nothing but the tip-ends of an immense system are visible. Nosooner is a new skyscraper walled and roofed, than the telephones arein place, at once putting the tenants in touch with the rest of thecity and the greater part of the United States. In a single one of thesemonstrous buildings, the Hudson Terminal, there is a cable that runsfrom basement to roof and ravels out to reach three thousand desks. This mighty geyser of wires is fifty tons in weight and would, ifstraightened out into a single line, connect New York with Chicago. Yetit is as invisible as the nerves and muscles of a human body. 

During this evolution of the cable, even the wire itself was beingremade. Vail and others had noticed that of all the varieties of wirethat were for sale, not one was exactly suitable for a telephone system. The first telephone wire was of galvanized iron, which had at least theprimitive virtue of being cheap. Then came steel wire, stronger butless durable. But these wires were noisy and not good conductors ofelectricity. An ideal telephone wire, they found, must be made of eithersilver or copper. Silver was out of the question, and copper wire wastoo soft and weak. It would not carry its own weight. 

The problem, therefore, was either to make steel wire a betterconductor, or to produce a copper wire that would be strong enough. Vailchose the latter, and forthwith gave orders to a Bridgeport manufacturerto begin experiments. A young expert named Thomas B. Doolittle was atonce set to work, and presently appeared the first hard-drawn copperwire, made tough-skinned by a fairly simple process. Vail bought thirtypounds of it and scattered it in various parts of the United States, to note the effect upon it of different climates. One length of it maystill be seen at the Vail homestead in Lyndonville, Vermont. Then thishard-drawn wire was put to a severe test by being strung between Bostonand New York. This line was a brilliant success, and the new wire washailed with great delight as the ideal servant of the telephone. 

Since then there has been little trouble with copper wire, exceptits price. It was four times as good as iron wire, and four times asexpensive. Every mile of it, doubled, weighed two hundred pounds andcost thirty dollars. On the long lines, where it had to be as thick asa lead pencil, the expense seemed to be ruinously great. When the firstpair of wires was strung between New York and Chicago, for instance, it was found to weigh 870, 000 pounds--a full load for a twenty-two-carfreight train; and the cost of the bare metal was $130, 000. So enormoushas been the use of copper wire since then by the telephone companies, that fully one-fourth of all the capital invested in the telephone hasgone to the owners of the copper mines. 

For several years the brains of the telephone men were focussed uponthis problem--how to reduce the expenditure on copper. One uncannydevice, which would seem to be a mere inventor's fantasy if it had notalready saved the telephone companies four million dollars or more, isknown as the "phantom circuit. " It enables three messages to run at thesame time, where only two ran before. A double track of wires is madeto carry three talk-trains running abreast, a feat made possible by thewhimsical disposition of electricity, and which is utterly inconceivablein railroading. This invention, which is the nearest approach as yet tomultiple telephony, was conceived by Jacobs in England and Carty in theUnited States. 

But the most copper money has been saved--literally tens of millions ofdollars--by persuading thin wires to work as efficiently as thick ones. This has been done by making better transmitters, by insulating thesmaller wires with enamel instead of silk, and by placing coils of acertain nature at intervals upon the wires. The invention of this lastdevice startled the telephone men like a flash of lightning out of ablue sky. It came from outside--from the quiet laboratory of a Columbiaprofessor who had arrived in the United States as a young Hungarianimmigrant not many years earlier. From this professor, Michael J. Pupin, came the idea of "loading" a telephone line, in such a way as toreinforce the electric current. It enabled a thin wire to carry as faras a thick one, and thus saved as much as forty dollars a wire per mile. As a reward for his cleverness, a shower of gold fell upon Pupin, andmade him in an instant as rich as one of the grand-dukes of his nativeland. 

It is now a most highly skilled occupation, supporting fully fifteenthousand families, to put the telephone wires in place and protect themagainst innumerable dangers. This is the profession of the wire chiefsand their men, a corps of human spiders, endlessly spinning threadsunder streets and above green fields, on the beds of rivers and theslopes of mountains, massing them in cities and fluffing them out amongfarms and villages. To tell the doings of a wire chief, in the courseof his ordinary week's work, would in itself make a lively bookof adventures. Even a washerwoman, with one lone, non-electricalclothes-line of a hundred yards to operate, has often enough troublewith it. But the wire chiefs of the Bell telephone have charge of asmuch wire as would make TWO HUNDRED MILLION CLOTHES-LINES--ten apieceto every family in the United States; and these lines are not punctuatedwith clothespins, but with the most delicate of electrical instruments. 

The wire chiefs must detect trouble under a thousand disguises. Perhapsa small boy has thrown a snake across the wires or driven a nail intoa cable. Perhaps some self-reliant citizen has moved his own telephonefrom one room to another. Perhaps a sudden rainstorm has splashed itsfatal moisture upon an unwiped joint. Or perhaps a submarine cable hasbeen sat upon by the Lusitania and flattened to death. But no matterwhat the trouble, a telephone system cannot be stopped for repairs. It cannot be picked up and put into a dry-dock. It must be repairedor improved by a sort of vivisection while it is working. It is aninterlocking unit, a living, conscious being, half human and halfmachine; and an injury in any one place may cause a pain or sickness toits whole vast body. 

And just as the particles of a human body change every six or sevenyears, without disturb-ing the body, so the particles of our telephonesystems have changed repeatedly without any interruption of traffic. The constant flood of new inventions has necessitated several completerebuildings. Little or nothing has ever been allowed to wear out. TheNew York system was rebuilt three times in sixteen years; and many acostly switchboard has gone to the scrap-heap at three or four years ofage. What with repairs and inventions and new construction, the variousBell companies have spent at least $425, 000, 000 in the first ten yearsof the twentieth century, without hindering for a day the ceaselesstorrent of electrical conversation. 

The crowning glory of a telephone system of to-day is not so much thesimple telephone itself, nor the maze and mileage of its cables, butrather the wonderful mechanism of the Switchboard. This is the part thatwill always remain mysterious to the public. It is seldom seen, and itremains as great a mystery to those who have seen it as to those whohave not. Explanations of it are futile. As well might any one expect tolearn Sanscrit in half an hour as to understand a switchboard by makinga tour of investigation around it. It is not like anything elsethat either man or Nature has ever made. It defies all metaphorsand comparisons. It cannot be shown by photography, not even inmoving-pictures, because so much of it is concealed inside its woodenbody. And few people, if any, are initiated into its inner mysteriesexcept those who belong to its own cortege of inventors and attendants. 

A telephone switchboard is a pyramid of inventions. If it is full-grown, it may have two million parts. It may be lit with fifteen thousand tinyelectric lamps and nerved with as much wire as would reach from New Yorkto Berlin. It may cost as much as a thousand pianos or as much as threesquare miles of farms in Indiana. The ten thousand wire hairs of itshead are not only numbered, but enswathed in silk, and combed out in somarvellous a way that any one of them can in a flash be linked to anyother. Such hair-dressing! Such puffs and braids and ringlet relays!Whoever would learn the utmost that may be done with copper hairsof Titian red, must study the fantastic coiffure of a telephoneSwitchboard. 

If there were no switchboard, there would still be telephones, but not atelephone system. To connect five thousand people by telephone requiresfive thousand wires when the wires run to a switchboard; but withouta switchboard there would have to be 12, 497, 500 wires--4, 999 to everytelephone. As well might there be a nerve-system without a brain, as atelephone system without a switchboard. If there had been at firsttwo separate companies, one owning the telephone and the other theswitchboard, neither could have done the business. 

Several years before the telephone got a switchboard of its own, it madeuse of the boards that had been designed for the telegraph. These wereas simple as wheelbarrows, and became absurdly inadequate as soon asthe telephone business began to grow. Then there came adaptations by thedozen. Every telephone manager became by compulsion an inventor. Therewas no source of information and each exchange did the best it could. Hundreds of patents were taken out. And by 1884 there had come to be afairly definite idea of what a telephone switchboard ought to be. 

The one man who did most to create the switchboard, who has been itsdevotee for more than thirty years, is a certain modest and little knowninventor, still alive and busy, named Charles E. Scribner. Of the ninethousand switchboard patents, Scribner holds six hundred or more. Eversince 1878, when he devised the first "jackknife switch, " Scribner hasbeen the wizard of the switchboard. It was he who saw most clearly itsrequirements. Hundreds of others have helped, but Scribner was the oneman who persevered, who never asked for an easier job, and who in theend became the master of his craft. 

It may go far to explain the peculiar genius of Scribner to say that hewas born in 1858, in the year of the laying of the Atlantic Cable; andthat his mother was at the time profoundly interested in the work andanxious for its success. His father was a judge in Toledo; but youngScribner showed no aptitude for the tangles of the law. He preferred thetangles of wire and system in miniature, which he and several other boyshad built and learned to operate. These boys had a benefactor in an oldbachelor named Thomas Bond. He had no special interest in telegraphy. He was a dealer in hides. But he was attracted by the cleverness of theboys and gave them money to buy more wires and more batteries. One dayhe noticed an invention of young Scribner's--a telegraph repeater. 

"This may make your fortune, " he said, "but no mechanic in Toledocan make a proper model of it for you. You must go to Chicago, wheretelegraphic apparatus is made. " The boy gladly took his advice and wentto the Western Electric factory in Chicago. Here he accidentally metEnos M. Barton, the head of the factory. Barton noted that the boy was agenius and offered him a job, which he accepted and has held eversince. Such is the story of the entrance of Charles E. Scribner into thetelephone business, where he has been well-nigh indispensable. 

His monumental work has been the development of the MULTIPLESwitchboard, a much more brain-twisting problem than the building ofthe Pyramids or the digging of the Panama Canal. The earlier types ofswitchboard had become too cumbersome by 1885. They were well enough forfive hundred wires but not for five thousand. In some exchanges as manyas half a dozen operators were necessary to handle a single call; andthe clamor and confusion were becoming unbearable. Some handier andquieter way had to be devised, and thus arose the Multiple board. Thefirst crude idea of such a way had sprung to life in the brain of aChicago man named L. B. Firman, in 1879; but he became a farmer andforsook his invention in its infancy. 

In the Multiple board, as it grew up under the hands of Scribner, the outgoing wires are duplicated so as to be within reach of everyoperator. A local call can thus be answered at once by the operator whoreceives it; and any operator who is overwhelmed by a sudden rush ofbusiness can be helped by her companions. Every wire that comes into theboard is tasselled out into many ends, and by means of a "busy test, "invented by Scribner, only one of these ends can be put into use at atime. The normal limit of such a board is ten thousand wires, and willalways remain so, unless a race of long-armed giantesses should appear, who would be able to reach over a greater expanse of board. At present, a business of more than ten thousand lines means a second exchange. 

The Multiple board was enormously expensive. It grew more and moreelaborate until it cost one-third of a million dollars. The telephonemen racked their brains to produce something cheaper to take its place, and they failed. The Multiple boards swallowed up capital as a desertswallows water, but THEY SAVED TEN SECONDS ON EVERY CALL. This was anunanswerable argument in their favor, and by 1887 twenty-one of themwere in use. 

Since then, the switchboard has had three or four rebuildings. There hasseemed to be no limit to the demands of the public or the fertilityof Scribner's brain. Persistent changes were made in the system ofsignalling. The first signal, used by Bell and Watson, was a tap on thediaphragm with the finger-nail. Soon after-wards came a "buzzer, " andthen the magneto-electric bell. In 1887 Joseph O'Connell, of Chicago, conceived of the use of tiny electric lights as signals, a brilliantidea, as an electric light makes no noise and can be seen either bynight or by day. In 1901, J. J. Carty invented the "bridging bell, " away to put four houses on a single wire, with a different signal foreach house. This idea made the "party line" practicable, and at oncecreated a boom in the use of the telephone by enterprising farmers. 

In 1896 there came a most revolutionary change in switchboards. Allthings were made new. Instead of individual batteries, one at eachtelephone, a large common battery was installed in the exchange itself. This meant better signalling and better talking. It reduced the cost ofbatteries and put them in charge of experts. It established uniformity. It introduced the federal idea into the mechanism of a telephone system. Best of all, it saved FOUR SECONDS ON EVERY CALL. The first of thesecentralizing switchboards was put in place at Philadelphia; and othercities followed suit as fast as they could afford the expense ofrebuilding. Since then, there have come some switchboards that arewholly automatic. Few of these have been put into use, for the reasonthat a switchboard, like a human body, must be semi-automatic only. Togive the most efficient service, there will always need to be an expertto stand between it and the public. 

As the final result of all these varying changes in switchboards andsignals and batteries, there grew up the modern Telephone Exchange. Thisis the solar plexus of the telephone body. It is the vital spot. Itis the home of the switchboard. It is not any one's invention, as thetelephone was. It is a growing mechanism that is not yet finished, andmay never be; but it has already evolved far enough to be one of thewonders of the electrical world. There is probably no other part ofan American city's equipment that is as sensitive and efficient as atelephone exchange. 

The idea of the exchange is somewhat older than the idea of thetelephone itself. There were communication exchanges before theinvention of the telephone. Thomas B. Doolittle had one in Bridgeport, using telegraph instruments Thomas B. A. David had one in Pittsburg, using printing-telegraph machines, which required little skill tooperate. And William A. Childs had a third, for lawyers only, in NewYork, which used dials at first and afterwards printing machines. Theselittle exchanges had set out to do the work that is done to-day bythe telephone, and they did it after a fashion, in a most crude andexpensive way. They helped to prepare the way for the telephone, bybuilding up small constituencies that were ready for the telephone whenit arrived. 

Bell himself was perhaps the first to see the future of the telephoneexchange. In a letter written to some English capitalists in 1878, hesaid: "It is possible to connect every man's house, office or factorywith a central station, so as to give him direct communication with hisneighbors. . . . It is conceivable that cables of telephone wires could belaid underground, or suspended overhead, connecting by branch wires withprivate dwellings, shops, etc. , and uniting them through the main cablewith a central office. " This remarkable prophecy has now become stalereading, as stale as Darwin's "Origin of Species, " or Adam Smith's"Wealth of Nations. " But at the time that it was written it was a mostfanciful dream. 

When the first infant exchange for telephone service was born in Boston, in 1877, it was the tiny offspring of a burglar-alarm business operatedby E. T. Holmes, a young man whose father had originated the idea ofprotecting property by electric wires in 1858. Holmes was the firstpractical man who dared to offer telephone service for sale. He hadobtained two telephones, numbers six and seven, the first fivehaving gone to the junk-heap; and he attached these to a wire in hisburglar-alarm office. For two weeks his business friends played with thetelephones, like boys with a fascinating toy; then Holmes nailed up anew shelf in his office, and on this shelf placed six box-telephones ina row. These could be switched into connection with the burglar-alarmwires and any two of the six wires could be joined by a wire cord. Nothing could have been simpler, but it was the arrival of a new idea inthe business world. 

The Holmes exchange was on the top floor of a little building, andin almost every other city the first exchange was as near the roof aspossible, partly to save rent and partly because most of the wires werestrung on roof-tops. As the telephone itself had been born in a cellar, so the exchange was born in a garret. Usually, too, each exchange wasan off-shoot of some other wire-using business. It was a medley ofmakeshifts. Almost every part of its outfit had been made for otheruses. In Chicago all calls came in to one boy, who bawled them up aspeaking-tube to the operators. In another city a boy received thecalls, wrote them on white alleys, and rolled them to the boys at theswitchboard. There was no number system. Every one was called by name. Even as late as 1880, when New York boasted fifteen hundred telephones, names were still in use. And as the first telephones were used both astransmitters and receivers, there was usually posted up a rule that washighly important: "Don't Talk with your Ear or Listen with your Mouth. "

To describe one of those early telephone exchanges in the silence ofa printed page is a wholly impossible thing. Nothing but a languageof noise could convey the proper impression. An editor who visited theChicago exchange in 1879 said of it: "The racket is almost deafening. Boys are rushing madly hither and thither, while others are putting inor taking out pegs from a central framework as if they were lunaticsengaged in a game of fox and geese. " In the same year E. J. Hall wrotefrom Buffalo that his exchange with twelve boys had become "a perfectBedlam. " By the clumsy methods of those days, from two to six boys wereneeded to handle each call. And as there was usually more or less ofa cat-and-dog squabble between the boys and the public, with every oneyelling at the top of his voice, it may be imagined that a telephoneexchange was a loud and frantic place. 

Boys, as operators, proved to be most complete and consistent failures. Their sins of omission and commission would fill a book. What withwhittling the switchboards, swearing at subscribers, playing tricks withthe wires, and roaring on all occasions like young bulls of Bashan, the boys in the first exchanges did their full share in adding to thetroubles of the business. Nothing could be done with them. They wereimmune to all schemes of discipline. Like the MYSTERIOUS NOISES theycould not be controlled, and by general consent they were abolished. In place of the noisy and obstreperous boy came the docile, soft-voicedgirl. 

If ever the rush of women into the business world was an unmixedblessing, it was when the boys of the telephone exchanges weresuperseded by girls. Here at its best was shown the influence of thefeminine touch. The quiet voice, pitched high, the deft fingers, thepatient courtesy and attentiveness--these qualities were precisely whatthe gentle telephone required in its attendants. Girls were easier totrain; they did not waste time in retaliatory conversation; they weremore careful; and they were much more likely to give "the soft answerthat turneth away wrath. "

A telephone call under the boy regime meant Bedlam and five minutes;afterwards, under the girl regime, it meant silence and twenty seconds. Instead of the incessant tangle and tumult, there came a new species ofexchange--a quiet, tense place, in which several score of young ladiessit and answer the language of the switchboard lights. Now and then, not often, the signal lamps flash too quickly for these expert phonists. During the panic of 1907 there was one mad hour when almost everytelephone in Wall Street region was being rung up by some desperatespeculator. The switchboards were ablaze with lights. A few girls losttheir heads. One fainted and was carried to the rest-room. But theothers flung the flying shuttles of talk until, in a single exchangefifteen thousand conversations had been made possible in sixty minutes. There are always girls in reserve for such explosive occasions, and whenthe hands of any operator are seen to tremble, and she has a warningred spot on each cheek, she is taken off and given a recess until sherecovers her poise. 

These telephone girls are the human part of a great communicationmachine. They are weaving a web of talk that changes into a new patternevery minute. How many possible combinations there are with the fivemillion telephones of the Bell System, or what unthinkable mileage ofconversation, no one has ever dared to guess. But whoever has onceseen the long line of white arms waving back and forth in front of theswitchboard lights must feel that he has looked upon the very pulse ofthe city's life. 

In 1902 the New York Telephone Company started a school, the first ofits kind in the world, for the education of these telephone girls. Thisschool is hidden amid ranges of skyscrapers, but seventeen thousandgirls discover it in the course of the year. It is a most particular andexclusive school. It accepts fewer than two thousand of these girls, andrejects over fifteen thousand. Not more than one girl in every eight canmeasure up to its standards; and it cheerfully refuses as many studentsin a year as would make three Yales or Harvards. 

This school is unique, too, in the fact that it charges no fees, paysevery student five dollars a week, and then provides her with a job whenshe graduates. But it demands that every girl shall be in good health, quick-handed, clear-voiced, and with a certain poise and alertness ofmanner. Presence of mind, which, in Herbert Spencer's opinion, oughtto be taught in every university, is in various ways drilled into thetemperament of the telephone girl. She is also taught the knack ofconcentration, so that she may carry the switchboard situation in herhead, as a chess-player carries in his head the arrangement of thechess-men. And she is much more welcome at this strange school if sheis young and has never worked in other trades, where less speed andvigilance are required. 

No matter how many millions of dollars may be spent upon cables andswitchboards, the quality of telephone service depends upon the girl atthe exchange end of the wire. It is she who meets the public at everypoint. She is the despatcher of all the talk trains; she is the rulerof the wire highways; and she is expected to give every passenger-voicean instantaneous express to its destination. More is demanded from herthan from any other servant of the public. Her clients refuse to standin line and quietly wait their turn, as they are quite willing to do instores and theatres and barber shops and railway stations and everywhereelse. They do not see her at work and they do not know what her work is. They do not notice that she answers a call in an average time of threeand a half seconds. They are in a hurry, or they would not be at thetelephone; and each second is a minute long. Any delay is a directpersonal affront that makes a vivid impression upon their minds. Andthey are not apt to remember that most of the delays and blunders arebeing made, not by the expert girls, but by the careless people whopersist in calling wrong numbers and in ignoring the niceties oftelephone etiquette. 

The truth about the American telephone girl is that she has become sohighly efficient that we now expect her to be a paragon of perfection. To give the young lady her due, we must acknowledge that she has donemore than any other person to introduce courtesy into the businessworld. She has done most to abolish the old-time roughness andvulgarity. She has made big business to run more smoothly than littlebusiness did, half a century ago. She has shown us how to take thefriction out of conversation, and taught us refinements of politenesswhich were rare even among the Beau Brummels of pre-telephonic days. Who, for instance, until the arrival of the telephone girl, appreciatedthe difference between "Who are you?" and "Who is this?" Or who else hasso impressed upon us the value of the rising inflection, as a gentlerhabit of speech? This propaganda of politeness has gone so far thatto-day the man who is profane or abusive at the telephone, is cutoff from the use of it. He is cast out as unfit for a telephone-usingcommunity. 

And now, so that there shall be no anticlimax in this story of telephonedevelopment, we must turn the spot-light upon that immense aggregationof workshops in which have been made three-fifths of the telephoneapparatus of the world--the Western Electric. The mother factory of thisglobe-trotting business is the biggest thing in the spaciousback-yard of Chicago, and there are eleven smaller factories--herchildren--scattered over the earth from New York to Tokio. To put itstotals into a sentence, it is an enterprise of 26, 000-man-power, and40, 000, 000-dollar-power; and the telephonic goods that it produces inhalf a day are worth one hundred thousand dollars--as much, by the way, as the Western Union REFUSED to pay for the Bell patents in 1877. 

The Western Electric was born in Chicago, in the ashes of the big fireof 1871; and it has grown up to its present greatness quietly, withoutcelebrating its birthdays. At first it had no telephones to make. Nonehad been invented, so it made telegraphic apparatus, burglar-alarms, electric pens, and other such things. But in 1878, when the WesternUnion made its short-lived attempt to compete with the Bell Company, theWestern Electric agreed to make its telephones. Three years later, whenthe brief spasm of competition was ended, the Western Electric wastaken in hand by the Bell people and has since then remained the greatworkshop of the telephone. 

The main plant in Chicago is not especially remarkable from amanufacturing point of view. Here are the inevitable lumber-yards andfoundries and machine-shops. Here is the mad waltz of the spindles thatwhirl silk and cotton threads around the copper wires, very similar towhat may be seen in any braid factory. Here electric lamps are made, five thousand of them in a day, in the same manner as elsewhere, exceptthat here they are so small and dainty as to seem designed for fairypalaces. 

The things that are done with wire in the Western Electric factories aretoo many for any mere outsider to remember. Some wire is wrapped withpaper tape at a speed of nine thousand miles a day. Some is fashionedinto fantastic shapes that look like absurd sea-monsters, but which inreality are only the nerve systems of switchboards. And some is twistedinto cables by means of a dozen whirling drums--a dizzying sight, aseach pair of drums revolve in opposite directions. Because of the factthat a cable's inevitable enemy is moisture, each cable is wound on animmense spool and rolled into an oven until it is as dry as a cinder. Then it is put into a strait-jacket of lead pipe, sealed at both ends, and trundled into a waiting freight car. 

No other company uses so much wire and hard rubber, or so many tons ofbrass rods, as the Western Electric. Of platinum, too, which is moreexpensive than gold, it uses one thousand pounds a year in the makingof telephone transmitters. This is imported from the Ural Mountains. The silk thread comes from Italy and Japan; the iron for magnets, fromNorway; the paper tape, from Manila; the mahogany, from South America;and the rubber, from Brazil and the valley of the Congo. At least sevencountries must cooperate to make a telephone message possible. 

Perhaps the most extraordinary feature in the Western Electric factoriesis the multitude of its inspectors. No other sort of manufacturing, noteven a Government navy-yard, has so many. Nothing is too small to escapethese sleuths of inspection. They test every tiny disc of mica, andthrow away nine out of ten. They test every telephone by actual talk, set up every switchboard, and try out every cable. A single transmitter, by the time it is completed, has had to pass three hundred examinations;and a single coin-box is obliged to count ten thousand nickels before itgraduates into the outer world. Seven hundred inspectors are on guard inthe two main plants at Chicago and New York. This is a ruinously largenumber, from a profit-making point of view; but the inexorable fact isthat in a telephone system nothing is insignificant. It is built on suchaltruistic lines that an injury to any one part is the concern of all. 

As usual, when we probe into the history of a business that has growngreat and overspread the earth, we find a Man; and the Western Electricis no exception to this rule. Its Man, still fairly hale and busy afterforty years of leadership, is Enos M. Barton. His career is the typicalAmerican story of self-help. He was a telegraph messenger boy in NewYork during the Civil War, then a telegraph operator in Cleveland. In1869 his salary was cut down from one hundred dollars a month to ninetydollars; whereupon he walked out and founded the Western Electric in ashabby little machine-shop. Later he moved to Chicago, took in ElishaGray as his partner, and built up a trade in the making of telegraphicmaterials. 

When the telephone was invented, Barton was one of the sceptics. "I wellremember my disgust, " he said, "when some one told me it was possible tosend conversation along a wire. " Several months later he saw a telephoneand at once became one of its apostles. By 1882 his plant had becomethe official workshop of the Bell Companies. It was the headquarters ofinvention and manufacturing. Here was gathered a notable group of youngmen, brilliant and adventurous, who dared to stake their futures on thesuccess of the telephone. And always at their head was Barton, as a sortof human switchboard, who linked them all together and kept them busy. 

In appearance, Enos M. Barton closely resembles ex-President Eliot, of Harvard. He is slow in speech, simple in manner, and with a raresagacity in business affairs. He was not an organizer, in the modernsense. His policy was to pick out a man, put him in a responsibleplace, and judge him by results. Engineers could become bookkeepers, and bookkeepers could become engineers. Such a plan worked well in theearlier days, when the art of telephony was in the making, and whenthere was no source of authority on telephonic problems. Barton is thebishop emeritus of the Western Electric to-day; and the big industryis now being run by a group of young hustlers, with H. B. Thayer at thehead of the table. Thayer is a Vermonter who has climbed the ladderof experience from its lower rungs to the top. He is a typicalYankee--lean, shrewd, tireless, and with a cold-blooded sense of justicethat fits him for the leadership of twenty-six thousand people. 

So, as we have seen, the telephone as Bell invented it, was merely abrilliant beginning in the development of the art of telephony. It wasan elfin birth--an elusive and delicate sprite that had to be nurturedinto maturity. It was like a soul, for which a body had to be created;and no one knew how to make such a body. Had it been born in some lessenergetic country, it might have remained feeble and undeveloped; butnot in the United States. Here in one year it had become famous, andin three years it had become rich. Bell's invincible patent was soonbuttressed by hundreds of others. An open-door policy was adopted forinvention. Change followed change to such a degree that the experts of1880 would be lost to-day in the mazes of a telephone exchange. 

The art of the telephone engineer has in thirty years grown from themost crude and clumsy of experiments into an exact and comprehensiveprofession. As Carty has aptly said, "At first we invariably approachedevery problem from the wrong end. If we had been told to load a herd ofcattle on a steamer, our method would have been to hire a Hagenbeck totrain the cattle for a couple of years, so that they would know enoughto walk aboard of the ship when he gave the signal; but to-day, if wehad to ship cattle, we would know enough to make a greased chute andslide them on board in a jiffy. "

The telephone world has now its own standards and ideals. It has alanguage of its own, a telephonese that is quite unintelligible tooutsiders. It has as many separate branches of study as medicine or law. There are few men, half a dozen at most, who can now be said to havea general knowledge of telephony. And no matter how wise a telephoneexpert may be, he can never reach perfection, because of the amazingvariety of things that touch or concern his profession. 

"No one man knows all the details now, " said Theodore Vail. "Severaldays ago I was walking through a telephone exchange and I saw somethingnew. I asked Mr. Carty to explain it. He is our chief engineer; buthe did not understand it. We called the manager. He did n't know, andcalled his assistant. He did n't know, and called the local engineer, who was able to tell us what it was. "

To sum up this development of the art of tele-phony--to present abird's-eye view--it may be divided into four periods:

1. Experiment. 1876 to 1886. This was the period of invention, in whichthere were no experts and no authorities. Telephonic apparatus consistedof makeshifts and adaptations. It was the period of iron wire, imperfecttransmitters, grounded circuits, boy operators, peg switchboards, localbatteries, and overhead lines. 

2. Development. 1886 to 1896. In this period amateurs became engineers. The proper type of apparatus was discovered, and was improved to ahigh point of efficiency. In this period came the multiple switchboard, copper wire, girl operators, underground cables, metallic circuit, common battery, and the long-distance lines. 

3. Expansion. 1896 to 1906. This was the era of big business. It was anautumn period, in which the telephone men and the public began to reapthe fruits of twenty years of investment and hard work. It was theperiod of the message rate, the pay station, the farm line, and theprivate branch exchange. 

4. Organization. 1906--. With the success of the Pupin coil, there camea larger life for the telephone. It became less local and more national. It began to link together its scattered parts. It discouraged the wasteand anarchy of duplication. It taught its older, but smaller brother, the telegraph, to cooperate. It put itself more closely in touch withthe will of the public. And it is now pushing ahead, along the two roadsof standardization and efficiency, toward its ideal of one universaltelephone system for the whole nation. The key-word of the telephonedevelopment of to-day is this--organization. 

CHAPTER V. THE EXPANSION OF THE BUSINESS

The telephone business did not really begin to grow big and overspreadthe earth until 1896, but the keynote of expansion was first sounded byTheodore Vail in the earliest days, when as yet the telephone was a babein arms. In 1879 Vail said, in a letter written to one of his captains:

"Tell our agents that we have a proposition on foot to connect thedifferent cities for the purpose of personal communication, and in otherways to organize a GRAND TELEPHONIC SYSTEM. "

This was brave talk at that time, when there were not in the whole worldas many telephones as there are to-day in Cincinnati. It was brave talkin those days of iron wire, peg switchboards, and noisy diaphragms. Mosttelephone men regarded it as nothing more than talk. They did not seeany business future for the telephone except in short-distance service. But Vail was in earnest. His previous experience as the head of therailway mail service had lifted him up to a higher point of view. He knew the need of a national system of communication that would bequicker and more direct than either the telegraph or the post office. 

"I saw that if the telephone could talk one mile to-day, " he said, "itwould be talking a hundred miles to-morrow. " And he persisted, in spiteof a considerable deal of ridicule, in maintaining that the telephonewas destined to connect cities and nations as well as individuals. 

Four months after he had prophesied the "grand telephonic system, " heencouraged Charles J. Glidden, of world-tour fame, to build a telephoneline between Boston and Lowell. This was the first inter-city line. Itwas well placed, as the owners of the Lowell mills lived in Boston, andit made a small profit from the start. This success cheered Vail on toa master-effort. He resolved to build a line from Boston to Providence, and was so stubbornly bent upon doing this that when the Bell Companyrefused to act, he picked up the risk and set off with it alone. He organized a company of well-known Rhode Islanders--nicknamed the"Governors' Company"--and built the line. It was a failure at first, and went by the name of "Vail's Folly. " But Engineer Carty, by a happythought, DOUBLED THE WIRE, and thus in a moment established two newfactors in the telephone business--the Metallic Circuit and the LongDistance line. 

At once the Bell Company came over to Vail's point of view, boughthis new line, and launched out upon what seemed to be the foolhardyenterprise of stringing a double wire from Boston to New York. Thiswas to be not only the longest of all telephone lines, strung on tenthousand poles; it was to be a line de luxe, built of glistening redcopper, not iron. Its cost was to be seventy thousand dollars, which wasan enormous sum in those hardscrabble days. There was much opposition tosuch extravagance, and much ridicule. "I would n't take that line as agift, " said one of the Bell Company's officials. 

But when the last coil of wire was stretched into place, and the first"Hello" leaped from Boston to New York, the new line was a victorioussuccess. It carried messages from the first day; and more, it raised thewhole telephone business to a higher level. It swept away the prejudicethat telephone service could become nothing more than a neighborhoodaffair. "It was the salvation of the business, " said Edward J. Hill. Itmarked a turning-point in the history of the telephone, when the dayof small things was ended and the day of great things was begun. Noone man, no hundred men, had created it. It was the final result of tenyears of invention and improvement. 

While this epoch-making line was being strung, Vail was pushing his"grand telephonic system" policy by organizing The American Telephoneand Telegraph Company. This, too, was a master-stroke. It was theintroduction of the staff-and-line method of organization into business. It was doing for the forty or fifty Bell Companies what Von Moltkedid for the German army prior to the Franco-Prussian War. It was thecreation of a central company that should link all local companiestogether, and itself own and operate the means by which these companiesare united. This central company was to grapple with all nationalproblems, to own all telephones and long-distance lines, to protect allpatents, and to be the headquarters of invention, information, capital, and legal protection for the entire federation of Bell Companies. 

Seldom has a company been started with so small a capital and so vast apurpose. It had no more than $100, 000 of capital stock, in 1885; butits declared object was nothing less than to establish a system ofwire communication for the human race. Here are, in its own words, themarching orders of this Company: "To connect one or more points in eachand every city, town, or place an the State of New York, with one ormore points in each and every other city, town, or place in said State, and in each and every other of the United States, and in Canada, andMexico; and each and every of said cities, towns, and places is to beconnected with each and every other city, town, or place in said Statesand countries, and also by cable and other appropriate means with therest of the known world. "

So ran Vail's dream, and for nine years he worked mightily to make itcome true. He remained until the various parts of the business had growntogether, and until his plan for a "grand telephonic system" was underway and fairly well understood. Then he went out, into a series ofpicturesque enterprises, until he had built up a four-square fortune;and recently, in 1907, he came back to be the head of the telephonebusiness, and to complete the work of organization that he startedthirty years before. 

When Vail said auf wiedersehen to the telephone business, it had passedfrom infancy to childhood. It was well shaped but not fully grown. Itspioneering days were over. It was self-supporting and had a little moneyin the bank. But it could not then have carried the load of traffic thatit carries to-day. It had still too many problems to solve and toomuch general inertia to overcome. It needed to be conserved, drilled, educated, popularized. And the man who was finally chosen to replaceVail was in many respects the appropriate leader for such a preparatoryperiod. 

Hudson--John Elbridge Hudson--was the name of the new head of thetelephone people. He was a man of middle age, born in Lynn and bred inBoston; a long-pedigreed New Englander, whose ancestors had smeltediron ore in Lynn when Charles the First was King. He was a lawyer byprofession and a university professor by temperament. His specialty, asa man of affairs, had been marine law; and his hobby was the collectionof rare books and old English engravings. He was a master of the Greeklanguage, and very fond of using it. On all possible occasions he usedthe language of Pericles in his conversation; and even carried thispreference so far as to write his business memoranda in Greek. He wasabove all else a scholar, then a lawyer, and somewhat incidentally thecentral figure in the telephone world. 

But it was of tremendous value to the telephone business at that time tohave at its head a man of Hudson's intellectual and moral calibre. 

He gave it tone and prestige. He built up its credit. He kept it cleanand clear above all suspicion of wrong-doing. He held fast whateverhad been gained. And he prepared the way for the period of expansion byborrowing fifty millions for improvements, and by adding greatly to thestrength and influence of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. 

Hudson remained at the head of the telephone table until his death, in1900, and thus lived to see the dawn of the era of big business. Underhis regime great things were done in the development of the art. Thebusiness was pushed ahead at every point by its captains. Every man inhis place, trying to give a little better service than yesterday--thatwas the keynote of the Hudson period. There was no one preeminentgenius. Each important step forward was the result of the cooperation ofmany minds, and the prodding necessities of a growing traffic. 

By 1896, when the Common Battery system created a new era, the telephoneengineer had pretty well mastered his simpler troubles. He was able tohandle his wires, no matter how many. By this time, too, the publicwas ready for the telephone. A new generation had grown up, without theprejudices of its fathers. People had grown away from the telegraphichabit of thought, which was that wire communications were expensiveluxuries for the few. The telephone was, in fact, a new social nerve, so new and so novel that very nearly twenty years went by before ithad fully grown into place, and before the social body developed theinstinct of using it. 

Not that the difficulties of the telephone engineers were over, for theywere not. They have seemed to grow more numerous and complex every year. But by 1896 enough had been done to warrant a forward movement. For thenext ten-year period the keynote of telephone history was EXPANSION. Under the prevailing flat-rate plan of payment, all customers paidthe same yearly price and then used their telephones as often as theypleased. This was a simple method, and the most satisfactory for smalltowns and farming regions. But in a great city such a plan grew to besuicidal. In New York, for instance, the price had to be raised to $240, which lifted the telephone as high above the mass of the citizens asthough it were a piano or a diamond sunburst. Such a plan was stranglingthe business. It was shutting out the small users. It was clogging thewires with deadhead calls. It was giving some people too little serviceand others too much. It was a very unsatisfactory situation. 

How to extend the service and at the same time cheapen it to smallusers--that was the Gordian knot; and the man who unquestionably didmost to untie it was Edward J. Hall. Mr. Hall founded the telephonebusiness in Buffalo in 1878, and seven years afterwards became the chiefof the long-distance traffic. He was then, and is to-day, one of thestatesmen of the telephone. For more than thirty years he has been the"candid friend" of the business, incessantly suggesting, probing, andcriticising. Keen and dispassionate, with a genius for mercilesslycutting to the marrow of a proposition, Hall has at the same time been azealot for the improvement and extension of telephone service. It was hewho set the agents free from the ball-and-chain of royalties, allowingthem to pay instead a percentage of gross receipts. And it was he who"broke the jam, " as a lumberman would say, by suggesting the MESSAGERATE system. 

By this plan, which U. N. Bethell developed to its highest point in NewYork, a user of the telephone pays a fixed minimum price for a certainnumber of messages per year, and extra for all messages over thisnumber. The large user pays more, and the little user pays less. Itopened up the way to such an expansion of telephone business as Bell, in his rosiest dreams, had never imagined. In three years, after 1896, there were twice as many users; in six years there were four times asmany; in ten years there were eight to one. What with the message rateand the pay station, the telephone was now on its way to be universal. It was adapted to all kinds and conditions of men. A great corporation, nerved at every point with telephone wires, may now pay fifty thousanddollars to the Bell Company, while at the same time a young Irishimmigrant boy, just arrived in New York City, may offer five coppers andfind at his disposal a fifty million dollar telephone system. 

When the message rate was fairly well established, Hudson died--fellsuddenly to the ground as he was about to step into a railway carriage. In his place came Frederick P. Fish, also a lawyer and a Bostonian. Fishwas a popular, optimistic man, with a "full-speed-ahead" temperament. He pushed the policy of expansion until he broke all the records. Heborrowed money in stupendous amounts--$150, 000, 000 at one time--andflung it into a campaign of red-hot development. More business hedemanded, and more, and more, until his captains, like a thirty-horseteam of galloping horses, became very nearly uncontrollable. 

It was a fast and furious period. The whole country was ablaze with apassion of prosperity. After generations of conflict, the men with largeideas had at last put to rout the men of small ideas. The wasteand folly of competition had everywhere driven men to the policy ofcooperation. Mills were linked to mills and factories to factories, ina vast mutualism of industry such as no other age, perhaps, has everknown. And as the telephone is essentially the instrument of co-workingand interdependent people, it found itself suddenly welcomed as the mostpopular and indispensable of all the agencies that put men in touch witheach other. 

To describe this growth in a single sentence, we might say that theBell telephone secured its first million of capital in 1879; its firstmillion of earnings in 1882; its first million of dividends in 1884; itsfirst million of surplus in 1885. It had paid out its first million forlegal expenses by 1886; began first to send a million messages a dayin 1888; had strung its first million miles of wire in 1900; and hadinstalled its first million telephones in 1898. By 1897 it had spun asmany cobwebs of wire as the mighty Western Union itself; by 1900 it hadtwice as many miles of wire as the Western Union, and in 1905 FIVE TIMESas many. Such was the plunging progress of the Bell Companies in thisperiod of expansion, that by 1905 they had swept past all Europeancountries combined, not only in the quality of the service but in theactual number of telephones in use. This, too, without a cent of publicmoney, or the protection of a tariff, or the prestige of a governmentalbureau. 

By 1892 Boston and New York were talking to Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburg, and Washington. One-half of the people of the United Stateswere within talking distance of each other. The THOUSAND-MILE TALK hadceased to be a fairy tale. Several years later the western end of theline was pushed over the plains to Nebraska, enabling the spoken word inBoston to be heard in Omaha. Slowly and with much effort the public weretaught to substitute the telephone for travel. A special long-distancesalon was fitted up in New York City to entice people into the habitof talking to other cities. Cabs were sent for customers; and when onearrived, he was escorted over Oriental rugs to a gilded booth, drapedwith silken curtains. This was the famous "Room Nine. " By such and manyother allurements a larger idea of telephone service was given to thepublic mind; until in 1909 at least eighteen thousand New York-Chicagoconversations were held, and the revenue from strictly long-distancemessages was twenty-two thousand dollars a day. 

By 1906 even the Rocky Mountain Bell Company had grown to be aten-million-dollar enterprise. It began at Salt Lake City with a hundredtelephones, in 1880. Then it reached out to master an area of fourhundred and thirteen thousand square miles--a great Lone Land ofundeveloped resources. Its linemen groped through dense forests wheretheir poles looked like toothpicks beside the towering pines and cedars. They girdled the mountains and basted the prairies with wire, until thelonely places were brought together and made sociable. They drove offthe Indians, who wanted the bright wire for ear-rings and bracelets;and the bears, which mistook the humming of the wires for the buzzingof bees, and persisted in gnawing the poles down. With the most heroicoptimism, this Rocky Mountain Company persevered until, in 1906, it hadcreated a seventy-thousand-mile nerve-system for the far West. 

Chicago, in this year, had two hundred thou-sand telephones in use, inher two hundred square miles of area. The business had been built up byGeneral Anson Stager, who was himself wealthy, and able to attract thesupport of such men as John Crerar, H. H. Porter, and Robert T. Lincoln. Since 1882 it has paid dividends, and in one glorious year its stocksoared to four hundred dollars a share. The old-timers--the men whoclambered over roof-tops in 1878 and tacked iron wires wherever theycould without being chased off--are still for the most part in controlof the Chicago company. 

But as might have been expected, it was New York City that was therecord-breaker when the era of telephone expansion arrived. Here theflood of big business struck with the force of a tidal wave. The numberof users leaped from 56, 000 in 1900 up to 810, 000 in 1908. In a singleyear of sweating and breathless activity, 65, 000 new telephones wereput on desks or hung on walls--an average of one new user for every twominutes of the business day. 

Literally tons, and hundreds of tons, of telephones were hauled in draysfrom the factory and put in place in New York's homes and offices. Moreand more were demanded, until to-day there are more telephones in NewYork than there are in the four countries, France, Belgium, Holland, andSwitzerland combined. As a user of telephones New York has risen to beunapproachable. Mass together all the telephones of London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffleld, Bristol, andBelfast, and there will even then be barely as many as are carrying theconversations of this one American city. 

In 1879 the New York telephone directory was a small card, showingtwo hundred and fifty-two names; but now it has grown to be aneight-hundred-page quarterly, with a circulation of half a million, andrequiring twenty drays, forty horses, and four hundred men to do thework of distribution. There was one shabby little exchange thirty yearsago; but now there are fifty-two exchanges, as the nerve-centres ofa vast fifty-million-dollar system. Incredible as it may seem toforeigners, it is literally true that in a single building in New York, the Hudson Terminal, there are more telephones than in Odessa or Madrid, more than in the two kingdoms of Greece and Bulgaria combined. 

Merely to operate this system requires an army of more than fivethousand girls. Merely to keep their records requires two hundred andthirty-five million sheets of paper a year. Merely to do the writing ofthese records wears away five hundred and sixty thousand lead pencils. And merely to give these girls a cup of tea or coffee at noon, compelsthe Bell Company to buy yearly six thousand pounds of tea, seventeenthousand pounds of coffee, forty-eight thousand cans of condensed milk, and one hundred and forty barrels of sugar. 

The myriad wires of this New York system are tingling with talk everyminute of the day and night. They are most at rest between three andfour o'clock in the morning, although even then there are usually tencalls a minute. Between five and six o'clock, two thousand New Yorkersare awake and at the telephone. Half an hour later there are twice asmany. Between seven and eight twenty-five thousand people have calledup twenty-five thousand other people, so that there are as many peopletalking by wire as there were in the whole city of New York in theRevolutionary period. Even this is only the dawn of the day's business. By half-past eight it is doubled; by nine it is trebled; by ten it ismultiplied sixfold; and by eleven the roar has become an incrediblebabel of one hundred and eighty thousand conversations an hour, withfifty new voices clamoring at the exchanges every second. 

This is "the peak of the load. " It is the topmost pinnacle of talk. Itis the utmost degree of service that the telephone has been required togive in any city. And it is as much a world's wonder, to men andwomen of imagination, as the steel mills of Homestead or the turbineleviathans that curve across the Atlantic Ocean in four and a half days. 

As to the men who built it up: Charles F. Cutler died in 1907, butmost of the others are still alive and busy. Union N. Bethell, nowin Cutler's place at the head of the New York Company, has been theoperating chief for eighteen years. He is a man of shrewdness andsympathy, with a rare sagacity in solving knotty problems, a presidentof the new type, who regards his work as a sort of obligation he owesto the public. And just as foreigners go to Pittsburg to see the steelbusiness at its best; just as they go to Iowa and Kansas to see theNew Farmer, so they make pilgrimages to Bethell's office to learn theprofession of telephony. 

This unparalleled telephone system of New York grew up without havingat any time the rivalry of competition. But in many other cities andespecially in the Middle West, there sprang up in 1895 a medley ofindependent companies. The time of the original patents had expired, andthe Bell Companies found themselves freed from the expense of litigationonly to be snarled up in a tangle of duplication. In a few years therewere six thousand of these little Robinson Crusoe companies. And by 1901they had put in use more than a million telephones and were professingto have a capital of a hundred millions. 

Most of these companies were necessary and did much to expand thetelephone business into new territory. They were in fact small mutualassociations of a dozen or a hundred farmers, whose aim was to gettelephone service at cost. But there were other companies, probablya thousand or more, which were organized by promoters who built theirhopes on the fact that the Bell Companies were unpopular, and on themyth that they were fabulously rich. Instead of legitimately extendingtelephone lines into communities that had none, these promotersproceeded to inflict the messy snarl of an overlapping system uponwhatever cities would give them permission to do so. 

In this way, masked as competition, the nuisance and waste ofduplication began in most American cities. The telephone business wasstill so young, it was so little appreciated even by the telephoneofficials and engineers, that the public regarded a second or athird telephone system in one city as quite a possible and desirableinnovation. "We have two ears, " said one promoter; "why not thereforehave two telephones?"

This duplication went merrily on for years before it was generallydiscovered that the telephone is not an ear, but a nerve system; andthat such an experiment as a duplicate nerve system has never beenattempted by Nature, even in her most frivolous moods. Most peoplefancied that a telephone system was practically the same as a gas orelectric light system, which can often be duplicated with the result ofcheaper rates and better service. They did not for years discover thattwo telephone companies in one city means either half service or doublecost, just as two fire departments or two post offices would. 

Some of these duplicate companies built up a complete plant, and gavegood local service, while others proved to be mere stock bubbles. Mostof them were over-capitalized, depending upon public sympathy to atonefor deficiencies in equipment. One which had printed fifty milliondollars of stock for sale was sold at auction in 1909 for four hundredthousand dollars. All told, there were twenty-three of these bubblesthat burst in 1905, twenty-one in 1906, and twelve in 1907. So highhas been the death-rate among these isolated companies that at a recentconvention of telephone agents, the chairman's gavel was made ofthirty-five pieces of wood, taken from thirty-five switchboards ofthirty-five extinct companies. 

A study of twelve single-system cities and twenty-seven double-systemcities shows that there are about eleven per cent more telephones underthe double-system, and that where the second system is put in, everyfifth user is obliged to pay for two telephones. The rates are alike, whether a city has one or two systems. Duplicating companies raisedtheir rates in sixteen cities out of the twenty-seven, and reduced themin one city. Taking the United States as a whole, there are to-day fullytwo hundred and fifty thousand people who are paying for two telephonesinstead of one, an economic waste of at least ten million dollars ayear. 

A fair-minded survey of the entire independent telephone movement wouldprobably show that it was at first a stimulant, followed, as stimulantsusually are, by a reaction. It was unquestionably for several years aspur to the Bell Companies. But it did not fulfil its promises of cheaprates, better service, and high dividends; it did little or nothing toimprove telephonic apparatus, producing nothing new except the automaticswitchboard--a brilliant invention, which is now in its experimentalperiod. In the main, perhaps, it has been a reactionary and troublesomemovement in the cities, and a progressive movement among the farmers. 

By 1907 it was a wave that had spent its force. It was no longer rollingalong easily on the broad ocean of hope, but broken and turned asideby the rocks of actual conditions. One by one the telephone promoterslearned the limitations of an isolated company, and asked to be includedas members of the Bell family. In 1907 four hundred and fifty-eightthousand independent telephones were linked by wire to the nearest BellCompany; and in 1908 these were followed by three hundred and fiftythousand more. After this landslide to the policy of consolidation, there still remained a fairly large assortment of independent companies;but they had lost their dreams and their illusions. 

As might have been expected, the independent movement produced a numberof competent local leaders, but none of national importance. The BellCompanies, on the other hand, were officered by men who had for aquarter of a century been surveying telephone problems from a nationalpoint of view. At their head, from 1907 onwards, was Theodore N. Vail, who had returned dramatically, at the precise moment when he was needed, to finish the work that he had begun in 1878. He had been absent fortwenty years, developing water-power and building street-railways inSouth America. In the first act of the telephone drama, it was hewho put the enterprise upon a business basis, and laid down the firstprinciples of its policy. In the second and third acts he had no place;but when the curtain rose upon the fourth act, Vail was once more thecentral figure, standing white-haired among his captains, and pushingforward the completion of the "grand telephonic system" that he haddreamed of when the telephone was three years old. 

Thus it came about that the telephone business was created by Vail, conserved by Hudson, expanded by Fish, and is now in process of beingconsolidated by Vail. It is being knit together into a stupendous BellSystem--a federation of self-governing companies, united by a centralcompany that is the busiest of them all. It is no longer protected byany patent monopoly. Whoever is rich enough and rash enough may enterthe field. But it has all the immeasurable advantages that come fromlong experience, immense bulk, the most highly skilled specialists, and an abundance of capital. "The Bell System is strong, " says Vail, "because we are all tied up together; and the success of one istherefore the concern of all. "

The Bell System! Here we have the motif of American telephonedevelopment. Here is the most comprehensive idea that has entered anytelephone engineer's brain. Already this Bell System has grown to be sovast, so nearly akin to a national nerve system, that there is nothingelse to which we can compare it. It is so wide-spread that few areaware of its greatness. It is strung out over fifty thousand cities andcommunities. 

If it were all gathered together into one place, this Bell System, itwould make a city of Telephonia as large as Baltimore. It would containhalf of the telephone property of the world. Its actual wealth would befully $760, 000, 000, and its revenue would be greater than the revenue ofthe city of New York. 

Part of the property of the city of Telephonia consists of ten millionpoles, as many as would make a fence from New York to California, or puta stockade around Texas. If the Telephonians wished to use these polesat home, they might drive them in as piles along their water-front, andhave a twenty-five thousand-acre dock; or if their city were a hundredsquare miles in extent, they might set up a seven-ply wall around itwith these poles. 

Wire, too! Eleven million miles of it! This city of Telephonia wouldbe the capital of an empire of wire. Not all the men in New York Statecould shoulder this burden of wire and carry it. Throw all the peopleof Illinois in one end of the scale, and put on the other side thewire-wealth of Telephonia, and long before the last coil was in place, the Illinoisans would be in the air. 

What would this city do for a living? It would make two-thirds ofthe telephones, cables, and switchboards of all countries. Nearlyone-quarter of its citizens would work in factories, while the otherswould be busy in six thousand exchanges, making it possible for thepeople of the United States to talk to one another at the rate of SEVENTHOUSAND MILLION CONVERSATIONS A YEAR. 

The pay-envelope army that moves to work every morning in Telephoniawould be a host of one hundred and ten thousand men and girls, mostlygirls, --as many girls as would fill Vassar College a hundred times andmore, or double the population of Nevada. Put these men and girls inline, march them ten abreast, and six hours would pass before the lastcompany would arrive at the reviewing stand. In single file this throngof Telephonians would make a living wall from New York to New Haven. 

Such is the extraordinary city of which Alexander Graham Bell was theonly resident in 1875. It has been built up without the backing of anygreat bank or multi-millionaire. There have been no Vanderbilts in it, no Astors, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Harrimans. There are even nowonly four men who own as many as ten thousand shares of the stock ofthe central company. This Bell System stands as the life-work ofunprivileged men, who are for the most part still alive and busy. Withvery few and trivial exceptions, every part of it was made in theUnited States. No other industrial organism of equal size owes foreigncountries so little. Alike in its origin, its development, andits highest point of efficiency and expansion, the telephone is asessentially American as the Declaration of Independence or the monumenton Bunker Hill. 

CHAPTER VI. NOTABLE USERS OF THE TELEPHONE

What we might call the telephonization of city life, for lack of asimpler word, has remarkably altered our manner of living from what itwas in the days of Abraham Lincoln. It has enabled us to be more socialand cooperative. It has literally abolished the isolation of separatefamilies, and has made us members of one great family. It has become sotruly an organ of the social body that by telephone we now enter intocontracts, give evidence, try lawsuits, make speeches, propose marriage, confer degrees, appeal to voters, and do almost everything else that isa matter of speech. 

In stores and hotels this wire traffic has grown to an almostbewildering extent, as these are the places where many interests meet. The hundred largest hotels in New York City have twenty-one thousandtelephones--nearly as many as the continent of Africa and more than thekingdom of Spain. In an average year they send six million messages. TheWaldorf-Astoria alone tops all residential buildings with eleven hundredand twenty telephones and five hundred thousand calls a year; whilemerely the Christmas Eve orders that flash into Marshall Field's store, or John Wanamaker's, have risen as high as the three thousand mark. 

Whether the telephone does most to concentrate population, or to scatterit, is a question that has not yet been examined. It is certainly truethat it has made the skyscraper possible, and thus helped to createan absolutely new type of city, such as was never imagined even in thefairy tales of ancient nations. The skyscraper is ten years younger thanthe telephone. It is now generally seen to be the ideal building forbusiness offices. It is one of the few types of architecture that mayfairly be called American. And its efficiency is largely, if not mainly, due to the fact that its inhabitants may run errands by telephone aswell as by elevator. 

There seems to be no sort of activity which is not being made moreconvenient by the telephone. It is used to call the duck-shooters inWestern Canada when a flock of birds has arrived; and to direct themovements of the Dragon in Wagner's grand opera "Siegfried. " At the lastYale-Harvard football game, it conveyed almost instantaneous news tofifty thousand people in various parts of New England. At the VanderbiltCup Race its wires girdled the track and reported every gain or mishapof the racing autos. And at such expensive pageants as that of theQuebec Tercentenary in 1908, where four thousand actors came and wentupon a ten-acre stage, every order was given by telephone. 

Public officials, even in the United States, have been slow to changefrom the old-fashioned and more dignified use of written documentsand uniformed messengers; but in the last ten years there has been asweeping revolution in this respect. Government by telephone! This is anew idea that has already arrived in the more efficient departments ofthe Federal service. And as for the present Congress, that body has goneso far as to plan for a special system of its own, in both Houses, sothat all official announcements may be heard by wire. 

Garfield was the first among American Presidents to possess a telephone. An exhibition instrument was placed in his house, without cost, in 1878, while he was still a member of Congress. Neither Cleveland nor Harrison, for temperamental reasons, used the magic wire very often. Under theirregime, there was one lonely idle telephone in the White House, used bythe servants several times a week. But with McKinley came a new order ofthings. To him a telephone was more than a necessity. It was a pastime, an exhilarating sport. He was the one President who really revelled inthe comforts of telephony. In 1895 he sat in his Canton home and heardthe cheers of the Chicago Convention. Later he sat there and ranthe first presidential telephone campaign; talked to his managers inthirty-eight States. Thus he came to regard the telephone with a higherdegree of appreciation than any of his predecessors had done, andeulogized it on many public occasions. "It is bringing us all closertogether, " was his favorite phrase. 

To Roosevelt the telephone was mainly for emergencies. He used it to thefull during the Chicago Convention of 1907 and the Peace Conference atPortsmouth. But with Taft the telephone became again the common avenueof conversation. He has introduced at least one new telephonic custom along-distance talk with his family every evening, when he is away fromhome. Instead of the solitary telephone of Cleveland-Harrison days, theWhite House has now a branch exchange of its own--Main 6--with a sheafof wires that branch out into every room as well as to the nearestcentral. 

Next to public officials, bankers were perhaps the last to accept thefacilities of the telephone. They were slow to abandon the fallacy thatno business can be done without a written record. James Stillman, of NewYork, was first among bankers to foresee the telephone era. As earlyas 1875, while Bell was teaching his infant telephone to talk, Stillmanrisked two thousand dollars in a scheme to establish a crude dial systemof wire communication, which later grew into New York's first telephoneexchange. At the present time, the banker who works closest to histelephone is probably George W. Perkins, of the J. P. Morgan groupof bankers. "He is the only man, " says Morgan, "who can raise twentymillions in twenty minutes. " The Perkins plan of rapid transit telephonyis to prepare a list of names, from ten to thirty, and to flash from oneto another as fast as the operator can ring them up. Recently one ofthe other members of the Morgan bank proposed to enlarge its telephoneequipment. "What will we gain by more wires?" asked the operator. "Ifwe were to put in a six-hundred pair cable, Mr. Perkins would keep itbusy. "

The most brilliant feat of the telephone in the financial world wasdone during the panic of 1907. At the height of the storm, on a Saturdayevening, the New York bankers met in an almost desperate conference. They decided, as an emergency measure of self-protection, not to shipcash to Western banks. At midnight they telephoned this decision tothe bankers of Chicago and St. Louis. These men, in turn, conferred bytelephone, and on Sunday afternoon called up the bankers of neighboringStates. And so the news went from 'phone to 'phone, until by Mondaymorning all bankers and chief depositors were aware of the situation, and prepared for the team-play that prevented any general disaster. 

As for stockbrokers of the Wall Street species, they transactpractically all their business by telephone. In their stock exchangestand six hundred and forty one booths, each one the terminus of aprivate wire. A firm of brokers will count it an ordinary year's talkingto send fifty thousand messages; and there is one firm which last yearsent twice as many. Of all brokers, the one who finally accomplishedmost by telephony was unquestionably E. H. Harriman. In the mansion thathe built at Arden, there were a hundred telephones, sixty of them linkedto the long-distance lines. What the brush is to the artist, what thechisel is to the sculptor, the telephone was to Harriman. He built hisfortune with it. It was in his library, his bathroom, his private car, his camp in the Oregon wilder-ness. No transaction was too large or tooinvolved to be settled over its wires. He saved the credit of theErie by telephone--lent it five million dollars as he lay at home ona sickbed. "He is a slave to the telephone, " wrote a magazine writer. "Nonsense, " replied Harriman, "it is a slave to me. "

The telephone arrived in time to prevent big corporations from beingunwieldy and aristocratic. The foreman of a Pittsburg coal company maynow stand in his subterranean office and talk to the president ofthe Steel Trust, who sits on the twenty-first floor of a New Yorkskyscraper. The long-distance talks, especially, have grown to beindispensable to the corporations whose plants are scattered andgeographically misplaced--to the mills of New England, for instance, that use the cotton of the South and sell so much of their product tothe Middle West. To the companies that sell perishable commodities, an instantaneous conversation with a buyer in a distant city has oftensaved a carload or a cargo. Such caterers as the meat-packers, who wereamong the first to realize what Bell had made possible, have greatlyaccelerated the wheels of their business by inter-city conversations. For ten years or longer the Cudahys have talked every business morningbetween Omaha and Boston, via fifteen hundred and seventy miles of wire. 

In the refining of oil, the Standard Oil Company alone, at its New Yorkoffice, sends two hundred and thirty thousand messages a year. In themaking of steel, a chemical analysis is made of each caldron of moltenpig-iron, when it starts on its way to be refined, and this analysis issent by telephone to the steelmaker, so that he will know exactly howeach potful is to be handled. In the floating of logs down rivers, instead of having relays of shouters to prevent the logs from jamming, there is now a wire along the bank, with a telephone linked on at everypoint of danger. In the rearing of skyscrapers, it is now usual to havea temporary wire strung vertically, so that the architect may stand onthe ground and confer with a foreman who sits astride of a naked girderthree hundred feet up in the air. And in the electric light business, the current is distributed wholly by telephoned orders. To give New Yorkthe seven million electric lights that have abolished night in thatcity requires twelve private exchanges and five hundred and twelvetelephones. All the power that creates this artificial daylight isgenerated at a single station, and let flow to twenty-five storagecentres. Minute by minute, its flow is guided by an expert, who sits ata telephone exchange as though he were a pilot at the wheel of an oceanliner. 

The first steamship line to take notice of the telephone was the Clyde, which had a wire from dock to office in 1877; and the first railway wasthe Pennsylvania, which two years later was persuaded by Professor Bellhimself to give it a trial in Altoona. Since then, this railroad hasbecome the chief beneficiary of the art of telephony. It has one hundredand seventy-five exchanges, four hundred operators, thirteen thousandtelephones, and twenty thousand miles of wire--a more ample system thanthe city of New York had in 1896. 

To-day the telephone goes to sea in the passenger steamer and thewarship. Its wires are waiting at the dock and the depot, so that atourist may sit in his stateroom and talk with a friend in some distantoffice. It is one of the most incredible miracles of telephony thata passenger at New York, who is about to start for Chicago on a fastexpress, may telephone to Chicago from the drawing-room of a Pullman. Hehimself, on the swiftest of all trains, will not arrive in Chicago foreighteen hours; but the flying words can make the journey, and RETURN, while his train is waiting for the signal to start. 

In the operation of trains, the railroads have waited thirty yearsbefore they dared to trust the telephone, just as they waited fifteenyears before they dared to trust the telegraph. In 1883 a few railwaysused the telephone in a small way, but in 1907, when a law was passedthat made telegraphers highly expensive, there was a general swingto the telephone. Several dozen roads have now put it in use, someemploying it as an associate of the Morse method and others as acomplete substitute. It has already been found to be the quickest way ofdespatching trains. It will do in five minutes what the telegraph didin ten. And it has enabled railroads to hire more suitable men for thesmaller offices. 

In news-gathering, too, much more than in railroading, the day of thetelephone has arrived. The Boston Globe was the first paper to receivenews by telephone. Later came The Washington Star, which had a wirestrung to the Capitol, and thereby gained an hour over its competitors. To-day the evening papers receive most of their news over the wire ala Bell instead of a la Morse. This has resulted in a specialization ofreporters--one man runs for the news and another man writes it. Some ofthe runners never come to the office. They receive their assignmentsby telephone, and their salaries by mail. There are even a few who areallowed to telephone their news directly to a swift linotype operator, who clicks it into type on his machine, without the scratch of a pencil. This, of course, is the ideal method of news-gathering, which is rarelypossible. 

A paper of the first class, such as The New York World, has now anoutfit of twenty trunk lines and eighty telephones. Its outgoing callsare two hundred thousand a year and its incoming calls three hundredthousand, which means that for every morning, evening, or Sundayedition, there has been an average of seven hundred and fifty messages. The ordinary newspaper in a small town cannot afford such a service, but recently the United Press has originated a cooperative method. Ittelephones the news over one wire to ten or twelve newspapers at onetime. In ten minutes a thousand words can in this way be flung out to adozen towns, as quickly as by telegraph and much cheaper. 

But it is in a dangerous crisis, when safety seems to hang upon asecond, that the telephone is at its best. It is the instrument ofemergencies, a sort of ubiquitous watchman. When the girl operator inthe exchange hears a cry for help--"Quick! The hospital!" "The firedepartment!" "The police!" she seldom waits to hear the number. Sheknows it. She is trained to save half-seconds. And it is at suchmoments, if ever, that the users of a telephone can appreciate itsinsurance value. No doubt, if a King Richard III were worsted on amodern battlefield, his instinctive cry would be, "My Kingdom for atelephone!"

When instant action is needed in the city of New York, a General Alarmcan in five minutes be sent by the police wires over its whole vastarea of three hundred square miles. When, recently, a gas main broke inBrooklyn, sixty girls were at once called to the centrals in that partof the city to warn the ten thousand families who had been placed indanger. When the ill-fated General Slocum caught fire, a mechanic in afactory on the water-front saw the blaze, and had the presence of mindto telephone the newspapers, the hospitals, and the police. When a smallchild is lost, or a convict has escaped from prison, or the forest ison fire, or some menace from the weather is at hand, the telephone bellsclang out the news, just as the nerves jangle the bells of pain whenthe body is in danger. In one tragic case, the operator in Folsom, NewMexico, refused to quit her post until she had warned her people of aflood that had broken loose in the hills above the village. Because ofher courage, nearly all were saved, though she herself was drowned atthe switchboard. Her name--Mrs. S. J. Rooke--deserves to be remembered. 

If a disaster cannot be prevented, it is the telephone, usually, thatbrings first aid to the injured. After the destruction of San Francisco, Governor Guild, of Massachusetts, sent an appeal for the stricken cityto the three hundred and fifty-four mayors of his State; and by thecourtesy of the Bell Company, which carried the messages free, they weredelivered to the last and furthermost mayors in less than five hours. After the destruction of Messina, an order for enough lumber to buildten thousand new houses was cabled to New York and telephoned to Westernlumbermen. So quickly was this order filled that on the twelfth dayafter the arrival of the cablegram, the ships were on their way toMessina with the lumber. After the Kansas City flood of 1903, when thedrenched city was without railways or street-cars or electric lights, it was the telephone that held the city together and brought help to thedanger-spots. And after the Baltimore fire, the telephone exchange wasthe last force to quit and the first to recover. Its girls sat on theirstools at the switchboard until the window-panes were broken by theheat. Then they pulled the covers over the board and walked out. Two hours later the building was in ashes. Three hours later anotherbuilding was rented on the unburned rim of the city, and the wire chiefswere at work. In one day there was a system of wires for the use of thecity officials. In two days these were linked to long-distance wires;and in eleven days a two-thousand-line switchboard was in full workingtrim. This feat still stands as the record in rebuilding. 

In the supreme emergency of war, the telephone is as indispensable, verynearly, as the cannon. This, at least, is the belief of the Japanese, who handled their armies by telephone when they drove back the Russians. Each body of Japanese troops moved forward like a silkworm, leavingbehind it a glistening strand of red copper wire. At the decisive battleof Mukden, the silk-worm army, with a million legs, crept against theRussian hosts in a vast crescent, a hundred miles from end to end. Bymeans of this glistening red wire, the various batteries and regimentswere organized into fifteen divisions. Each group of three divisions waswired to a general, and the five generals were wired to the great Oyamahimself, who sat ten miles back of the firing-line and sent his orders. Whenever a regiment lunged forward, one of the soldiers carried atelephone set. If they held their position, two other soldiers ranforward with a spool of wire. In this way and under fire of the Russiancannon, one hundred and fifty miles of wire were strung across thebattlefield. As the Japanese said, it was this "flying telephone" thatenabled Oyama to manipulate his forces as handily as though he wereplaying a game of chess. It was in this war, too, that the Mikado'ssoldiers strung the costliest of all telephone lines, at 203 Metre Hill. When the wire had been basted up this hill to the summit, the fortressof Port Arthur lay at their mercy. But the climb had cost themtwenty-four thousand lives. 

Of the seven million telephones in the United States, about two millionare now in farmhouses. Every fourth American farmer is in telephonetouch with his neighbors and the market. Iowa leads, among the farmingStates. In Iowa, not to have a telephone is to belong to what a Londonerwould call the "submerged tenth" of the population. Second in line comesIllinois, with Kansas, Nebraska, and Indiana following closely behind;and at the foot of the list, in the matter of farm telephones, areConnecticut and Louisiana. 

The first farmer who discovered the value of the telephone wasthe market gardener. Next came the bonanza farmer of the Red RiverValley--such a man, for instance, as Oliver Dalrymple, of North Dakota, who found that by the aid of the telephone he could plant and harvestthirty thousand acres of wheat in a single season. Then, not more thanhalf a dozen years ago, there arose a veritable Telephone Crusade amongthe farmers of the Middle West. Cheap telephones, yet fairly good, had by this time been made possible by the improvements of the Bellengineers; and stories of what could be done by telephone became thefavorite gossip of the day. One farmer had kept his barn from beingburned down by telephoning for his neighbors; another had cleared fivehundred dollars extra profit on the sale of his cattle, by telephoningto the best market; a third had rescued a flock of sheep by sendingquick news of an approaching blizzard; a fourth had saved his son's lifeby getting an instantaneous message to the doctor; and so on. 

How the telephone saved a three million dollar fruit crop in Colorado, in 1909, is the story that is oftenest told in the West. Until thatyear, the frosts in the Spring nipped the buds. No farmer could be sureof his harvest. But in 1909, the fruit-growers bought smudge-pots--threehundred thousand or more. These were placed in the orchards, ready tobe lit at a moment's notice. Next, an alliance was made with the UnitedStates Weather Bureau so that whenever the Frost King came down from thenorth, a warning could be telephoned to the farmers. Just when Coloradowas pink with apple blossoms, the first warning came. "Get ready tolight up your smudge-pots in half an hour. " Then the farmers telephonedto the nearest towns: "Frost is coming; come and help us in theorchards. " Hundreds of men rushed out into the country on horsebackand in wagons. In half an hour the last warning came: "Light up; thethermometer registers twenty-nine. " The smudge-pot artillery was setablaze, and kept blazing until the news came that the icy forces hadretreated. And in this way every Colorado farmer who had a telephonesaved his fruit. 

In some farming States, the enthusiasm for the telephone is running sohigh that mass meetings are held, with lavish oratory on the generaltheme of "Good Roads and Telephones. " And as a result of this TelephoneCrusade, there are now nearly twenty thousand groups of farmers, eachone with a mutual telephone system, and one-half of them with sufficiententerprise to link their little webs of wires to the vast Bell system, so that at least a million farmers have been brought as close to thegreat cities as they are to their own barns. 

What telephones have done to bring in the present era of big crops, isan interesting story in itself. To compress it into a sentence, we mightsay that the telephone has completed the labor-saving movement whichstarted with the McCormick reaper in 1831. It has lifted the farmerabove the wastefulness of being his own errand-boy. The average lengthof haul from barn to market in the United States is nine and a halfmiles, so that every trip saved means an extra day's work for a man andteam. Instead of travelling back and forth, often to no purpose, thefarmer may now stay at home and attend to his stock and his crops. 

As yet, few farmers have learned to appreciate the value of quality intelephone service, as they have in other lines. The same man who willpay six prices for the best seed-corn, and who will allow nothing buthigh-grade cattle in his barn, will at the same time be content with theshabbiest and flimsiest telephone service, without offering any otherexcuse than that it is cheap. But this is a transient phase of farmtelephony. The cost of an efficient farm system is now so little--notmore than two dollars a month, that the present trashy lines are certainsooner or later to go to the junk-heap with the sickle and the flail andall the other cheap and unprofitable things. 

CHAPTER VII. THE TELEPHONE AND NATIONAL EFFICIENCY

The larger significance of the telephone is that it completes the workof eliminating the hermit and gypsy elements of civilization. In analmost ideal way, it has made intercommunication possible withouttravel. It has enabled a man to settle permanently in one place, and yetkeep in personal touch with his fellows. 

Until the last few centuries, much of the world was probably whatMorocco is to-day--a region without wheeled vehicles or even roads ofany sort. There is a mythical story of a wonderful speaking-trumpetpossessed by Alexander the Great, by which he could call a soldier whowas ten miles distant; but there was probably no substitute for thehuman voice except flags and beacon-fires, or any faster method oftravel than the gait of a horse or a camel across ungraded plains. Thefirst sensation of rapid transit doubtless came with the sailing vessel;but it was the play-toy of the winds, and unreliable. When Columbusdared to set out on his famous voyage, he was five weeks in crossingfrom Spain to the West Indies, his best day's record two hundred miles. The swift steamship travel of to-day did not begin until 1838, when theGreat Western raced over the Atlantic in fifteen days. 

As for organized systems of intercommunication, they were unknown evenunder the rule of a Pericles or a Caesar. There was no post office inGreat Britain until 1656--a generation after America had begun to becolonized. There was no English mail-coach until 1784; and when BenjaminFranklin was Postmaster General at Philadelphia, an answer by mail fromBoston, when all went well, required not less than three weeks. Therewas not even a hard-surface road in the thirteen United States until1794; nor even a postage stamp until 1847, the year in which AlexanderGraham Bell was born. In this same year Henry Clay delivered hismemorable speech on the Mexican War, at Lexington, Kentucky, and it wastelegraphed to The New York Herald at a cost of five hundred dollars, thus breaking all previous records for news-gathering enterprise. Elevenyears later the first cable established an instantaneous sign-languagebetween Americans and Europeans; and in 1876 there came the perfectdistance-talking of the telephone. 

No invention has been more timely than the telephone. It arrived at theexact period when it was needed for the organization of great citiesand the unification of nations. The new ideas and energies of science, commerce, and cooperation were beginning to win victories in all partsof the earth. The first railroad had just arrived in China; the firstparliament in Japan; the first constitution in Spain. Stanley was movinglike a tiny point of light through the heart of the Dark Continent. TheUniversal Postal Union had been organized in a little hall in Berne. TheRed Cross movement was twelve years old. An International Congress ofHygiene was being held at Brussells, and an International Congress ofMedicine at Philadelphia. De Lesseps had finished the Suez Canal andwas examining Panama. Italy and Germany had recently been built intonations; France had finally swept aside the Empire and the Commune andestablished the Republic. And what with the new agencies of railroads, steamships, cheap newspapers, cables, and telegraphs, the civilizedraces of mankind had begun to be knit together into a practicalconsolidation. 

To the United States, especially, the telephone came as a friend inneed. After a hundred years of growth, the Republic was still a looseconfederation of separate States, rather than one great united nation. It had recently fallen apart for four years, with a wide gulf of bloodbetween; and with two flags, two Presidents, and two armies. In 1876it was hesitating halfway between doubt and confidence, between the oldpolitical issues of North and South, and the new industrial issues offoreign trade and the development of material resources. The West wasbeing thrown open. The Indians and buffaloes were being driven back. There was a line of railway from ocean to ocean. The population wasgaining at the rate of a million a year. Colorado had just beenbaptized as a new State. And it was still an unsolved problem whether ornot the United States could be kept united, whether or not it could bebuilt into an organic nation without losing the spirit of self-help anddemocracy. 

It is not easy for us to realize to-day how young and primitive was theUnited States of 1876. Yet the fact is that we have twice the populationthat we had when the telephone was invented. We have twice the wheatcrop and twice as much money in circulation. We have three times therailways, banks, libraries, newspapers, exports, farm values, andnational wealth. We have ten million farmers who make four times as muchmoney as seven million farmers made in 1876. We spend four times asmuch on our public schools, and we put four times as much in the savingsbank. We have five times as many students in the colleges. And we haveso revolutionized our methods of production that we now produce seventimes as much coal, fourteen times as much oil and pig-iron, twenty-twotimes as much copper, and forty-three times as much steel. 

There were no skyscrapers in 1876, no trolleys, no electric lights, nogasoline engines, no self-binders, no bicycles, no automobiles. Therewas no Oklahoma, and the combined population of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Arizona was about equal to that of Des Moines. It was in thisyear that General Custer was killed by the Sioux; that the flimsy ironrailway bridge fell at Ashtabula; that the "Molly Maguires" terrorizedPennsylvania; that the first wire of the Brooklyn Bridge was strung; andthat Boss Tweed and Hell Gate were both put out of the way in New York. 

The Great Elm, under which the Revolutionary patriots had met, was stillstanding on Boston Common. Daniel Drew, the New York financier, who wasborn before the American Constitution was adopted, was still alive; sowere Commodore Vanderbilt, Joseph Henry, A. T. Stewart, Thurlow Weed, Peter Cooper, Cyrus McCormick, Lucretia Mott, Bryant, Longfellow, andEmerson. Most old people could remember the running of the first railwaytrain; people of middle age could remember the sending of the firsttelegraph message; and the children in the high schools remembered thelaying of the first Atlantic Cable. 

The grandfathers of 1876 were fond of telling how Webster opposed takingTexas and Oregon into the Union; how George Washington advised againstincluding the Mississippi River; and how Monroe warned Congress thata country that reached from the Atlantic to the Middle West was "tooextensive to be governed but by a despotic monarchy. " They told howAbraham Lincoln, when he was postmaster of New Salem, used to carry theletters in his coon-skin cap and deliver them at sight; how in 1822 themails were carried on horseback and not in stages, so as to have thequickest possible service; and how the news of Madison's election wasthree weeks in reaching the people of Kentucky. When the telegraphwas mentioned, they told how in Revolutionary days the patriots used asystem of signalling called "Washington's Tele-graph, " consisting of apole, a flag, a basket, and a barrel. 

So, the young Republic was still within hearing distance of itschildhood, in 1876. Both in sentiment and in methods of work itwas living close to the log-cabin period. Many of the old slow wayssurvived, the ways that were fast enough in the days of the stage-coachand the tinder-box. There were seventy-seven thousand miles of railway, but poorly built and in short lengths. There were manufacturingindustries that employed two million, four hundred thousand people, butevery trade was broken up into a chaos of small competitive units, eachat war with all the others. There were energy and enterprise in thehighest degree, but not efficiency or organization. Little as we knewit, in 1876 we were mainly gathering together the plans and the rawmaterials for the building up of the modern business world, with itsquick, tense life and its national structure of immense coordinatedindustries. 

In 1876 the age of specialization and community of interest was in itsdawn. The cobbler had given place to the elaborate factory, in whichseventy men cooperated to make one shoe. The merchant who had hithertolived over his store now ventured to have a home in the suburbs. No manwas any longer a self-sufficient Robinson Crusoe. He was a fraction, a single part of a social mechanism, who must necessarily keep in theclosest touch with many others. 

A new interdependent form of civilization was about to be developed, andthe telephone arrived in the nick of time to make this new civilizationworkable and convenient. It was the unfolding of a new organ. Just asthe eye had become the telescope, and the hand had become machinery, andthe feet had become railways, so the voice became the telephone. It wasa new ideal method of communication that had been made indispensable bynew conditions. The prophecy of Carlyle had come true, when he said that"men cannot now be bound to men by brass collars; you will have to bindthem by other far nobler and cunninger methods. "

Railways and steamships had begun this work of binding man to man by"nobler and cunninger methods. " The telegraph and cable had gone stillfarther and put all civilized people within sight of each other, so thatthey could communicate by a sort of deaf and dumb alphabet. And thencame the telephone, giving direct instantaneous communication andputting the people of each nation within hearing distance of eachother. It was the completion of a long series of inventions. It wasthe keystone of the arch. It was the one last improvement that enabledinterdependent nations to handle themselves and to hold together. 

To make railways and steamboats carry letters was much, in the evolutionof the means of communication. To make the electric wire carry signalswas more, because of the instantaneous transmission of important news. But to make the electric wire carry speech was MOST, because it putall fellow-citizens face to face, and made both message and answerinstantaneous. The invention of the telephone taught the Genie ofElectricity to do better than to carry mes-sages in the sign language ofthe dumb. It taught him to speak. As Emerson has finely said:

"We had letters to send. Couriers could not go fast enough, nor farenough; broke their wagons, foundered their horses; bad roads in Spring, snowdrifts in Winter, heat in Summer--could not get their horses outof a walk. But we found that the air and the earth were full ofelectricity, and always going our way, just the way we wanted to send. WOULD HE TAKE A MESSAGE, Just as lief as not; had nothing else to do;would carry it in no time. "

As to the exact value of the telephone to the United States in dollarsand cents, no one can tell. One statistician has given us a total ofthree million dollars a day as the amount saved by using telephones. This sum may be far too high, or too low. It can be no more than aguess. The only adequate way to arrive at the value of the telephoneis to consider the nation as a whole, to take it all in all as a goingconcern, and to note that such a nation would be absolutely impossiblewithout its telephone service. Some sort of a slower and lower graderepublic we might have, with small industrial units, long hours oflabor, lower wages, and clumsier ways. The money loss would be enormous, but more serious still would be the loss in the QUALITY OF THE NATIONALLIFE. Inevitably, an untelephoned nation is less social, less unified, less progressive, and less efficient. It belongs to an inferior species. 

How to make a civilization that is organized and quick, instead ofa barbarism that was chaotic and slow--that is the universal humanproblem, not wholly solved to-day. And how to develop a science ofintercommunication, which commenced when the wild animals began totravel in herds and to protect themselves from their enemies by alanguage of danger-signals, and to democratize this science until theentire nation becomes self-conscious and able to act as one livingbeing--that is the part of this universal problem which finallynecessitated the invention of the telephone. 

With the use of the telephone has come a new habit of mind. The slow andsluggish mood has been sloughed off. The old to-morrow habit has beensuperseded by "Do It To-day"; and life has become more tense, alert, vivid. The brain has been relieved of the suspense of waiting for ananswer, which is a psychological gain of great importance. It receivesits reply at once and is set free to consider other matters. There isless burden upon the memory and the WHOLE MIND can be given to each newproposition. 

A new instinct of speed has been developed, much more fully in theUnited States than elsewhere. "No American goes slow, " said IanMaclaren, "if he has the chance of going fast; he does not stop to talkif he can talk walking; and he does not walk if he can ride. " He is aspleased as a child with a new toy when some speed record is broken, when a pair of shoes is made in eleven minutes, when a man lays twelvehundred bricks in an hour, or when a ship crosses the Atlantic infour and a half days. Even seconds are now counted and split up intofractions. The average time, for instance, taken to reply to a telephonecall by a New York operator, is now three and two-fifth seconds; andeven this tiny atom of time is being strenuously worn down. 

As a witty Frenchman has said, one of our most lively regrets is thatwhile we are at the telephone we cannot do business with our feet. Weregard it as a victory over the hostility of nature when we do an hour'swork in a minute or a minute's work in a second. Instead of saying, asthe Spanish do, "Life is too short; what can one person do?" an Americanis more apt to say, "Life is too short; therefore I must do to-day'swork to-day. " To pack a lifetime with energy--that is the American plan, and so to economize that energy as to get the largest results. To geta question asked and answered in five minutes by means of an electricwire, instead of in two hours by the slow trudging of a messengerboy--that is the method that best suits our passion for instantaneousservice. 

It is one of the few social laws of which we are fairly sure, thata nation organizes in proportion to its velocity. We know that afour-mile-an-hour nation must remain a huge inert mass of peasants andvillagers; or if, after centuries of slow toil, it should pile up agreat city, the city will sooner or later fall to pieces of its ownweight. In such a way Babylon rose and fell, and Nineveh, and Thebes, and Carthage, and Rome. Mere bulk, unorganized, becomes its owndestroyer. It dies of clogging and congestion. But when Stephenson'sRocket ran twenty-nine miles an hour, and Morse's telegraph clicked itssignals from Washington to Baltimore, and Bell's telephone flashed thevibrations of speech between Boston and Salem, a new era began. In camethe era of speed and the finely organized nations. In came cities ofunprecedented bulk, but held together so closely by a web-work of steelrails and copper wires that they have become more alert and cooperativethan any tiny hamlet of mud huts on the banks of the Congo. 

That the telephone is now doing most of all, in this binding togetherof all manner of men, is perhaps not too much to claim, when we rememberthat there are now in the United States seventy thousand holders of Belltelephone stock and ten million users of telephone service. There aretwo hundred and sixty-four wires crossing the Mississippi, in the Bellsystem; and five hundred and forty-four crossing Mason and Dixon'sLine. It is the telephone which does most to link together cottageand skyscraper and mansion and factory and farm. It is not limited toexperts or college graduates. It reaches the man with a nickel aswell as the man with a million. It speaks all languages and serves alltrades. It helps to prevent sectionalism and race feuds. It givesa common meeting place to capitalists and wage-workers. It is soessentially the instrument of all the people, in fact, that we mightalmost point to it as a national emblem, as the trade-mark of democracyand the American spirit. 

In a country like ours, where there are eighty nationalities in thepublic schools, the telephone has a peculiar value as a part of thenational digestive apparatus. It prevents the growth of dialects andhelps on the process of assimilation. Such is the push of American life, that the humble immigrants from Southern Europe, before they have beenhere half a dozen years, have acquired the telephone habit andhave linked on their small shops to the great wire network ofintercommunication. In the one community of Brownsville, for example, settled several years ago by an overflow of Russian Jews from the EastSide of New York, there are now as many telephones as in the kingdom ofGreece. And in the swarming East Side itself, there is a single exchangein Orchard Street which has more wires than there are in all theexchanges of Egypt. 

There can be few higher ideals of practical democracy than that whichcomes to us from the telephone engineer. His purpose is much morecomprehensive than the supplying of telephones to those who want them. It is rather to make the telephone as universal as the water faucet, tobring within speaking distance every economic unit, to connect to thesocial organism every person who may at any time be needed. Just asthe click of the reaper means bread, and the purr of the sewing-machinemeans clothes, and the roar of the Bessemer converter means steel, andthe rattle of the press means education, so the ring of the telephonebell has come to mean unity and organization. 

Already, by cable, telegraph, and telephone, no two towns in thecivilized world are more than one hour apart. We have even girdled theearth with a cablegram in twelve minutes. We have made it possible forany man in New York City to enter into conversation with any otherNew Yorker in twenty-one seconds. We have not been satisfied withestablishing such a system of transportation that we can start any dayfor anywhere from anywhere else; neither have we been satisfied withestablishing such a system of communication that news and gossip arethe common property of all nations. We have gone farther. We haveestablished in every large region of population a system of voice-nervesthat puts every man at every other man's ear, and which so magicallyeliminates the factor of distance that the United States becomes threethousand miles of neighbors, side by side. 

This effort to conquer Time and Space is above all else the instinctof material progress. To shrivel up the miles and to stretch out theminutes--this has been one of the master passions of the human race. Andthus the larger truth about the telephone is that it is vastly more thana mere convenience. It is not to be classed with safety razors and pianoplayers and fountain pens. It is nothing less than the high-speed toolof civilization, gearing up the whole mechanism to more effective socialservice. It is the symbol of national efficiency and cooperation. 

All this the telephone is doing, at a total cost to the nation ofprobably $200, 000, 000 a year--no more than American farmers earn in tendays. We pay the same price for it as we do for the potatoes, or forone-third of the hay crop, or for one-eighth of the corn. Out of everynickel spent for electrical service, one cent goes to the telephone. Wecould settle our telephone bill, and have several millions left over, if we cut off every fourth glass of liquor and smoke of tobacco. Whoeverrents a typewriting machine, or uses a street car twice a day, or hashis shoes polished once a day, may for the same expense have a very goodtelephone service. Merely to shovel away the snow of a single storm in1910 cost the city government of New York as much as it will pay forfive or six years of telephoning. 

This almost incredible cheapness of telephony is still far from beinggenerally perceived, mainly for psychological reasons. A telephone isnot impressive. It has no bulk. It is not like the Singer Building orthe Lusitania. Its wires and switchboards and batteries are scatteredand hidden, and few have sufficient imagination to picture them in alltheir complexity. If only it were possible to assemble the hundred ormore telephone buildings of New York in one vast plaza, and if the twothousand clerks and three thousand maintenance men and six thousand girloperators were to march to work each morning with bands and banners, then, perhaps, there might be the necessary quality of impressiveness bywhich any large idea must always be imparted to the public mind. 

For lack of a seven and one-half cent coin, there is now five-centtelephony even in the largest American cities. For five cents whoeverwishes has an entire wire-system at his service, a system that is keptwaiting by day and night, so that it will be ready the instant he needsit. This system may have cost from twenty to fifty millions, yet itmay be hired for one-eighth the cost of renting an automobile. Even inlong-distance telephony, the expense of a message dwindles when it iscompared with the price of a return railway ticket. A talk from NewYork to Philadelphia, for instance, costs seventy-five cents, whilethe railway fare would be four dollars. From New York to Chicago a talkcosts five dollars as against seventy dollars by rail. As Harriman oncesaid, "I can't get from my home to the depot for the price of a talk toOmaha. "

To say what the net profits have been, to the entire body of people whohave invested money in the telephone, will always be more or less of aguess. The general belief that immense fortunes were made by the luckyholders of Bell stock, is an exaggeration that has been kept alive bythe promoters of wildcat companies. No such fortunes were made. "I donot believe, " says Theodore Vail, "that any one man ever made aclear million out of the telephone. " There are not apt to be anyget-rich-quick for-tunes made in corporations that issue no wateredstock and do not capitalize their franchises. On the contrary, upto 1897, the holders of stock in the Bell Companies had paid in fourmillion, seven hundred thousand dollars more than the par value; and inthe recent consolidation of Eastern companies, under the presidency ofUnion N. Bethell, the new stock was actually eight millions less thanthe stock that was retired. 

Few telephone companies paid any profits at first. They had undervaluedthe cost of building and maintenance. Denver expected the cost to be twothousand, five hundred dollars and spent sixty thousand dollars. Buffaloexpected to pay three thousand dollars and had to pay one hundred andfifty thousand dollars. Also, they made the unwelcome discovery that anexchange of two hundred costs more than twice as much as an exchange ofone hundred, because of the greater amount of traffic. Usually a dollarthat is paid to a telephone company is divided as follows:

 Rent. . . . . . . . . . . . 4c Taxes. . . . . . . . . . . 4c Interest. . . . . . . . 6c Surplus. . . . . . . . . 8c Maintenance. . . . 16c Dividends. . . . . . 18c Labor. . . . . . . . . . 44c ---- $1. 00

Most of the rate troubles (and their name has been legion) have arisenbecause the telephone business was not understood. In fact, untilrecently, it did not understand itself. It persisted in holding toa local and individualistic view of its business. It was slow to puttelephones in unprofitable places. It expected every instrument topay its way. In many States, both the telephone men and the publicoverlooked the most vital fact in the case, which is that the members ofa telephone system are above all else INTERDEPENDENT. 

One telephone by itself has no value. It is as useless as a reed cutout of an organ or a finger that is severed from a hand. It is not evenornamental or adaptable to any other pur-pose. It is not at all like apiano or a talking-machine, which has a separate existence. It is usefulonly in proportion to the number of other telephones it reaches. ANDEVERY TELEPHONE ANYWHERE ADDS VALUE TO EVERY OTHER TELEPHONE ON THE SAMESYSTEM OF WIRES. That, in a sentence, is the keynote of equitable rates. 

Many a telephone, for the general good, must be put where it does notearn its own living. At any time some sudden emergency may arise thatwill make it for the moment priceless. Especially since the advent ofthe automobile, there is no nook or corner from which it may not besupremely necessary, now and then, to send a message. This principlewas acted upon recently in a most practical way by the PennsylvaniaRailroad, which at its own expense installed five hundred andtwenty-five telephones in the homes of its workmen in Altoona. In thesame way, it is clearly the social duty of the telephone companyto widen out its system until every point is covered, and then todistribute its gross charges as fairly as it can. The whole mustcarry the whole--that is the philosophy of rates which must finally berecognized by legislatures and telephone companies alike. It can never, of course, be reduced to a system or formula. It will always be a matterof opinion and compromise, requiring much skill and much patience. Butthere will seldom be any serious trouble when once its basic principlesare understood. 

Like all time-saving inventions, like the railroad, the reaper, and theBessemer converter, the telephone, in the last analysis, COSTS NOTHING;IT IS THE LACK OF IT THAT COSTS. THE NATION THAT MOST IS THE NATIONWITHOUT IT. 

CHAPTER VIII. THE TELEPHONE IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES

The telephone was nearly a year old before Europe was aware of itsexistence. It received no public notice of any kind whatever untilMarch 3, 1877, when the London Athenaeum mentioned it in a few carefulsentences. It was not welcomed, except by those who wished an evening'sentertainment. And to the entire commercial world it was for four orfive years a sort of scientific Billiken, that never could be of anyservice to serious people. 

One after another, several American enthusiasts rushed posthaste toEurope, with dreams of eager nations clamoring for telephone systems, and one after another they failed. Frederick A. Gower was the firstof these. He was an adventurous chevalier of business who gave up anagent's contract in return for a right to become a roving propagandist. Later he met a prima donna, fell in love with and married her, forsooktelephony for ballooning, and lost his life in attempting to fly acrossthe English Channel. 

Next went William H. Reynolds, of Providence, who had bought five-eightsof the British patent for five thousand dollars, and half the rightto Russia, Spain, Portugal, and Italy for two thousand, five hundreddollars. How he was received may be seen from a letter of his whichhas been preserved. "I have been working in London for four months, " hewrites; "I have been to the Bank of England and elsewhere; and I havenot found one man who will put one shilling into the telephone. "

Bell himself hurried to England and Scotland on his wedding tour in1878, with great expectations of having his invention appreciated in hisnative land. But from a business point of view, his mission was a totalfailure. He received dinners a-plenty, but no contracts; and came backto the United States an impoverished and disheartened man. Then theoptimistic Gardiner G. Hubbard, Bell's father-in-law, threw himselfagainst the European inertia and organized the International andOriental Telephone Companies, which came to nothing of any importance. In the same year even Enos M. Barton, the sagacious founder of theWestern Electric, went to France and England to establish an exporttrade in telephones, and failed. 

These able men found their plans thwarted by the indifference of thepublic, and often by open hostility. "The telephone is little betterthan a toy, " said the Saturday Review; "it amazes ignorant people for amoment, but it is inferior to the well-established system of air-tubes. ""What will become of the privacy of life?" asked another London editor. "What will become of the sanctity of the domestic hearth?" Writersvied with each other in inventing methods of pooh-poohing Bell andhis invention. "It is ridiculously simple, " said one. "It is only anelectrical speaking-tube, " said another. "It is a complicated formof speaking-trumpet, " said a third. No British editor could at firstconceive of any use for the telephone, except for divers and coalminers. The price, too, created a general outcry. Floods of toytelephones were being sold on the streets at a shilling apiece; andalthough the Government was charging sixty dollars a year for the use ofits printing-telegraphs, people protested loudly against paying halfas much for telephones. As late as 1882, Herbert Spencer writes: "Thetelephone is scarcely used at all in London, and is unknown in the otherEnglish cities. "

The first man of consequence to befriend the telephone was Lord Kelvin, then an untitled young scientist. He had seen the original telephones atthe Centennial in Philadelphia, and was so fascinated with them thatthe impulsive Bell had thrust them into his hands as a gift. At the nextmeeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Lord Kelvin exhibited these. He did more. He became the champion of thetelephone. He staked his reputation upon it. He told the story of thetests made at the Centennial, and assured the sceptical scientists thathe had not been deceived. "All this my own ears heard, " he said, "spokento me with unmistakable distinctness by this circular disc of iron. "

The scientists and electrical experts were, for the most part, split upinto two camps. Some of them said the telephone was impossible, whileothers said that "nothing could be simpler. " Almost all were agreed thatwhat Bell had done was a humorous trifle. But Lord Kelvin persisted. He hammered the truth home that the telephone was "one of the mostinteresting inventions that has ever been made in the history ofscience. " He gave a demonstration with one end of the wire in a coalmine. He stood side by side with Bell at a public meeting in Glasgow, and declared:

"The things that were called telephones before Bell were as differentfrom Bell's telephone as a series of hand-claps are different from thehuman voice. They were in fact electrical claps; while Bell conceivedthe idea--THE WHOLLY ORIGINAL AND NOVEL IDEA--of giving continuity tothe shocks, so as to perfectly reproduce the human voice. "

One by one the scientists were forced to take the telephone seriously. At a public test there was one noted professor who still stood in theranks of the doubters. He was asked to send a message. He went to theinstrument with a grin of incredulity, and thinking the whole exhibitiona joke, shouted into the mouthpiece: "Hi diddle diddle--follow up that. "Then he listened for an answer. The look on his face changed to one ofthe utmost amazement. "It says--`The cat and the fiddle, '" he gasped, and forthwith he became a convert to telephony. By such tests the menof science were won over, and by the middle of 1877 Bell received a"vociferous welcome" when he addressed them at their annual conventionat Plymouth. 

Soon afterwards, The London Times surrendered. It whirledright-about-face and praised the telephone to the skies. "Suddenly andquietly the whole human race is brought within speaking and hearingdistance, " it exclaimed; "scarcely anything was more desired and moreimpossible. " The next paper to quit the mob of scoffers was the Tatler, which said in an editorial peroration, "We cannot but feel im-pressed bythe picture of a human child commanding the subtlest and strongest forcein Nature to carry, like a slave, some whisper around the world. "

Closely after the scientists and editors came the nobility. The Earl ofCaithness led the way. He declared in public that "the telephone is themost extraordinary thing I ever saw in my life. " And one wintry morningin 1878 Queen Victoria drove to the house of Sir Thomas Biddulph, inLondon, and for an hour talked and listened by telephone to KateField, who sat in a Downing Street office. Miss Field sang "KathleenMavourneen, " and the Queen thanked her by telephone, saying she was"immensely pleased. " She congratulated Bell himself, who was present, and asked if she might be permitted to buy the two telephones; whereuponBell presented her with a pair done in ivory. 

This incident, as may be imagined, did much to establish the reputationof telephony in Great Britain. A wire was at once strung to WindsorCastle. Others were ordered by the Daily News, the Persian Ambassador, and five or six lords and baronets. Then came an order which raised thehopes of the telephone men to the highest heaven, from the banking houseof J. S. Morgan & Co. It was the first recognition from the "seats ofthe mighty" in the business and financial world. A tiny exchange, with ten wires, was promptly started in London; and on April 2d, 1879, Theodore Vail, the young manager of the Bell Company, sent an orderto the factory in Boston, "Please make one hundred hand telephones forexport trade as early as possible. " The foreign trade had begun. 

Then there came a thunderbolt out of a blue sky, a wholly unforeseendisaster. Just as a few energetic companies were sprouting up, thePostmaster General suddenly proclaimed that the telephone was a speciesof telegraph. According to a British law the telegraph was required tobe a Government monopoly. This law had been passed six years beforethe telephone was born, but no matter. The telephone men protested andargued. Tyndall and Lord Kelvin warned the Government that it was makingan indefensible mistake. But nothing could be done. Just as the firstrailways had been called toll-roads, so the telephone was solemnlydeclared to be a telegraph. Also, to add to the absurd humor of thesituation, Judge Stephen, of the High Court of Justice, spoke thefinal word that compelled the telephone legally to be a telegraph, andsustained his opinion by a quotation from Webster's Dictionary, whichwas published twenty years before the telephone was invented. 

Having captured this new rival, what next? The Postmaster General didnot know. He had, of course, no experience in telephony, and neither hadany of his officials in the telegraph department. There was no book andno college to instruct him. His telegraph was then, as it is to-day, abusiness failure. It was not earning its keep. Therefore he did not dareto shoulder the risk of constructing a second system of wires, and atlast consented to give licenses to private companies. 

But the muddle continued. In order to compel competition, accordingto the academic theories of the day, licenses were given to thir-teenprivate companies. As might have been expected, the ablest companyquickly swallowed the other twelve. If it had been let alone, thiscompany might have given good service, but it was hobbled and fenced inby jealous regulations. It was compelled to pay one-tenth of its grossearnings to the Post Office. It was to hold itself ready to sell out atsix months' notice. And as soon as it had strung a long-distance systemof wires, the Postmaster General pounced down upon it and took it away. 

Then, in 1900, the Post Office tossed aside all obligations to thelicensed company, and threw open the door to a free-for-all competition. It undertook to start a second system in London, and in two yearsdiscovered its blunder and proposed to cooperate. It granted licensesto five cities that demanded municipal ownership. These cities set outbravely, with loud beating of drums, plunged from one mishap to another, and finally quit. Even Glasgow, the premier city of municipal ownership, met its Waterloo in the telephone. It spent one million, eight hundredthousand dollars on a plant that was obsolete when it was new, ran itfor a time at a loss, and then sold it to the Post Office in 1906 forone million, five hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. 

So, from first to last, the story of the telephone in Great Britain hasbeen a "comedy of errors. " There are now, in the two islands, not sixhundred thousand telephones in use. London, with its six hundred andforty square miles of houses, has one-quarter of these, and is gainingat the rate of ten thousand a year. No large improvements are under way, as the Post Office has given notice that it will take over and operateall private companies on New Year's Day, 1912. The bureaucratic muddle, so it seems, is to continue indefinitely. 

In Germany there has been the same burden of bureaucracy, but lessbacking and filling. There is a complete government monopoly. Whoevercommits the crime of leasing telephone service to his neighbors may besent to jail for six months. Here, too, the Postmaster General has beensupreme. He has forced the telephone business into a postal mould. Theman in a small city must pay as high a rate for a small service, as theman in a large city pays for a large service. There is a fair degree ofefficiency, but no high speed or record-breaking. The German engineershave not kept in close touch with the progress of telephony in theUnited States. They have preferred to devise methods of their own, andso have created a miscellaneous assortment of systems, good, bad, andindifferent. All told, there is probably an investment of seventy-fivemillion dollars and a total of nine hundred thousand telephones. 

Telephony has always been in high favor with the Kaiser. It is hiscustom, when planning a hunting party, to have a special wire strung tothe forest headquarters, so that he can converse every morning withhis Cabinet. He has conferred degrees and honors by telephone. Evenhis former Chancellor, Von Buelow, received his title of Count in thisinformal way. But the first friend of the telephone in Germany wasBismarck. The old Unifier saw instantly its value in holding a nationtogether, and ordered a line between his palace in Berlin and his farmat Varzin, which lay two hundred and thirty miles apart. This was asearly as the Fall of 1877, and was thus the first long-distance line inEurope. 

In France, as in England, the Government seized upon the telephonebusiness as soon as the pioneer work had been done by private citizens. In 1889 it practically confiscated the Paris system, and after nineyears of litigation paid five million francs to its owners. With thisreckless beginning, it floundered from bad to worse. It assembledthe most complete assortment of other nations' mistakes, and inventedseveral of its own. Almost every known evil of bureaucracy wasdeveloped. The system of rates was turned upside down; the flat rate, which can be profitably permitted in small cities only, was put in forcein the large cities, and the message rate, which is applicable only tolarge cities, was put in force in small places. The girl operators wereentangled in a maze of civil service rules. They were not allowedto marry without the permission of the Postmaster General; and on noaccount might they dare to marry a mayor, a policeman, a cashier, or aforeigner, lest they betray the secrets of the switchboard. 

There was no national plan, no standardization, no staff of inventorsand improvers. Every user was required to buy his own telephone. AsGeorge Ade has said, "Anything attached to a wall is liable to be atelephone in Paris. " And so, what with poor equipment and red tape, the French system became what it remains to-day, the most conspicuousexample of what NOT to do in telephony. 

There are barely as many telephones in the whole of France as oughtnormally to be in the city of Paris. There are not as many as are nowin use in Chicago. The exasperated Parisians have protested. They havepresented a petition with thirty-two thousand names. They have evenorganized a "Kickers' League"--the only body of its kind in anycountry--to demand good service at a fair price. The daily loss frombureaucratic telephony has become enormous. "One blundering girl in atelephone exchange cost me five thousand dollars on the day of the panicin 1907, " said George Kessler. But the Government clears a net profitof three million dollars a year from its telephone monopoly; and until1910, when a committee of betterment was appointed, it showed no concernat the discomfort of the public. 

There was one striking lesson in telephone efficiency which Parisreceived in 1908, when its main exchange was totally destroyed by fire. "To build a new switchboard, " said European manufacturers, "will requirefour or five months. " A hustling young Chicagoan appeared on the scene. "We 'll put in a new switchboard in sixty days, " he said; "and agree toforfeit six hundred dollars a day for delay. " Such quick work had neverbeen known. But it was Chicago's chance to show what she could do. Parisand Chicago are four thousand, five hundred miles apart, a twelve days'journey. The switchboard was to be a hundred and eighty feet in length, with ten thousand wires. Yet the Western Electric finished it in threeweeks. It was rushed on six freight-cars to New York, loaded on theFrench steamer La Provence, and deposited at Paris in thirty-six days;so that by the time the sixty days had expired, it was running fullspeed with a staff of ninety operators. 

Russia and Austria-Hungary have now about one hundred and twenty-fivethousand telephones apiece. They are neck and neck in a race that hasnot at any time been a fast one. In each country the Government has beena neglectful stepmother to the telephone. It has starved the businesswith a lack of capital and used no enterprise in expanding it. Outside of Vienna, Budapest, St. Petersburg, and Moscow there are nowire-systems of any consequence. The political deadlock between Austriaand Hungary shuts out any immediate hope of a happier life for thetelephone in those countries; but in Russia there has recently beena change in policy that may open up a new era. Permits are now beingoffered to one private company in each city, in return for three percent of the revenue. By this step Russia has unexpectedly swept to thefront and is now, to telephone men, the freest country in Europe. 

In tiny Switzerland there has been government ownership from thefirst, but with less detriment to the business than elsewhere. Here theofficials have actually jilted the telegraph for the telephone. Theyhave seen the value of the talking wire to hold their valley villagestogether; and so have cries-crossed the Alps with a cheap and somewhatflimsy system of telephony that carries sixty million conversations ayear. Even the monks of St. Bernard, who rescue snowbound travellers, have now equipped their mountain with a series of telephone booths. 

The highest telephone in the world is on the peak of Monte Rosa, in theItalian Alps, very nearly three miles above the level of the sea. It islinked to a line that runs to Rome, in order that a queen may talk toa professor. In this case the Queen is Margherita of Italy and theprofessor is Signor Mosso, the astronomer, who studies the heavens froman observatory on Monte Rosa. At her own expense, the Queen had thiswire strung by a crew of linemen, who slipped and floundered on themountain for six years before they had it pegged in place. The generalsituation in Italy is like that in Great Britain. The Government hasalways monopolized the long-distance lines, and is now about to buy outall private companies. There are only fifty-five thousand telephonesto thirty-two million people--as many as in Norway and less than inDenmark. And in many of the southern and Sicilian provinces the jingleof the telephone bell is still an unfamiliar sound. 

The main peculiarity in Holland is that there is no national plan, butrather a patchwork, that resembles Joseph's coat of many colors. Eachcity engineer has designed his own type of apparatus and had it made toorder. Also, each company is fenced in by law within a six-mile circle, so that Holland is dotted with thumb-nail systems, no two of which arealike. In Belgium there has been a government system since 1893, hencethere is unity, but no enterprise. The plant is old-fashioned and toosmall. Spain has private companies, which give fairly good service totwenty thousand people. Roumania has half as many. Portugal has twosmall companies in Lisbon and Oporto. Greece, Servia, and Bulgaria havea scanty two thousand apiece. The frozen little isle of Iceland hasone-quarter as many; and even into Turkey, which was a forbidden landunder the regime of the old Sultan, the Young Turks are importing boxesof telephones and coils of copper wire. 

There is one European country, and only one, which has caught thetelephone spirit--Sweden. Here telephony had a free swinging start. It was let alone by the Post Office; and better still, it had a Man, abusiness-builder of remarkable force and ability, named Henry Cedergren. Had this man been made the Telephone-Master of Europe, there would havebeen a different story to tell. By his insistent enterprise he madeStockholm the best telephoned city outside of the United States. Hepushed his country forward until, having one hundred and sixty-fivethousand telephones, it stood fourth among the European nations. Sincehis death the Government has entered the field with a duplicate system, and a war has been begun which grows yearly more costly and absurd. 

Asia, as yet, with her eight hundred and fifty million people, has fewertelephones than Philadelphia, and three-fourths of them are in the tinyisland of Japan. The Japanese were enthusiastic telephonists from thefirst. They had a busy exchange in Tokio in 1883. This has now grown tohave twenty-five thousand users, and might have more, if it had not beenstunted by the peculiar policy of the Government. The public officialswho operate the system are able men. They charge a fair price and maketen per cent profit for the State. But they do not keep pace with thedemand. It is one of the oddest vagaries of public ownership that thereis now in Tokio a WAITING LIST of eight thousand citizens, who areoffering to pay for telephones and cannot get them. And when a Tokiandies, his franchise to a telephone, if he has one, is usually itemizedin his will as a four-hundred-dollar property. 

India, which is second on the Asiatic list, has no more than ninethousand telephones--one to every thirty-three thousand of herpopulation! Not quite so many, in fact, as there are in five of theskyscrapers of New York. The Dutch East Indies and China have onlyseven thousand apiece, but in China there has recently come aforward movement. A fund of twenty million dollars is to be spent inconstructing a national system of telephone and telegraph. Peking is nowpointing with wonder and delight to a new exchange, spick and span, witha couple of ten-thousand-wire switchboards. Others are being built inCanton, Hankow, and Tien-Tsin. Ultimately, the telephone will flourishin China, as it has done in the Chinese quarter in San Francisco. TheEmpress of China, after the siege of Peking, commanded that a telephoneshould be hung in her palace, within reach of her dragon throne; andshe was very friendly with any representative of the "Speaking LightningSounds" business, as the Chinese term telephony. 

In Persia the telephone made its entry recently in true comic-operafashion. A new Shah, in an outburst of confidence, set up a wire betweenhis palace and the market-place in Teheran, and invited his people totalk to him whenever they had grievances. And they talked! They talkedso freely and used such language, that the Shah ordered out his soldiersand attacked them. He fired upon the new Parliament, and was at oncechased out of Persia by the enraged people. From this it would appearthat the telephone ought to be popular in Persia, although at presentthere are not more than twenty in use. 

South America, outside of Buenos Ayres, has few telephones, probably notmore than thirty thousand. Dom Pedro of Brazil, who befriended Bell atthe Centennial, introduced telephony into his country in 1881; but ithas not in thirty years been able to obtain ten thousand users. Canadahas exactly the same number as Sweden--one hundred and sixty-fivethousand. Mexico has perhaps ten thousand; New Zealand twenty-sixthousand; and Australia fifty-five thousand. 

Far down in the list of continents stands Africa. Egypt and Algeria havetwelve thousand at the north; British South Africa has as many at thesouth; and in the vast stretches between there are barely a thousandmore. Whoever pushes into Central Africa will still hear the beat of thewooden drum, which is the clattering sign-language of the natives. Onestrand of copper wire there is, through the Congo region, placed thereby order of the late King of Belgium. To string it was probably the mostadventurous piece of work in the history of telephone linemen. There wasone seven hundred and fifty mile stretch of the central jungle. Therewere white ants that ate the wooden poles, and wild elephants thatpulled up the iron poles. There were monkeys that played tag on thelines, and savages that stole the wire for arrow-heads. But the linewas carried through, and to-day is alive with conversations concerningrubber and ivory. 

So, we may almost say of the telephone that "there is no speech norlanguage where its voice is not heard. " There are even a thousand milesof its wire in Abyssinia and one hundred and fifty miles in the FijiIslands. Roughly speaking, there are now ten million telephones in allcountries, employing two hundred and fifty thousand people, requiringtwenty-one million miles of wire, representing a cost of fifteen hundredmillion dollars, and carrying fourteen thousand million conversationsa year. All this, and yet the men who heard the first feeble cry of theinfant telephone are still alive, and not by any means old. 

No foreign country has reached the high American level of telephony. TheUnited States has eight telephones per hundred of population, while noother country has one-half as many. Canada stands second, with almostfour per hundred; and Sweden is third. Germany has as many telephonesas the State of New York; and Great Britain as many as Ohio. Chicagohas more than London; and Boston twice as many as Paris. In the whole ofEurope, with her twenty nations, there are one-third as many telephonesas in the United States. In proportion to her population, Europe hasonly one-thirteenth as many. 

The United States writes half as many letters as Europe, sends one-thirdas many telegrams, and talks twice as much at the telephone. The averageEuropean family sends three telegrams a year, and three letters and onetelephone message a week; while the average American family sends fivetelegrams a year, and seven letters and eleven telephone messages aweek. This one na-tion, which owns six per cent of the earth and is fiveper cent of the human race, has SEVENTY per cent of the telephones. And fifty per cent, or one-half, of the telephony of the world, is nowcomprised in the Bell System of this country. 

There are only six nations in Europe that make a fair showing--theGermans, British, Swedish, Danes, Norwegians, and Swiss. The othershave less than one telephone per hundred. Little Denmark has more thanAustria. Little Finland has better service than France. The Belgiantelephones have cost the most--two hundred and seventy-three dollarsapiece; and the Finnish telephones the least--eighty-one dollars. Buta telephone in Belgium earns three times as much as one in Norway. Ingeneral, the lesson in Europe is this, that the telephone is what anation makes it. Its usefulness depends upon the sense and enterprisewith which it is handled. It may be either an invaluable asset or anuisance. 

Too much government! That has been the basic reason for failure in mostcountries. Before the telephone was invented, the telegraph had beenmade a State monopoly; and the tele-phone was regarded as a species oftelegraph. The public officials did not see that a telephone system is ahighly complex and technical problem, much more like a piano factoryor a steel-mill. And so, wherever a group of citizens established atelephone service, the government officials looked upon it with jealouseyes, and usually snatched it away. The telephone thus became a part ofthe telegraph, which is a part of the post office, which is a part ofthe government. It is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction--a meretwig of bureaucracy. Under such conditions the telephone could notprosper. The wonder is that it survived. 

Handled on the American plan, the telephone abroad may be raised toAmerican levels. There is no racial reason for failure. The slow serviceand the bungling are the natural results of treating the telephone asthough it were a road or a fire department; and any nation that risesto a proper conception of the telephone, that dares to put it intocompetent hands and to strengthen it with enough capital, can secure asalert and brisk a service as heart can wish. Some nations are alreadyon the way. China, Japan, and France have sent delegations to New YorkCity--"the Mecca of telephone men, " to learn the art of telephony inits highest development. Even Russia has rescued the telephone from herbureaucrats and is now offering it freely to men of enterprise. 

In most foreign countries telephone service is being steadily geared upto a faster pace. The craze for "cheap and nasty" telephony is passing;and the idea that the telephone is above all else a SPEED instrument, is gaining ground. A faster long-distance service, at double rates, isbeing well patronized. Slow-moving races are learning the value of time, which is the first lesson in telephony. Our reapers and mowers now go toseventy-five nations. Our street cars run in all great cities. Moroccois importing our dollar watches; Korea is learning the waste of allowingnine men to dig with one spade. And all this means telephones. 

In thirty years, the Western Electric has sold sixty-seven milliondollars' worth of telephonic apparatus to foreign countries. But thisis no more than a fair beginning. To put one telephone in China to everyhundred people will mean an outlay of three hundred million dollars. Togive Europe as fit an equipment as the United States now has, will meanthirty million telephones, with proper wire and switchboards to match. And while telephony for the masses is not yet a live question in manycountries, sooner or later, in the relentless push of civilization, itmust come. 

Possibly, in that far future of peace and goodwill among nations, wheneach country does for all the others what it can do best, the UnitedStates may be generally recognized as the source of skill and authorityon telephony. It may be called in to rebuild or operate the telephonesystems of other countries, in the same way that it is now supplyingoil and steel rails and farm machinery. Just as the wise buyer of to-dayasks France for champagne, Germany for toys, England for cottons, andthe Orient for rugs, so he will learn to look upon the United States asthe natural home and headquarters of the telephone. 

CHAPTER IX. THE FUTURE OF THE TELEPHONE

In the Spring of 1907 Theodore N. Vail, a rugged, ruddy, white-hairedman, was superintending the building of a big barn in northern Vermont. His house stood near-by, on a balcony of rolling land that overlookedthe town of Lyndon and far beyond, across evergreen forests to themassive bulk of Burke Mountain. His farm, very nearly ten square milesin area, lay back of the house in a great oval of field and woodland, with several dozen cottages in the clearings. His Welsh ponies and Swisscattle were grazing on the May grass, and the men were busy with theploughs and harrows and seeders. It was almost thirty years since hehad been called in to create the business structure of telephony, and toshape the general plan of its development. Since then he had done manyother things. The one city of Buenos Ayres had paid him more, merelyfor giving it a system of trolleys and electric lights, than the UnitedStates had paid him for putting the telephone on a business basis. Hewas now rich and retired, free to enjoy his play-work of the farm and toforget the troubles of the city and the telephone. 

But, as he stood among his barn-builders, there arrived from Boston andNew York a delegation of telephone directors. Most of them belonged tothe "Old Guard" of telephony. They had fought under Vail in the pioneerdays; and now they had come to ask him to return to the telephonebusiness, after twenty years of absence. Vail laughed at the suggestion. 

"Nonsense, " he said, "I'm too old. I'm sixty-two years of age. " Thedirectors persisted. They spoke of the approaching storm-cloud of panicand the need of another strong hand at the wheel until the crisis wasover, but Vail still refused. They spoke of old times and old memories, but he shook his head. "All my life, " he said, "I have wanted to be afarmer. "

Then they drew a picture of the telephone situation. They showed himthat the "grand telephonic system" which he had planned was unfinished. He was its architect, and it was undone. The telephone business wasenergetic and prosperous. Under the brilliant leadership of Frederick P. Fish, it had grown by leaps and bounds. But it was still far from beingthe SYSTEM that Vail had dreamed of in his younger days; and so, whenthe directors put before him his unfinished plan, he surrendered. The instinct for completeness, which is one of the dominatingcharacteristics of his mind, compelled him to consent. It was the callof the telephone. 

Since that May morning, 1907, great things have been done by the men ofthe telephone and telegraph world. The Bell System was brought throughthe panic without a scratch. When the doubt and confusion were at theirworst, 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 thatoverlapped were united. Small local wire-clusters, several thousandsof them, were linked to the national lines. A policy of publicitysuperseded the secrecy which had naturally grown to be a habit in thedays 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-distanceproblems. And in return for a thirty million check, the control of thehistoric Western Union was transferred from the children of Jay Gouldto the thirty thousand stock-holders of the American Telephone andTelegraph Company. 

From what has been done, therefore, we may venture a guess as to thefuture of the telephone. This "grand telephonic system" which had noexistence thirty years ago, except in the imagination of Vail, seems tobe at hand. The very newsboys in the streets are crying it. And whilethere is, of course, no exact blueprint of a best possible telephonesystem, we can now see the general outlines of Vail's plan. 

There is nothing mysterious or ominous in this plan. It has nothingto do with the pools and conspiracies of Wall Street. No one will besqueezed out except the promoters of paper companies. The simple fact isthat Vail is organizing a complete Bell System for the same reason thathe built one big comfortable barn for his Swiss cattle and his Welshponies, instead of half a dozen small uncomfortable sheds. He has neverbeen a "high financier" to juggle profits out of other men's losses. Heis merely applying to the telephone business the same hard sense thatany farmer uses in the management of his farm. He is building a BigBarn, metaphorically, for the telephone and telegraph. 

Plainly, the telephone system of the future will be national, so thatany 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 thinkfor a moment of running his farm on competitive lines. It will havea staff-and-line organization, to use a military phrase. Each localcompany will continue to handle its own local affairs, and exercise tothe 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 commonto all companies. No separateness or secession on the one side, norbureaucracy on the other--that is the typically American idea thatunderlies the ideal telephone system. 

The line of authority, in such a system, will begin with the localmanager. 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. Thefailure of government ownership of the telephone in so many foreigncountries does not mean that the private companies will have absolutepower. Quite the reverse. The lesson of thirty years' experience showsthat a private telephone company is apt to be much more obedient to thewill of the people than if it were a Government department. But it isan axiom of democracy that no company, however well conducted, will bepermitted to control a public convenience without being held strictlyresponsible for its own acts. As politics becomes less of a game andmore of a responsibility, the telephone of the future will doubtless besupervised by some sort of public committee, which will have power topass upon complaints, and to prevent the nuisance of duplication and theswindle of watering stock. 

As this Federal supervision becomes more and more efficient, the presentfear of monopoly will decrease, just as it did in the case of therailways. It is a fact, although now generally forgotten, that thefirst railways of the United States were run for ten years or more onan anti-monopoly plan. The tracks were free to all. Any one who owneda cart with flanged wheels could drive it on the rails and compete withthe locomotives. There was a happy-go-lucky jumble of trains and wagons, all held back by the slowest team; and this continued on some railwaysuntil as late as 1857. By that time the people saw that com-petition ona railway track was absurd. They allowed each track to be monopolized byone company, and the era of expansion began. 

No one, certainly, at the present time, regrets the passing of theindependent teamster. He was much more arbitrary and expensive thanany railroad has ever dared to be; and as the country grew, he becameimpossible. He was not the fittest to survive. For the general good, hewas held back from competing with the railroad, and taught to cooperatewith it by hauling freight to and from the depots. This, to hissurprise, he found much more profitable and pleasant. He had beensqueezed out of a bad job into a good one. And by a similar process ofevolution, the United States is rapidly outgrowing the small independenttelephone companies. These will eventually, one by one, rise as theteamster did to a higher social value, by clasping wires with the mainsystem of telephony. 

Until 1881 the Bell System was in the hands of a family group. It wasa strictly private enterprise. The public had been asked to help in itslaunching, and had refused. But after 1881 it passed into the control ofthe small stock-holders, and has remained there without a break. It isnow one of our most democratized businesses, scattering either wages ordividends into more than a hundred thousand homes. It has at times beenexclusive, but never sordid. It has never been dollar-mad, nor frenziedby the virus of stock-gambling. There has always been a vein ofsentiment in it that kept it in touch with human nature. Even at thepresent time, each check of the American Telephone and Telegraph Companycarries on it a picture of a pretty Cupid, sitting on a chair upon whichhe has placed a thick book, and gayly prattling into a telephone. 

Several sweeping changes may be expected in the near future, now thatthere is team-play between the Bell System and the Western Union. Already, by a stroke of the pen, five million users of telephoneshave been put on the credit books of the Western Union; and every Belltelephone office is now a telegraph office. Three telephone messages andeight 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 triedout upon a gigantic scale. Most of the long-distance telephone wires, fully two million miles, can be used for telegraphic purposes; and athird of the Western Union wires, five hundred thousand miles, may witha few changes be used for talking. 

The Western Union is paying rent for twenty-two thousand, five hundredoffices, all of which helps to make telegraphy a luxury of the few. Itis employing as large a force of messenger-boys as the army that marchedwith General Sherman from Atlanta to the sea. Both of these items ofexpense will dwindle when a Bell wire and a Morse wire can be brought toa common terminal; and when a telegram can be received or delivered bytelephone. There will also be a gain, perhaps the largest of all, inremoving the trudging little messenger-boy from the streets and sendinghim either to school or to learn some useful trade. 

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

Elsewhere either the two are widely apart, or the telephone is a mereadjunct of a telegraphic department. According to the new American plan, the two are not competitive, but complementary. The one is a supplementto the other. The post office sends a package; the telegraph sendsthe contents of the package; but the telephone sends nothing. It is anapparatus that makes conversation possible between two separated people. Each of the three has a distinct field of its own, so that there hasnever been any cause for jealousy among them. 

To make the telephone an annex of the post office or the telegraph hasbecome absurd. There are now in the whole world very nearly as manymessages sent by telephone as by letter; and there are THIRTY-TWOTIMES as many telephone calls as telegrams. In the United States, thetelephone has grown to be the big brother of the telegraph. It has sixtimes the net earnings and eight times the wire. And it transmits asmany messages as the combined total of telegrams, letters, and railroadpassengers. 

This universal trend toward consolidation has introduced a variety ofproblems that will engage the ablest brains in the telephone world formany years to come. How to get the benefits of organization without itslosses, to become strong without losing quickness, to become systematicwithout losing the dash and dare of earlier days, to develop theworking force into an army of high-speed specialists without losing thebird's-eye view of the whole situation, --these are the riddles of thenew type, for which the telephonists of the next generation mustfind the answers. They illustrate the nature of the big jobs that thetelephone 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 eternalstruggle remains between the large and little ideas--between the men whosee what might be and the men who only see what IS. There is still therace to break records. Already the girl at the switchboard can find theperson wanted in thirty seconds. This is one-tenth of the time that wastaken in the early centrals; but it is still too long. It is one-half ofa valuable minute. It must be cut to twenty-five seconds, or twenty orfifteen. 

There is still the inventors' battle to gain miles. The distance overwhich conversations can be held has been increased from twenty milesto twenty-five hundred. But this is not far enough. There are somecivilized human beings who are twelve thousand miles apart, and who haveinterests in common. During the Boxer Rebellion in China, for instance, there were Americans in Peking who would gladly have given half of theirfortune 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"; butthis was regarded as a poetical fancy until Pupin invented his methodof automatically propelling the electric current. Since then themost conservative engineer will discuss the problem of transatlantictelephony. And as for the poets, they are now dreaming of the timewhen a man may speak and hear his own voice come back to him around theworld. 

The immediate long-distance problem is, of course, to talk from New Yorkto the Pacific. The two oceans are now only three and a half days apartby rail. Seattle is clamoring for a wire to the East. San Diego wantsone in time for her Panama Canal Exposition in 1915. The wires arealready strung to San Francisco, but cannot be used in the present stageof the art. And Vail's captains are working now with almost breathlesshaste to give him a birthday present of a talk across the continent fromhis farm in Vermont. 

"I can see a universal system of telephony for the United States in thevery near future, " says Carty. "There is a statue of Seward standing inone of the streets of Seattle. The inscription upon it is, `To a UnitedCountry. ' But as an Easterner stands there, he feels the isolation ofthat Far Western State, and he will always feel it, until he cantalk from one side of the United States to the other. For my part, "continues Carty, "I believe we will talk across continents and acrossoceans. Why not? Are there not more cells in one human body than thereare people in the whole earth?"

Some future Carty may solve the abandoned problem of the single wire, and cut the copper bill in two by restoring the grounded circuit. He maytransmit vision as well as speech. He may perfect a third-rail systemfor use on moving trains. He may conceive of an ideal insulatingmaterial to supersede glass, mica, paper, and enamel. He may establisha universal code, so that all persons of importance in the United Statesshall have call-numbers by which they may instantly be located, as booksare in a library. 

Some other young man may create a commercial department on wide lines, awork which telephone men have as yet been too specialized to do. Whoeverdoes this will be a man of comprehensive brain. He will be as closelyin touch with the average man as with the art of telephony. He willknow the gossip of the street, the demands of the labor unions, and thepolicies of governors and presidents. The psychology of the Westernfarmer will concern him, and the tone of the daily press, and themethods of department stores. It will be his aim to know the subtlechemistry of public opinion, and to adapt the telephone service to theshifting moods and necessities of the times. HE WILL FIT TELEPHONY LIKEA GARMENT AROUND THE HABITS OF THE PEOPLE. 

Also, now that the telephone business has become strong, its nextanxiety must be to develop the virtues, and not the defects, ofstrength. Its motto must be "Ich dien"--I serve; and it will be the workof the future statesmen of the telephone to illustrate this motto in allits practical variations. They will cater and explain, and explain andcater. They will educate and educate, until they have created an expertpublic. They will teach by pictures and lectures and exhibitions. Theywill have charts and diagrams hung in the telephone booths, so that theperson who is waiting for a call may learn a little and pass the timemore pleasantly. They will, in a word, attend to those innumerabletrifles that make the perfection of public service. 

Already the Bell System has gone far in this direction by organizingwhat might fairly be called a foresight department. Here is where thefortune-tellers of the business sit. When new lines or exchanges are tobe built, these men study the situation with an eye to the future. Theyprepare a "fundamental plan, " outlining what may reasonably be expectedto happen in fifteen or twenty years. Invariably they are optimists. They make provision for growth, but none at all for shrinkage. By theiradvice, there is now twenty-five million dollars' worth of reserve plantin the various Bell Companies, waiting for the country to grow up to it. Even in the city of New York, one-half of the cable ducts are empty, in expectation of the greater city of eight million population whichis scheduled to arrive in 1928. There are perhaps few more impressiveevidences of practical optimism and confidence than a new telephoneexchange, with two-thirds of its wires waiting for the business of thefuture. 

Eventually, this foresight department will expand. It may, if a leaderof genius appear, become the first real corps of practical sociologists, which will substitute facts for the present hotch-potch of theories. Itwill prepare a "fundamental plan" of the whole United States, showingthe centre of each industry and the main runways of traffic. It willact upon the basic fact that WHEREVER THERE IS INTERDEPENDENCE, THEREIS BOUND TO BE TELEPHONY; and it will therefore prepare maps ofinterdependence, showing the widely scattered groups of industry andfinance, and the lines that weave them into a pattern of nationalcooperation. 

As yet, no nation, not even our own, has seen the full value of thelong-distance telephone. Few have the imagination to see what has beenmade possible, and to realize that an actual face-to-face conversationmay take place, even though there be a thousand miles between. Neithercan it seem credible that a man in a distant city may be located asreadily as though he were close at hand. It is too amazing to be true, and possibly a new generation will have to arrive before it will betaken for granted and acted upon freely. Ultimately, there can be nodoubt that long-distance telephony will be regarded as a national assetof the highest value, for the reason that it can prevent so much of theenormous economic waste of travel. 

Nothing that science can say will ever decrease the marvel of along-distance conversation, and there may come in the futurean Interpreter who will put it before our eyes in the form of amoving-picture. He will enable us to follow the flying words in a talkfrom Boston to Denver. We will flash first to Worcester, cross theHudson on the high bridge at Poughkeepsie, swing southwest througha dozen coal towns to the outskirts of Philadelphia, leap acrossthe Susquehanna, zigzag up and down the Alleghenies into the murkof Pittsburg, cross the Ohio at Wheeling, glance past Columbus andIndianapolis, over the Wabash at Terre Haute, into St. Louis by the Eadsbridge, through Kansas City, across the Missouri, along the corn-fieldsof Kansas, and then on--on--on with the Sante Fe Railway, across vastplains and past the brink of the Grand Canyon, to Pueblo and the loftycity of Denver. Twenty-five hundred miles along a thousand tons ofcopper wire! From Bunker Hill to Pike's Peak IN A SECOND!

Herbert Spencer, in his autobiography, alludes to the impressive factthat while the eye is reading a single line of type, the earth hastravelled thirty miles through space. But this, in telephony, would beslow travelling. It is simple everyday truth to say that while your eyeis reading this dash, --, a telephone sound can be carried from New Yorkto Chicago. 

There are many reasons to believe that for the practical idealists ofthe future, the supreme study will be the force that makes such miraclespossible. Six thousand million dollars--one-twentieth of our nationalwealth--is at the present time invested in electrical development. TheElectrical Age has not yet arrived; but it is at hand; and no one cantell how brilliant the result may be, when the creative minds of anation are focussed upon the subdual of this mysterious force, which hasmore power and more delicacy than any other force that man has been ableto harness. 

As a tame and tractable energy, Electricity is new. It has no past andno pedigree. It is younger than many people who are now alive. Among thewise men of Greece and Rome, few knew its existence, and none put it toany practical use. The wisest knew that a piece of amber, when rubbed, will attract feathery substances. But they regarded this as poetryrather than science. There was a pretty legend among the Phoeniciansthat the pieces of amber were the petrified tears of maidens who hadthrown themselves into the sea because of unrequited love, and each beadof amber was highly prized. It was worn as an amulet and a symbol ofpurity. Not for two thousand years did any one dream that within itsgolden heart lay hidden the secret of a new electrical civilization. 

Not even in 1752, when Benjamin Franklin flew his famous kite on thebanks of the Schuylkill River, and captured the first CANNED LIGHTNING, was there any definite knowledge of electrical energy. His lightning-rodwas regarded as an insult to the deity of Heaven. It was blamed forthe earthquake of 1755. And not until the telegraph of Morse came intogeneral use, did men dare to think of the thunder-bolt of Jove as apossible servant of the human race. 

Thus it happened that when Bell invented the telephone, he surprised theworld with a new idea. He had to make the thought as well as the thing. No Jules Verne or H. G. Wells had foreseen it. The author of the ArabianNights fantasies had conceived of a flying carpet, but neither he norany one else had conceived of flying conversation. In all the literatureof ancient days, there is not a line that will apply to the telephone, except possibly that expressive phrase in the Bible, "And there camea voice. " In these more privileged days, the telephone has come tobe regarded as a commonplace fact of everyday life; and we are apt toforget that the wonder of it has become greater and not less; and thatthere are still honor and profit, plenty of both, to be won by theinventor and the scientist. 

The flood of electrical patents was never higher than now. There areliterally more in a single month than the total number issued by thePatent Office up to 1859. The Bell System has three hundred experts whoare paid to do nothing else but try out all new ideas and inventions;and before these words can pass into the printed book, new uses andnew methods will have been discovered. There is therefore no immediatedanger that the art of telephony will be less fascinating in the futurethan it has been in the past. It will still be the most alluringand elusive sprite that ever led the way through a Dark Continent ofmysterious phenomena. 

There still remains for some future scientist the task of showing us indetail exactly what the telephone current does. Such a man will studyvibrations as Darwin studied the differentiation of species. He willinvestigate how a child's voice, speaking from Boston to Omaha, canvibrate more than a million pounds of copper wire; and he will inventa finer system of time to fit the telephone, which can do as manydifferent things in a second as a man can do in a day, transmitting withevery tick of the clock from twenty-five to eighty thousand vibrations. He will deal with the various vibrations of nerves and wires andwireless air, that are necessary in conveying thought between twoseparated minds. He will make clear how a thought, originating in thebrain, passes along the nerve-wires to the vocal chords, and then inwireless vibration of air to the disc of the transmitter. At the otherend of the line the second disc re-creates these vibrations, whichimpinge upon the nerve-wires of an ear, and are thus carried to theconsciousness of another brain. 

And so, notwithstanding all that has been done since Bell opened upthe way, the telephone remains the acme of electrical marvels. Noother thing does so much with so little energy. No other thing is moreenswathed in the unknown. Not even the gray-haired pioneers who havelived with the telephone since its birth, can understand their protege. As to the why and the how, there is as yet no answer. It is as true oftelephony to-day as it was in 1876, that a child can use what the wisestsages cannot comprehend. 

Here is a tiny disc of sheet-iron. I speak--it shudders. It has adifferent shudder for every sound. It has thousands of millions ofdifferent shudders. There is a second disc many miles away, perhapstwenty-five hundred miles away. Between the two discs runs a copperwire. As I speak, a thrill of electricity flits along the wire. Thisthrill is moulded by the shudder of the disc. It makes the second discshudder. And the shudder of the second disc reproduces my voice. That iswhat happens. But how--not all the scientists of the world can tell. 

The telephone current is a phenomenon of the ether, say the theorists. But what is ether? No one knows. Sir Oliver Lodge has guessed that itis "perhaps the only substantial thing in the material universe"; but noone knows. There is nothing to guide us in that unknown country excepta sign-post that points upwards and bears the one word--"Perhaps. " Theether of space! Here is an Eldorado for the scientists of the future, and whoever can first map it out will go far toward discovering thesecret of telephony. 

Some day--who knows?--there may come the poetry and grand opera of thetelephone. Artists may come who will portray the marvel of the wiresthat quiver with electrified words, and the romance of the switchboardsthat tremble with the secrets of a great city. Already Puvis deChavannes, by one of his superb panels in the Boston Library, hasadmitted the telephone and the telegraph to the world of art. He hasembodied them as two flying figures, poised above the electric wires, and with the following inscription underneath: "By the wondrous agencyof electricity, speech dashes through space and swift as lightning bearstidings of good and evil. "

But these random guesses as to the future of the telephone may fall farshort of what the reality will be. In these dazzling days it is idle topredict. The inventor has everywhere put the prophet out of business. Fact has outrun Fancy. When Morse, for instance, was tacking up hisfirst little line of wire around the Speedwell Iron Works, who couldhave foreseen two hundred and fifty thousand miles of submarine cables, by which the very oceans are all aquiver with the news of the world?When Fulton's tiny tea-kettle of a boat steamed up the Hudson to Albanyin two days, who could have foreseen the steel leviathans, one-sixth ofa mile in length, that can in the same time cut the Atlantic Ocean inhalves? And when Bell stood in a dingy workshop in Boston and heardthe clang of a clock-spring come over an electric wire, who could haveforeseen the massive structure of the Bell System, built up by half thetelephones of the world, and by the investment of more actual capitalthan has gone to the making of any other industrial association? Whocould have foreseen what the telephone bells have done to ring out theold ways and to ring in the new; to ring out delay, and isolation and toring in the efficiency and the friendliness of a truly united people?