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A VERY great invention has its own dramatic
history. Episodes full of human interest attend
its development. The periods of weary
struggle, the daring adventure along unknown
paths, the clash of rival claimants, are
closely similar to those which mark the
revelation and subjugation of a new continent.
At the close of the epoch of discovery it is
seen that mankind as a whole has made one more
great advance; but in the earlier stages one
watched chiefly the confused vicissitudes of
fortune of the individual pioneers. The great
modern art of telephony has had thus in its
beginnings, its evolution, and its present
status as a universal medium of intercourse, all
the elements of surprise, mystery, swift
creation of wealth, tragic interludes, and
colossal battle that can appeal to the
imagination and hold public attention. And in
this new electrical industry, in laying its
essential foundations, Edison has again been
one of the dominant figures.
As far back as 1837, the American,
Page, discovered the curious fact that an iron
bar, when magnetized and demagnetized at short
intervals of time, emitted sounds due to the
molecular disturbances in the mass. Philipp
Reis, a simple professor in Germany, utilized
this principle in the construction of apparatus
for the transmission of sound; but in the grasp
of the idea he was preceded by Charles
Bourseul, a young French soldier in Algeria,
who in 1854, under the title of
"Electrical Telephony," in a Parisian
illustrated paper, gave a brief and lucid
description as follows:
"We know that sounds are made by vibrations,
and are made sensible to the ear by the same
vibrations, which are reproduced by the
intervening medium. But the intensity of the
vibrations diminishes very rapidly with the
distance; so that even with the aid of
speaking-tubes and trumpets it is impossible to
exceed somewhat narrow limits. Suppose a man
speaks near a movable disk sufficiently flexible
to lose none of the vibrations of the voice;
that this disk alternately makes and breaks the
connection with a battery; you may have at a
distance another disk which will simultaneously
execute the same vibrations.... Any one who
is not deaf and dumb may use this mode of
transmission, which would require no apparatus
except an electric battery, two vibrating
disks, and a wire."
This would serve admirably for a portrayal of
the Bell telephone, except that it mentions
distinctly the use of the make-and-break method
(i. e., where the circuit is necessarily
opened and closed as in telegraphy, although,
of course, at an enormously higher rate),
which has never proved practical.
So far as is known Bourseul was not practical
enough to try his own suggestion, and never made
a telephone. About 1860, Reis built
several forms of electrical telephonic
apparatus, all imitating in some degree the
human ear, with its auditory tube, tympanum,
etc., and examples of the apparatus were
exhibited in public not only in Germany, but in
England. There is a variety of testimony to
the effect that not only musical sounds, but
stray words and phrases, were actually
transmitted with mediocre, casual success. It
was impossible, however, to maintain the
devices in adjustment for more than a few
seconds, since the invention depended upon the
make-and-break principle, the circuit being
made and broken every time an impulse-creating
sound went through it, causing the movement of
the diaphragm on which the sound-waves
impinged. Reis himself does not appear to have
been sufficiently interested in the marvellous
possibilities of the idea to follow it
up--remarking to the man who bought his
telephonic instruments and tools that he had
shown the world the way. In reality it was not
the way, although a monument erected to his
memory at Frankfort styles him the inventor of
the telephone. As one of the American judges
said, in deciding an early litigation over the
invention of the telephone, a hundred years of
Reis would not have given the world the
telephonic art for public use. Many others
after Reis tried to devise practical
make-and-break telephones, and all failed;
although their success would have rendered them
very valuable as a means of fighting the Bell
patent. But the method was a good
starting-point, even if it did not indicate the
real path. If Reis had been willing to
experiment with his apparatus so that it did not
make-and-break, he would probably have been
the true father of the telephone, besides giving
it the name by which it is known. It was not
necessary to slam the gate open and shut. All
that was required was to keep the gate closed,
and rattle the latch softly. Incidentally it
may be noted that Edison in experimenting with
the Reis transmitter recognized at once the
defect caused by the make-and-break action,
and sought to keep the gap closed by the use,
first, of one drop of water, and later of
several drops. But the water decomposed, and
the incurable defect was still there.
The Reis telephone was brought to America by
Dr. P. H. Van der Weyde, a well-known
physicist in his day, and was exhibited by him
before a technical audience at Cooper Union,
New York, in 1868, and described shortly
after in the technical press. The apparatus
attracted attention, and a set was secured by
Prof. Joseph Henry for the Smithsonian
Institution. There the famous philosopher
showed and explained it to Alexander Graham
Bell, when that young and persevering Scotch
genius went to get help and data as to harmonic
telegraphy, upon which he was working, and as
to transmitting vocal sounds. Bell took up
immediately and energetically the idea that his
two predecessors had dropped--and reached the
goal. In 1875 Bell, who as a student and
teacher of vocal physiology had unusual
qualifications for determining feasible methods
of speech transmission, constructed his first
pair of magneto telephones for such a purpose.
In February of 1876 his first telephone
patent was applied for, and in March it was
issued. The first published account of the
modern speaking telephone was a paper read by
Bell before the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences in Bos- ton in May of that year;
while at the Centennial Exposition at
Philadelphia the public first gained any
familiarity with it. It was greeted at once
with scientific acclaim and enthusiasm as a
distinctly new and great invention, although at
first it was regarded more as a scientific toy
than as a commercially valuable device.
By an extraordinary coincidence, the very day
that Bell's application for a patent went into
the United States Patent Office, a caveat
was filed there by Elisha Gray, of Chicago,
covering the specific idea of transmitting speech
and reproducing it in a telegraphic circuit
"through an instrument capable of vibrating
responsively to all the tones of the human
voice, and by which they are rendered
audible." Out of this incident arose a
struggle and a controversy whose echoes are yet
heard as to the legal and moral rights of the two
inventors, the assertion even being made that
one of the most important claims of Gray, that
on a liquid battery transmitter, was
surreptitiously "lifted" into the Bell
application, then covering only the magneto
telephone. It was also asserted that the filing
of the Gray caveat antedated by a few hours the
filing of the Bell application. All such
issues when brought to the American courts were
brushed aside, the Bell patent being broadly
maintained in all its remarkable breadth and
fullness, embracing an entire art; but Gray
was embittered and chagrined, and to the last
expressed his belief that the honor and glory
should have been his. The path of Gray to the
telephone was a natural one. A Quaker
carpenter who studied five years at Oberlin
College, he took up electrical invention, and
brought out many ingenious devices in rapid
succession in the telegraphic field, including
the now universal needle annunciator for hotels,
etc., the useful telautograph, automatic
self-adjusting relays, private-line printers
--leading up to his famous "harmonic"
system. This was based upon the principle that
a sound produced in the presence of a reed or
tuning-fork responding to the sound, and acting
as the armature of a magnet in a closed circuit,
would, by induction, set up electric impulses
in the circuit and cause a distant magnet having
a similarly tuned armature to produce the same
tone or note. He also found that over the same
wire at the same time another series of impulses
corresponding to another note could be sent
through the agency of a second set of magnets
without in any way interfering with the first
series of impulses. Building the principle into
apparatus, with a keyboard and vibrating
"reeds" before his magnets, Doctor Gray was
able not only to transmit music by his harmonic
telegraph, but went so far as to send nine
different telegraph messages at the same
instant, each set of instruments depending on
its selective note, while any intermediate
office could pick up the message for itself by
simply tuning its relays to the keynote
required. Theoretically the system could be
split up into any number of notes and
semi-tones. Practically it served as the basis
of some real telegraphic work, but is not now in
use. Any one can realize, however, that it
did not take so acute and ingenious a mind very
long to push forward to the telephone, as a
dangerous competitor with Bell, who had also,
like Edison, been working assiduously in the
field of acoustic and multiple telegraphs. Seen
in the retrospect, the struggle for the goal at
this moment was one of the memorable incidents in
electrical history.
Among the interesting papers filed at the
Orange Laboratory is a lithograph, the size of
an ordinary patent drawing, headed "First
Telephone on Record." The claim thus made
goes back to the period when all was war, and
when dispute was hot and rife as to the actual
invention of the telephone. The device shown,
made by Edison in 1875, was actually
included in a caveat filed January 14,
1876, a month before Bell or Gray. It
shows a little solenoid arrangement, with one
end of the plunger attached to the diaphragm of a
speaking or resonating chamber. Edison states
that while the device is crudely capable of use
as a magneto telephone, he did not invent it for
transmitting speech, but as an apparatus for
analyzing the complex waves arising from various
sounds. It was made in pursuance of his
investigations into the subject of harmonic
telegraphs. He did not try the effect of
sound-waves produced by the human voice until
Bell came forward a few months later; but he
found then that this device, made in 1875,
was capable of use as a telephone. In his
testimony and public utterances Edison has
always given Bell credit for the discovery of
the transmission of articulate speech by talking
against a diaphragm placed in front of an
electromagnet; but it is only proper here to
note, in passing, the curious fact that he had
actually produced a device that COULD talk,
prior to 1876, and was therefore very close
to Bell, who took the one great step further.
A strong characterization of the value and
importance of the work done by Edison in the
development of the carbon transmitter will be
found in the decision of Judge Brown in the
United States Circuit Court of Appeals,
sitting in Boston, on February 27,
1901, declaring void the famous Berliner
patent of the Bell telephone system.[5]
Bell's patent of 1876 was of an
all-embracing character, which only the
make-and-break principle, if practical, could
have escaped. It was pointed out in the patent
that Bell discovered the great principle that
electrical undulations induced by the vibrations
of a current produced by sound-waves can be
represented graphically by the same sinusoidal
curve that expresses the original sound
vibrations themselves; or, in other words,
that a curve representing sound vibrations will
correspond precisely to a curve representing
electric impulses produced or generated by those
identical sound vibrations--as, for example,
when the latter impinge upon a diaphragm acting
as an armature of an electromagnet, and which by
movement to and fro sets up the electric impulses
by induction. To speak plainly, the electric
impulses correspond in form and character to the
sound vibration which they represent. This
reduced to a patent "claim" governed the art as
firmly as a papal bull for centuries enabled
Spain to hold the Western world. The language
of the claim is: "The method of and apparatus
for transmitting vocal or other sounds
telegraphically as herein described, by causing
electrical undulations similar in form to the
vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal
or other sounds substantially as set forth."
It was a long time, however, before the
inclusive nature of this grant over every
possible telephone was understood or recognized,
and litigation for and against the patent lasted
during its entire life. At the outset, the
commercial value of the telephone was little
appreciated by the public, and Bell had the
greatest difficulty in securing capital; but
among far-sighted inventors there was an
immediate "rush to the gold fields." Bell's
first apparatus was poor, the results being
described by himself as "unsatisfactory and
discouraging," which was almost as true of the
devices he exhibited at the Philadelphia
Centennial. The new-comers, like Edison,
Berliner, Blake, Hughes, Gray, Dolbear,
and others, brought a wealth of ideas, a fund
of mechanical ingenuity, and an inventive
ability which soon made the telephone one of the
most notable gains of the century, and one of
the most valuable additions to human resources.
The work that Edison did was, as usual,
marked by infinite variety of method as well as
by the power to seize on the one needed element
of practical success. Every one of the six
million telephones in use in the United
States, and of the other millions in use
through out the world, bears the imprint of his
genius, as at one time the instruments bore his
stamped name. For years his name was branded on
every Bell telephone set, and his patents were
a mainstay of what has been popularly called the
"Bell monopoly." Speaking of his own efforts
in this field, Mr. Edison says:
"In 1876 I started again to experiment for
the Western Union and Mr. Orton. This time
it was the telephone. Bell invented the first
telephone, which consisted of the present
receiver, used both as a transmitter and a
receiver (the magneto type). It was attempted
to introduce it commercially, but it failed on
account of its faintness and the extraneous
sounds which came in on its wires from various
causes. Mr. Orton wanted me to take hold of
it and make it commercial. As I had also been
working on a telegraph system employing
tuning-forks, simultaneously with both Bell
and Gray, I was pretty familiar with the
subject. I started in, and soon produced the
carbon transmitter, which is now universally
used.
"Tests were made between New York and
Philadelphia, also between New York and
Washington, using regular Western Union
wires. The noises were so great that not a word
could be heard with the Bell receiver when used
as a transmitter between New York and Newark,
New Jersey. Mr. Orton and W. K.
Vanderbilt and the board of directors witnessed
and took part in the tests. The Western Union
then put them on private lines. Mr. Theodore
Puskas, of Budapest, Hungary, was the first
man to suggest a telephone exchange, and soon
after exchanges were established. The telephone
department was put in the hands of Hamilton
McK. Twombly, Vanderbilt's ablest
son-in-law, who made a success of it. The
Bell company, of Boston, also started an
exchange, and the fight was on, the Western
Union pirating the Bell receiver, and the
Boston company pirating the Western Union
transmitter. About this time I wanted to be
taken care of. I threw out hints of this
desire. Then Mr. Orton sent for me. He had
learned that inventors didn't do business by the
regular process, and concluded he would close it
right up. He asked me how much I wanted. I
had made up my mind it was certainly worth
$25,000, if it ever amounted to anything
for central-station work, so that was the sum
I had in mind to stick to and
get--obstinately. Still it had been an easy
job, and only required a few months, and I
felt a little shaky and uncertain. So I asked
him to make me an offer. He promptly said he
would give me $100,000. `All right,'
I said. `It is yours on one condition, and
that is that you do not pay it all at once, but
pay me at the rate of $6000 per year for
seventeen years'--the life of the patent. He
seemed only too pleased to do this, and it was
closed. My ambition was about four times too
large for my business capacity, and I knew that
I would soon spend this money experimenting if
I got it all at once, so I fixed it that I
couldn't. I saved seventeen years of worry by
this stroke."
Thus modestly is told the debut of Edison in
the telephone art, to which with his carbon
transmitter he gave the valuable principle of
varying the resistance of the transmitting
circuit with changes in the pressure, as well as
the vital practice of using the induction coil as
a means of increasing the effective length of the
talking circuit. Without these, modern
telephony would not and could not exist.[6]
But Edison, in telephonic work, as in other
directions, was remarkably fertile and
prolific. His first inventions in the art,
made in 1875-76, continue through many
later years, including all kinds of carbon
instruments --the water telephone,
electrostatic telephone, condenser telephone,
chemical telephone, various magneto telephones,
inertia telephone, mercury telephone, voltaic
pile telephone, musical transmitter, and the
electromotograph. All were actually made and
tested.
The principle of the electromotograph was
utilized by Edison in more ways than one, first
of all in telegraphy at this juncture. The
well-known Page patent, which had lingered in
the Patent Office for years, had just been
issued, and was considered a formidable weapon.
It related to the use of a retractile spring to
withdraw the armature lever from the magnet of a
telegraph or other relay or sounder, and thus
controlled the art of telegraphy, except in
simple circuits. "There was no known way,"
remarks Edison, "whereby this patent could be
evaded, and its possessor would eventually
control the use of what is known as the relay and
sounder, and this was vital to telegraphy.
Gould was pounding the Western Union on the
Stock Exchange, disturbing its railroad
contracts, and, being advised by his lawyers
that this patent was of great value, bought it.
The moment Mr. Orton heard this he sent for
me and explained the situation, and wanted me to
go to work immediately and see if I couldn't
evade it or discover some other means that could
be used in case Gould sustained the patent. It
seemed a pretty hard job, because there was no
known means of moving a lever at the other end of
a telegraph wire except by the use of a magnet.
I said I would go at it that night. In
experimenting some years previously, I had
discovered a very peculiar phenomenon, and that
was that if a piece of metal connected to a
battery was rubbed over a moistened piece of
chalk resting on a metal connected to the other
pole, when the current passed the friction was
greatly diminished. When the current was
reversed the friction was greatly increased over
what it was when no current was passing.
Remembering this, I substituted a piece of
chalk rotated by a small electric motor for the
magnet, and connecting a sounder to a metallic
finger resting on the chalk, the combination
claim of Page was made worthless. A hitherto
unknown means was introduced in the electric
art. Two or three of the devices were made and
tested by the company's expert. Mr. Orton,
after he had me sign the patent application and
got it in the Patent Office, wanted to settle
for it at once. He asked my price. Again I
said: `Make me an offer.' Again he named
$100,000. I accepted, providing he
would pay it at the rate of $6000 a year for
seventeen years. This was done, and thus,
with the telephone money, I received
$12,000 yearly for that period from the
Western Union Telegraph Company."
A year or two later the motograph cropped up
again in Edison's work in a curious manner.
The telephone was being developed in England,
and Edison had made arrangements with Colonel
Gouraud, his old associate in the automatic
telegraph, to represent his interests. A
company was formed, a large number of
instruments were made and sent to Gouraud in
London, and prospects were bright. Then there
came a threat of litigation from the owners of
the Bell patent, and Gouraud found he could
not push the enterprise unless he could avoid
using what was asserted to be an infringement of
the Bell receiver. He cabled for help to
Edison, who sent back word telling him to hold
the fort. "I had recourse again," says
Edison, "to the phenomenon discovered by me
years previous, that the friction of a rubbing
electrode passing over a moist chalk surface was
varied by electricity. I devised a telephone
receiver which was afterward known as the
`loud-speaking telephone,' or `chalk
receiver.' There was no magnet, simply a
diaphragm and a cylinder of compressed chalk
about the size of a thimble. A thin spring
connected to the centre of the diaphragm extended
outwardly and rested on the chalk cylinder, and
was pressed against it with a pressure equal to
that which would be due to a weight of about six
pounds. The chalk was rotated by hand. The
volume of sound was very great. A person
talking into the carbon transmitter in New York
had his voice so amplified that he could be heard
one thousand feet away in an open field at Menlo
Park. This great excess of power was due to
the fact that the latter came from the person
turning the handle. The voice, instead of
furnishing all the power as with the present
receiver, merely controlled the power, just as
an engineer working a valve would control a
powerful engine.
"I made six of these receivers and sent them in
charge of an expert on the first steamer. They
were welcomed and tested, and shortly afterward
I shipped a hundred more. At the same time I
was ordered to send twenty young men, after
teaching them to become expert. I set up an
exchange, around the laboratory, of ten
instruments. I would then go out and get each
one out of order in every conceivable way,
cutting the wires of one, short-circuiting
another, destroying the adjustment of a third,
putting dirt between the electrodes of a fourth,
and so on. A man would be sent to each to find
out the trouble. When he could find the trouble
ten consecutive times, using five minutes each,
he was sent to London. About sixty men were
sifted to get twenty. Before all had arrived,
the Bell company there, seeing we could not be
stopped, entered into negotiations for
consolidation. One day I received a cable from
Gouraud offering `30,000' for my
interest. I cabled back I would accept. When
the draft came I was astonished to find it was
for L30,000. I had thought it was
dollars."
In regard to this singular and happy
conclusion, Edison makes some interesting
comments as to the attitude of the courts toward
inventors, and the difference between American
and English courts. "The men I sent over
were used to establish telephone exchanges all
over the Continent, and some of them became
wealthy. It was among this crowd in London
that Bernard Shaw was employed before he became
famous. The chalk telephone was finally
discarded in favor of the Bell receiver--the
latter being more simple and cheaper. Extensive
litigation with new-comers followed. My
carbon-transmitter patent was sustained, and
preserved the monopoly of the telephone in
England for many years. Bell's patent was not
sustained by the courts. Sir Richard
Webster, now Chief-Justice of England, was
my counsel, and sustained all of my patents in
England for many years. Webster has a
marvellous capacity for understanding things
scientific; and his address before the courts
was lucidity itself. His brain is highly
organized. My experience with the legal
fraternity is that scientific subjects are
distasteful to them, and it is rare in this
country, on account of the system of trying
patent suits, for a judge really to reach the
meat of the controversy, and inventors scarcely
ever get a decision squarely and entirely in
their favor. The fault rests, in my judgment,
almost wholly with the system under which
testimony to the extent of thousands of pages
bearing on all conceivable subjects, many of
them having no possible connection with the
invention in dispute, is presented to an over-
worked judge in an hour or two of argument
supported by several hundred pages of briefs;
and the judge is supposed to extract some essence
of justice from this mass of conflicting,
blind, and misleading statements. It is a
human impossibility, no matter how able and
fair-minded the judge may be. In England the
case is different. There the judges are face to
face with the experts and other witnesses. They
get the testimony first-hand and only so much as
they need, and there are no long-winded briefs
and arguments, and the case is decided then and
there, a few months perhaps after suit is
brought, instead of many years afterward, as in
this country. And in England, when a case is
once finally decided it is settled for the whole
country, while here it is not so. Here a
patent having once been sustained, say, in
Boston, may have to be litigated all over again
in New York, and again in Philadelphia, and
so on for all the Federal circuits.
Furthermore, it seems to me that scientific
disputes should be decided by some court
containing at least one or two scientific men--
men capable of comprehending the significance of
an invention and the difficulties of its
accomplishment --if justice is ever to be given
to an inventor. And I think, also, that this
court should have the power to summon before it
and examine any recognized expert in the special
art, who might be able to testify to FACTS
for or against the patent, instead of trying to
gather the truth from the tedious essays of hired
experts, whose depositions are really nothing
but sworn arguments. The real gist of patent
suits is generally very simple, and I have no
doubt that any judge of fair intelligence,
assisted by one or more scientific advisers,
could in a couple of days at the most examine all
the necessary witnesses; hear all the necessary
arguments, and actually decide an ordinary
patent suit in a way that would more nearly be
just, than can now be done at an expenditure of
a hundred times as much money and months and
years of preparation. And I have no doubt that
the time taken by the court would be enormously
less, because if a judge attempts to read the
bulky records and briefs, that work alone would
require several days.
"Acting as judges, inventors would not be very
apt to correctly decide a complicated law point;
and on the other hand, it is hard to see how a
lawyer can decide a complicated scientific point
rightly. Some inventors complain of our Patent
Office, but my own experience with the Patent
Office is that the examiners are fair-minded
and intelligent, and when they refuse a patent
they are generally right; but I think the whole
trouble lies with the system in vogue in the
Federal courts for trying patent suits, and in
the fact, which cannot be disputed, that the
Federal judges, with but few exceptions, do
not comprehend complicated scientific questions.
To secure uniformity in the several Federal
circuits and correct errors, it has been
proposed to establish a central court of patent
appeals in Washington. This I believe in;
but this court should also contain at least two
scientific men, who would not be blind to the
sophistry of paid experts.[7] Men whose
inventions would have created wealth of millions
have been ruined and prevented from making any
money whereby they could continue their careers
as creators of wealth for the general good, just
because the experts befuddled the judge by their
misleading statements."
Mr. Bernard Shaw, the distinguished English
author, has given a most vivid and amusing
picture of this introduction of Edison's
telephone into England, describing the
apparatus as "a much too ingenious invention,
being nothing less than a telephone of such
stentorian efficiency that it bellowed your most
private communications all over the house,
instead of whispering them with some sort of
discretion." Shaw, as a young man, was
employed by the Edison Telephone Company, and
was very much alive to his surroundings, often
assisting in public demonstra- tions of the
apparatus "in a manner which I am persuaded
laid the foundation of Mr. Edison's
reputation." The sketch of the men sent over
from America is graphic: "Whilst the Edison
Telephone Company lasted it crowded the
basement of a high pile of offices in Queen
Victoria Street with American artificers.
These deluded and romantic men gave me a glimpse
of the skilled proletariat of the United
States. They sang obsolete sentimental songs
with genuine emotion; and their language was
frightful even to an Irishman. They worked
with a ferocious energy which was out of all
proportion to the actual result achieved.
Indomitably resolved to assert their republican
manhood by taking no orders from a tall- hatted
Englishman whose stiff politeness covered his
conviction that they were relatively to himself
inferior and common persons, they insisted on
being slave-driven with genuine American oaths
by a genuine free and equal American foreman.
They utterly despised the artfully slow British
workman, who did as little for his wages as he
possibly could; never hurried himself; and had
a deep reverence for one whose pocket could be
tapped by respectful behavior. Need I add that
they were contemptuously wondered at by this same
British workman as a parcel of outlandish adult
boys who sweated themselves for their employer's
benefit instead of looking after their own
interest? They adored Mr. Edison as the
greatest man of all time in every possible
department of science, art, and philosophy,
and execrated Mr. Graham Bell, the inventor
of the rival telephone, as his Satanic
adversary; but each of them had (or intended to
have) on the brink of completion an improvement
on the telephone, usually a new transmitter.
They were free-souled creatures, excellent
company, sensitive, cheerful, and profane;
liars, braggarts, and hustlers, with an air of
making slow old England hum, which never left
them even when, as often happened, they were
wrestling with difficulties of their own making,
or struggling in no- thoroughfares, from which
they had to be retrieved like stray sheep by
Englishmen without imagination enough to go
wrong."
Mr. Samuel Insull, who afterward became
private secretary to Mr. Edison, and a leader
in the development of American electrical
manufacturing and the central-station art, was
also in close touch with the London situation
thus depicted, being at the time private
secretary to Colonel Gouraud, and acting for
the first half hour as the amateur telephone
operator in the first experimental exchange
erected in Europe. He took notes of an early
meeting where the affairs of the company were
discussed by leading men like Sir John Lubbock
(Lord Avebury) and the Right Hon. E.
P. Bouverie (then a cabinet minister), none
of whom could see in the telephone much more than
an auxiliary for getting out promptly in the next
morning's papers the midnight debates in
Parliament. "I remember another incident,"
says Mr. Insull. "It was at some
celebration of one of the Royal Societies at
the Burlington House, Piccadilly. We had a
telephone line running across the roofs to the
basement of the building. I think it was to
Tyndall's laboratory in Burlington Street.
As the ladies and gentle- men came through,
they naturally wanted to look at the great
curiosity, the loud-speaking telephone: in
fact, any telephone was a curiosity then. Mr.
and Mrs. Gladstone came through. I was
handling the telephone at the Burlington House
end. Mrs. Gladstone asked the man over the
telephone whether he knew if a man or woman was
speaking; and the reply came in quite loud tones
that it was a man!"
With Mr. E. H. Johnson, who represented
Edison, there went to England for the
furtherance of this telephone enterprise, Mr.
Charles Edison, a nephew of the inventor. He
died in Paris, October, 1879, not twenty
years of age. Stimulated by the example of his
uncle, this brilliant youth had already made a
mark for himself as a student and inventor, and
when only eighteen he secured in open competition
the contract to install a complete fire-alarm
telegraph system for Port Huron. A few months
later he was eagerly welcomed by his uncle at
Menlo Park, and after working on the telephone
was sent to London to aid in its introduction.
There he made the acquaintance of Professor
Tyndall, exhibited the telephone to the late
King of England; and also won the friendship
of the late King of the Belgians, with whom he
took up the project of establishing telephonic
communication between Belgium and England. At
the time of his premature death he was engaged in
installing the Edison quadruplex between
Brussels and Paris, being one of the very few
persons then in Europe familiar with the working
of that invention.
Meantime, the telephonic art in America was
undergoing very rapid development. In March,
1878, addressing "the capitalists of the
Electric Telephone Company" on the future of
his invention, Bell outlined with prophetic
foresight and remarkable clearness the coming of
the modern telephone exchange. Comparing with
gas and water distribution, he said: "In a
similar manner, it is conceivable that cables of
telephone wires could be laid underground or
suspended overhead communicating by branch wires
with private dwellings, country houses, shops,
manufactories, etc., uniting them through the
main cable with a central office, where the wire
could be connected as desired, establishing
direct communication between any two places in
the city.... Not only so, but I believe,
in the future, wires will unite the head offices
of telephone companies in different cities; and
a man in one part of the country may communicate
by word of mouth with another in a distant
place."
All of which has come to pass. Professor Bell
also suggested how this could be done by "the
employ of a man in each central office for the
purpose of connecting the wires as directed."
He also indicated the two methods of telephonic
tariff--a fixed rental and a toll; and
mentioned the practice, now in use on
long-distance lines, of a time charge. As a
matter of fact, this "centralizing" was
attempted in May, 1877, in Boston, with
the circuits of the Holmes burglar-alarm
system, four banking-houses being thus
interconnected; while in January of 1878
the Bell telephone central-office system at
New Haven, Connecticut, was opened for
business, "the first fully equipped commercial
telephone exchange ever established for public or
general service."
All through this formative period Bell had
adhered to and introduced the magneto form of
telephone, now used only as a receiver, and
very poorly adapted for the vital function of a
speech-transmitter. From August, 1877,
the Western Union Telegraph Company worked
along the other line, and in 1878, with its
allied Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, it
brought into existence the American Speaking
Telephone Company to introduce the Edison
apparatus, and to create telephone exchanges all
over the country. In this warfare, the
possession of a good battery transmitter counted
very heavily in favor of the Western Union,
for upon that the real expansion of the whole
industry depended; but in a few months the Bell
system had its battery transmitter, too,
tending to equalize matters. Late in the same
year patent litigation was begun which brought
out clearly the merits of Bell, through his
patent, as the original and first inventor of
the electric speaking telephone; and the
Western Union Telegraph Company made terms
with its rival. A famous contract bearing date
of November 10, 1879, showed that under
the Edison and other controlling patents the
Western Union Company had already set going
some eighty- five exchanges, and was making
large quantities of telephonic apparatus. In
return for its voluntary retirement from the
telephonic field, the Western Union Telegraph
Company, under this contract, received a
royalty of 20 per cent. of all the telephone
earnings of the Bell system while the Bell
patents ran; and thus came to enjoy an annual
income of several hundred thousand dollars for
some years, based chiefly on its modest
investment in Edison's work. It was also paid
several thousand dollars in cash for the
Edison, Phelps, Gray, and other apparatus
on hand. It secured further 40 per cent. of
the stock of the local telephone systems of New
York and Chicago; and last, but by no means
least, it exacted from the Bell interests an
agreement to stay out of the telegraph field.
By March, 1881, there were in the United
States only nine cities of more than ten
thousand inhabitants, and only one of more than
fifteen thousand, without a telephone exchange.
The industry thrived under competition, and the
absence of it now had a decided effect in
checking growth; for when the Bell patent
expired in 1893, the total of telephone sets
in operation in the United States was only
291,253. To quote from an official Bell
statement:
"The brief but vigorous Western Union
competition was a kind of blessing in disguise.
The very fact that two distinct interests were
actively engaged in the work of organizing and
establishing competing telephone exchanges all
over the country, greatly facilitated the spread
of the idea and the growth of the business, and
familiarized the people with the use of the
telephone as a business agency; while the
keenness of the competition, extending to the
agents and employees of both companies, brought
about a swift but quite unforeseen and unlooked-
for expansion in the individual exchanges of the
larger cities, and a corresponding advance in
their importance, value, and usefulness."
The truth of this was immediately shown in
1894, after the Bell patents had expired,
by the tremendous outburst of new competitive
activity, in "independent" country systems and
toll lines through sparsely settled
districts--work for which the Edison apparatus
and methods were peculiarly adapted, yet against
which the influence of the Edison patent was
invoked. The data secured by the United
States Census Office in 1902 showed that
the whole industry had made gigantic leaps in
eight years, and had 2,371,044
telephone stations in service, of which
1,053,866 were wholly or nominally
independent of the Bell. By 1907 an even
more notable increase was shown, and the Census
figures for that year included no fewer than
6,118,578 stations, of which
1,986,575 were "independent." These
six million instruments every single set
employing the principle of the carbon
transmitter--were grouped into 15,527
public exchanges, in the very manner predicted
by Bell thirty years before, and they gave
service in the shape of over eleven billions of
talks. The outstanding capitalized value of the
plant was $814,616,004, the income
for the year was nearly
$185,000,000, and the people
employed were 140,000. If Edison had
done nothing else, his share in the creation of
such an industry would have entitled him to a
high place among inventors.
This chapter is of necessity brief in its
reference to many extremely interesting points
and details; and to some readers it may seem
incomplete in its references to the work of other
men than Edison, whose influence on telephony
as an art has also been con- siderable. In
reply to this pertinent criticism, it may be
pointed out that this is a life of Edison, and
not of any one else; and that even the
discussion of his achievements alone in these
various fields requires more space than the
authors have at their disposal. The attempt has
been made, however, to indicate the course of
events and deal fairly with the facts. The
controversy that once waged with great excitement
over the invention of the microphone, but has
long since died away, is suggestive of the
difficulties involved in trying to do justice to
everybody. A standard history describes the
microphone thus:
"A form of apparatus produced during the early
days of the telephone by Professor Hughes, of
England, for the purpose of rendering faint,
indistinct sounds distinctly audible, depended
for its operation on the changes that result in
the resistance of loose contacts. This
apparatus was called the microphone, and was in
reality but one of the many forms that it is
possible to give to the telephone transmitter.
For example, the Edison granular transmitter
was a variety of microphone, as was also
Edison's transmitter, in which the solid
button of carbon was employed. Indeed, even
the platinum point, which in the early form of
the Reis transmitter pressed against the
platinum contact cemented to the centre of the
diaphragm, was a microphone."
At a time when most people were amazed at the
idea of hearing, with the aid of a
"microphone," a fly walk at a distance of many
miles, the priority of invention of such a
device was hotly disputed. Yet without desiring
to take anything from the credit of the brilliant
American, Hughes, whose telegraphic apparatus
is still in use all over Europe, it may be
pointed out that this passage gives Edison the
attribution of at least two original forms of
which those suggested by Hughes were mere
variations and modifications. With regard to
this matter, Mr. Edison himself remarks:
"After I sent one of my men over to London
especially, to show Preece the carbon
transmitter, and where Hughes first saw it,
and heard it--then within a month he came out
with the microphone, without any acknowledgment
whatever. Published dates will show that
Hughes came along after me."
There have been other ways also in which Edison
has utilized the peculiar property that carbon
possesses of altering its resistance to the
passage of current, according to the pressure to
which it is subjected, whether at the surface,
or through closer union of the mass. A loose
road with a few inches of dust or pebbles on it
offers appreciable resistance to the wheels of
vehicles travelling over it; but if the surface
is kept hard and smooth the effect is quite
different. In the same way carbon, whether
solid or in the shape of finely divided powder,
offers a high resistance to the passage of
electricity; but if the carbon is squeezed
together the conditions change, with less
resistance to electricity in the circuit. For
his quadruplex system, Mr. Edison utilized
this fact in the construction of a rheostat or
resistance box. It consists of a series of silk
disks saturated with a sizing of plumbago and
well dried. The disks are compressed by means
of an adjustable screw; and in this manner the
resistance of a circuit can be varied over a wide
range.
In like manner Edison developed a "pressure"
or carbon relay, adapted to the transference of
signals of variable strength from one circuit to
another. An ordinary relay consists of an
electromagnet inserted in the main line for
telegraphing, which brings a local battery and
sounder circuit into play, reproducing in the
local circuit the signals sent over the main
line. The relay is adjusted to the weaker
currents likely to be received, but the signals
reproduced on the sounder by the agency of the
relay are, of course, all of equal strength,
as they depend upon the local battery, which has
only this steady work to perform. In cases
where it is desirable to reproduce the signals in
the local circuit with the same variations in
strength as they are received by the relay, the
Edison carbon pressure relay does the work.
The poles of the electromagnet in the local
circuit are hollowed out and filled up with
carbon disks or powdered plumbago. The armature
and the carbon-tipped poles of the electromagnet
form part of the local circuit; and if the relay
is actuated by a weak current the armature will
be attracted but feebly. The carbon being only
slightly compressed will offer considerable
resistance to the flow of current from the local
battery, and therefore the signal on the local
sounder will be weak. If, on the contrary,
the incoming current on the main line be strong,
the armature will be strongly attracted, the
carbon will be sharply compressed, the
resistance in the local circuit will be
proportionately lowered, and the signal heard on
the local sounder will be a loud one. Thus it
will be seen, by another clever juggle with the
willing agent, carbon, for which he has found
so many duties, Edison is able to transfer or
transmit exactly, to the local circuit, the
main-line current in all its minutest
variations.
In his researches to determine the nature of the
motograph phenomena, and to open up other
sources of electrical current generation,
Edison has worked out a very ingenious and
somewhat perplexing piece of apparatus known as
the "chalk battery." It consists of a series
of chalk cylinders mounted on a shaft revolved by
hand. Resting against each of these cylinders
is a palladium-faced spring, and similar
springs make contact with the shaft between each
cylinder. By connecting all these springs in
circuit with a galvanometer and revolving the
shaft rapidly, a notable deflection is obtained
of the galvanometer needle, indicating the
production of electrical energy. The reason for
this does not appear to have been determined.
Last but not least, in this beautiful and
ingenious series, comes the "tasimeter," an
instrument of most delicate sensibility in the
presence of heat. The name is derived from the
Greek, the use of the apparatus being primarily
to measure extremely minute differences of
pressure. A strip of hard rubber with pointed
ends rests perpendicularly on a platinum plate,
beneath which is a carbon button, under which
again lies another platinum plate. The two
plates and the carbon button form part of an
electric circuit containing a battery and a
galvanometer. The hard-rubber strip is
exceedingly sensitive to heat. The slightest
degree of heat imparted to it causes it to expand
invisibly, thus increasing the pressure contact
on the carbon button and producing a variation in
the resistance of the circuit, registered
immediately by the little swinging needle of the
galvanometer. The instrument is so sensitive
that with a delicate galvanometer it will show
the impingement of the heat from a person's hand
thirty feet away. The suggestion to employ such
an apparatus in astronomical observations occurs
at once, and it may be noted that in one
instance the heat of rays of light from the
remote star Arcturus gave results.
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