telegraph, received young Bell with the greatest interest, and showed
him a new talking-machine that had been constructed by Baron de
Kempelin. Bell studied this closely, discussed it with Wheatstone, and
decided that he would devote himself to the problems of reproducing
sounds mechanically.
The course of his life was then suddenly altered. His two brothers
died in Edinburgh of consumption, and he was told that he must seek a
change of climate. Accordingly his father and mother sailed with him
to the town of Brantford in Canada. There he at once became interested
in teaching his father’s system of “Visible Speech” to a tribe of
Mohawk Indians in the neighborhood.
He had already had very considerable success in teaching deaf-mutes to
talk by visible speech, or sign-language, and this success was
repeated in Canada. Word of it went to Boston, and as a result the
Board of Education of that city wrote to him, offering to pay him five
hundred dollars if he would teach his system in a school for
deaf-mutes there. He was glad to accept, and in 1871 moved to Boston,
which he planned to make his permanent residence.
Success crowned his teaching almost immediately. Boston University
offered him a professorship, and he opened a “School of Vocal
Physiology,” which paid him well. Most of his remarkable skill in
teaching the deaf and dumb to understand spoken words and in a manner
to speak themselves was due to his father’s system, which he had
carefully followed, and had in some respects improved upon.
At this time a resident of Salem, Thomas Sanders, engaged the young
teacher to train his small deaf-mute son, and asked him to make his
home at Sanders’ house in Salem. As he could easily reach Boston from
there Bell consented, and in the cellar of Mr. Sanders’ house he set
up a workshop, where for three years he experimented with tuning-forks
and electric batteries along the line of his early studies in London.
At nearly the same time Miss Mabel Hubbard came to him to be taught
his system of speech. He became engaged to her, and some years later
they were married.
His future wife’s father was a well-known Boston lawyer, Gardiner G.
Hubbard. It is related that one evening as Bell sat at the piano in
Mr. Hubbard’s home in Cambridge, he said, “Do you know that if I sing
the note G close to the strings of the piano, the G-string will answer
me?” “What of it?” asked Mr. Hubbard. “Why, it means that some day we
ought to have a musical telegraph, that will send as many messages
simultaneously over one wire as there are notes on the piano.”
Bell knew the field of his work in a general way, but he had not yet
decided which path to choose of several that looked as if they might
lead across it. His far-distant goal was to construct a machine that
would carry, not the dots and dashes of the telegraph, but the complex
vibrations of the human voice. This would be much more difficult to
attain than a musical telegraph, and for some time he wavered between
the two ideas. His work with his deaf and dumb pupils was all in the
line of making sound vibrations visible to the eye. He knew that with
what was called the phonautograph he could get tracings of such sound
vibrations upon blackened paper by means of a pencil or marker
attached to a vibrating cord or membrane, and furthermore that he
could obtain tracings of certain vowel sound vibrations upon smoked
glass. He studied the effect of vibrations upon the bones of the ear,
and this led him to experiment with vibrating a thin piece of iron
before an electro-magnet.
His study of the effect of vibrations on the human eardrum showed Bell
what path he should follow. Sound waves striking the delicate ear-drum
could send thrills through the heavier bones inside the ear. He
thought that if he could construct two iron discs, which should be
similar to the ear-drums, and connect them by an electrified wire, he
might be able to make the disc at one end vibrate with sound waves,
send those vibrations through the wire to the other disc, and have
that give out the vibrations again in the form of sounds. That now
became his working idea, and it was the principle on which the
telephone was ultimately to be built.
But Bell had been giving so much time and attention to this absorbing
project that his teaching had suffered. His “School of Vocal
Physiology” had had to be abandoned, and he found that his only pupils
were Miss Hubbard and small George Sanders. Both Mr. Sanders and Mr.
Hubbard, who had been helping him with the cost of his experiments,
refused to do so any longer unless he would devote himself to working
out his musical telegraph, in which both had a great deal of faith as
a successful business proposition.
While he was struggling with these distracting calls of duty and
science he was obliged to go to Washington to see his patent attorney.
There he determined to call upon Professor Joseph Henry, who was the
greatest American authority on electrical science, and who had
experimented with the telegraph in the early years of the century.
Bell, aged twenty-eight, explained his new idea to Henry, then aged
seventy-eight. The theory was new to Henry, but he saw at once that it
had tremendous possibilities. He told Bell so. “But,” said Bell, “I
have not the expert knowledge of electricity that is needed.” “You can
get it,” answered Henry. “You must, for you are in possession of the
germ of a great invention.”
Those few words, coming from such a man, were of the greatest possible
encouragement to Bell. He returned home, determined to get the
knowledge of electricity he needed, and to carry on his work with the
telephone.
He rented a room at 109 Court Street, Boston, for a workshop, and took
a bedroom in the neighborhood. He studied electricity night and day,
and he gave equal time to the musical telegraph that his friends
favored and to the invention that now claimed his real interest.
The man from whom Bell rented his workshop was Charles Williams,
himself a manufacturer of electrical supplies. Bell had for his
assistant Thomas A. Watson, who helped him construct the two
armatures, or vibrating discs, at the end of an electrified wire that
stretched from the workshop to an adjoining room. Watson was working
with Bell on an afternoon in June, 1875. Bell was in the workshop, and
Watson in the next room. Bell was stooping down over the instrument at
his end of the wire. Suddenly he gave an exclamation. He had heard a
faint twang come from the disc in front of him.
He dashed into the next room. “Snap that reed again, Watson,” he
commanded. Back at his own end of the wire he waited. In a minute he
caught the light twang again. It was only what he had been expecting
to hear at any time during the months of his work, but nevertheless he
was amazed when he did catch the sound. It proved that a sound could
be carried over a wire, and accurately reproduced at the farther end.
And that meant that the vibrations of the human voice could ultimately
be sent in the same way.
Bell’s enthusiasm had already converted his assistant, Watson; it now
won over Hubbard and Sanders. They began to believe that there might
be something of real value in his strange scheme, and offered to help
him finance it. He went on with his studies in electricity, and
gradually began to learn how he could make it serve him best.
But it was a far cry from that first faint sound to the actual
transmission of words. For a long time his receiving instruments would
only give out vague rumbling noises. In November, 1875, his
experiments showed him that the vibrations created in a reed by the
human voice could be transmitted in such a way as to reproduce words
and sounds. Then, in January, 1876, he showed a few of the pupils at
Monroe’s School of Oratory in Boston an apparatus by which singing
could be carried more or less satisfactorily from the cellar of the
building to a room on the fourth floor. But on March 10, 1876, the new
instrument actually talked. Watson, who was at the basement end of the
wire, heard the disc say, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” He
dashed up the three flights of stairs to the room in which Bell was.
“I can _hear_ you!” he cried. “I can _hear the words_!”
“Had I known more about electricity, and less about sound,” Bell is
reported to have said, “I would never have invented the telephone.” He
had come upon his discovery by the right path, but it was a path that
very few men could ever have picked out. Other inventors had tried to
make a machine that would carry the voice, but they had all worked
from the standpoint of the telegraph. Bell, inheriting unusual
knowledge of the laws of speech and sound, came from the other
direction. He started with the laws of sound transmission rather than
with the laws of the telegraph. The result was that he had created
something altogether new, basically different from all the other
inventions that made use of electricity, for which there was as yet no
common name even, and which he described in his application for a
patent, as “an improvement in telegraphy.”
Only two months after the day on which the telephone had actually
talked for the first time the Centennial Exposition opened in
Philadelphia. Mr. Hubbard was one of the Commissioners, and he
obtained permission to have Bell’s first telephone placed on a small
table in the Department of Education. Bell himself was too poor to be
able to go to Philadelphia, and intended to stay in Boston, and try to
find new deaf-mute pupils. But when Miss Hubbard left for the
Centennial, and begged him to go with her, he could not resist. He
stayed on the train, without a ticket, without baggage, and reached
Philadelphia with the Hubbards.
[Illustration: THE FIRST TELEPHONE
Reproduced by permission
From “The History of the Telephone”
By Herbert N. Casson
Published by A. C. McClurg & Co.]
The new instrument had been at the Exposition for six weeks without
attracting serious attention. But Mr. Hubbard arranged that the judges
should examine it for a few minutes on the Sunday afternoon following
Bell’s arrival. The afternoon, however, was very warm, and there were
a great many exhibits for the judges to inspect. There was the first
grain-binder, and the earliest crude electric light, and Elisha Gray’s
musical telegraph, and exhibits of printing telegraphs. It was seven
o’clock when the judges reached Bell’s table, and they were tired and
hungry. One of the judges picked up the receiver, looked at it, and
put it back on the table. The others laughed and joked as they started
to go by. Then they stopped short. A man had come up to the table,
with a crowd of attendants at his heels. He said to the young man at
the table, “Professor Bell, I am delighted to see you again.” The new
arrival was the Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil, who had once visited
Bell’s school for deaf-mutes in Boston. The Emperor said he would
like to test Bell’s new machine.
With the judges, a group of famous scientific men, and the Emperor’s
suite for audience, Bell went to the transmitter at the other end of
the wire, while Dom Pedro put the receiver to his ear. There was a
moment’s pause, and then the Emperor threw back his head, exclaiming,
“_My God--it talks!_”
The Emperor put down the receiver. Joseph Henry, who had encouraged
Bell in Washington, picked it up. He too heard Bell’s own words coming
from the disc. He too showed his amazement. “This comes nearer to
overthrowing the doctrine of the conservation of energy,” said he,
“than anything I ever saw.” After him came Sir William Thomson, later
known as Lord Kelvin. He had been the engineer of the first Atlantic
Cable. He listened intently. “Yes,” said he at last, “it does speak.
It is the most wonderful thing I have seen in America!”
Until ten o’clock that night the judges spoke into the transmitter and
listened at the receiver of Bell’s instrument. Next morning it was
given a place of honor, and every one begged for a chance to examine
it. It became the most wonderful exhibit of the Centennial, and the
judges gave Bell their Certificate of Award. Nothing more opportune
could possibly have happened for the inventor.
But in spite of this launching at the hands of the most eminent
scientists, business men could see little future for the new machine.
It was very ingenious, they admitted, but it could only be a toy. And
Bell himself was not sufficiently well versed in business affairs to
know how to make the most of his invention. Fortunately Mr. Hubbard
was much better acquainted with business methods. He determined to
promote the telephone, and he did. He talked about it to all his
friends until they could think of nothing else. He began a campaign of
publicity, with the object of making the name of the new instrument a
household word. He had it written up for the newspapers, and
advertised public demonstrations of its powers, and arranged that Bell
should lecture on it in different cities. Bell was a good lecturer,
and his talks became popular. Then news was sent to the _Boston Globe_
by telephone, and people began to wonder if there were not new
possibilities in its use.
In May, 1877, a man named Emery called at Hubbard’s office, and leased
two telephones for twenty dollars. That encouraged the promoters, and
they issued a little circular describing the business. Then another
man, who ran a burglar-alarm company, obtained permission to hang up
the telephone in a few banks. They proved of use, and the same man
started a service among the express companies. Before long several
other small exchanges were opened, and by August, 1877, it was
estimated that there were 778 telephones in use. Hubbard was very much
encouraged, and he, together with Bell, Sanders, and Watson formed the
“Bell Telephone Association.”
The Western Union Telegraph Company was a great corporation,
controlling the telegraph business of the country. Hubbard hoped that
it would purchase the Bell patents, as it had already bought many
patents taken out on allied inventions. They offered them to President
Orton for $100,000, but he refused to buy them, saying, “What use
could this company make of an electrical toy?”
But the Western Union had many little subsidiary companies, supplying
customers with printing-telegraphs and dial telegraphs and various
other modifications of the usual telegraph, and one day one of these
companies reported that some of their customers were preferring to use
the new telephone. The Western Union bestirred itself at this sign of
competition, and had shortly formed the “American Speaking-Telephone
Company,” with a staff of inventors that included Edison. The war was
on in earnest, for the new company not only claimed to have the best
instrument on the market, but advertised that it had “the only
original telephone.”
That war was actually a good thing for Bell, and Hubbard, and Sanders.
With the Western Union pushing this new invention, and not only
pushing it, but fighting for its claim to it, the public realized that
the telephone was neither a toy nor a scientific oddity, but an
instrument of great commercial value. Sanders’ relatives came to the
aid of the Bell Company, and put money into its treasury, and soon
Hubbard was leasing out telephones at the rate of a thousand a month.
But none of these partners was exactly the man to organize and build
up such a business as this of the telephone should be, and each of
them knew it. Then Hubbard discovered a young man in Washington who
impressed him as having remarkable executive ability. Watson met him,
and his opinion coincided with that of Hubbard. The upshot of the
matter was that the partners offered the post of General Manager at a
salary of thirty-five hundred dollars a year to this man, Theodore N.
Vail, and Vail accepted the offer. Vail himself knew little about the
telephone, but his cousin, Alfred Vail, had been the friend and
assistant of Morse when he was working on his first telegraph.
Hubbard had advertised Bell’s telephone, Sanders had financed it, and
now Vail pushed it on the market. He faced the powerful Western Union
and fought them. He sent copies of Bell’s original patent to each of
his agents, with the message, “We have the only original telephone
patents, we have organized and introduced the business, and we do not
propose to have it taken from us by any corporation.”
His plan was to create a national telephone system, and so he confined
each of his agents to one place, and reserved all rights to connect
one city with another. He made short-term contracts, and tried in
every way to keep control of the whole system in the hands of the
parent company. Then the Western Union came out with Edison’s new
telephone transmitter, which increased the value of the telephone
tenfold, and which in fact made it almost a new instrument. The Bell
Company was panic-stricken, for their customers demanded a telephone
as good as Edison’s.
Those were hard times for Vail and the partners back of him. The
telephone war had cut the price of service to a point where neither
company could show a profit. Bell, now married, returned from England
with word that he had been unable to establish the telephone business
there, and that he must have a thousand dollars at once to pay his
most pressing debts. He was ill, and he wrote from the Massachusetts
General Hospital, “Thousands of telephones are now in operation in all
parts of the country, yet I have not yet received one cent from my
invention. On the contrary, I am largely out of pocket by my
researches, as the mere value of the profession that I have sacrificed
during my three years’ work amounts to twelve thousand dollars.”
At this juncture a young Bostonian named Francis Blake wrote to Vail,
announcing that he had invented a transmitter that was the equal of
Edison’s, and offering to sell it for stock in the company. The
purchase was made, and the claim of the inventor proved true. The Bell
telephone was again as good as that of the Western Union Company. A
new company, called the National Bell Telephone Company, was
organized, with a capital of $850,000, and Colonel Forbes of Boston
became its first president.
There have been few patent struggles to compare with that which was
waged over the telephone. McCormick fought for years to uphold his
rights to the invention of the reaper, but he fought a host of
competitors, and the warfare was of the guerrilla order. The Bell
Company fought alone against the Western Union, and it was a struggle
of giants. The Western Union was certain that it could find patents
antedating Bell’s, and it went on that assumption, even after its own
expert had reported, “I am entirely unable to discover any apparatus
or method anticipating the invention of Bell as a whole, and I
conclude that his patent is valid.” It claimed that Gray was the
original inventor, and instructed its lawyers to bring suits against
the Bell Company for infringing on Gray’s patents.
The legal battle began in the autumn of 1878, and continued for a
year. Then George Gifford, the leading counsel for the Western Union,
told his clients that their claim was baseless, and advised that they
come to a settlement. The Western Union saw the wisdom of this course,
and went to the Bell Company with an offer of compromise. An agreement
was finally reached, to remain in force for seventeen years, and the
terms were that the Western Union should admit that Bell was the
original inventor, that his patents were valid, and should retire from
the telephone business. On the other side, the Bell Company agreed to
buy the Western Union telephone system, to pay them a royalty of
twenty per cent. on all their telephone rentals, and to keep out of
the telegraph business.
That ended the great war. It converted a powerful rival into an ally,
it gave the Bell Company fifty-six thousand new telephones in
fifty-five cities, and it made that company the national system of the
United States. In 1881 there was another reorganization; the American
Bell Telephone Company was created, with a capital of six million
dollars. The following year there was such a telephone boom that the
Bell Company’s system was doubled, and the gross earnings reached more
than a million dollars.
The four men who had taken hold of Bell’s invention in its infancy and
brought it to maturity were ready to surrender its care into the hands
of the able business men who headed the Bell Company. Sanders sold his
stock in the company for a little less than a million dollars, Watson,
when he resigned his interest, found himself sufficiently rich to
build a ship-building plant near Boston and employ four thousand
workmen to build battle-ships. Gardiner G. Hubbard retired from active
business life, and transferred his remarkable energy to the affairs of
the National Geographical Society. Bell had presented his stock in the
company to his wife on their wedding-day, and he now took up afresh
the work of his boyhood and youth, the teaching of deaf-mutes. But he
was no longer unheeded nor unrewarded. In 1880 the government of
France awarded him the Volta prize of fifty thousand francs and the
Cross of the Legion of Honor. With the Volta prize he founded the
Volta Laboratory in Washington for the use of students. In Washington
he has made his home, and there scientists of all lands call to pay
their respects to the patriarch of American inventors.
Shortly after the first appearance of the telephone at the Centennial
Exposition men were accustomed to laugh at the new invention, and call
it a freak, a scientific toy. Its mechanism was so incomprehensible to
most people that they refused to regard it seriously. A Boston
mechanic expressed the general ignorance when he stoutly maintained
that in his opinion there must be “a hole through the middle of the
wire.” And the telephone is still to most people a mystery, far more
so than the telegraph or the incandescent light or the other uses to
which electricity has been put. It is one thing to send a message by
the mechanical process of dots and dashes made by breaking and joining
a current. It is quite another to reproduce in one place the exact
inflection, tone, and quality of a voice that is speaking hundreds of
miles away, across rivers and mountains. There is real magic in that,
the wonder that might be found in a Genii’s spell in the Arabian
Nights. How can people be blamed for laughing at such pretensions, and
believing that even if such a thing were true it was more fit for an
exposition than for public use?
Yet this thing of magic has outdistanced every other mode of
communication. It is estimated that in the United States as many
messages are sent by telephone as the combined total of telegrams,
letters, and railroad passengers. The telephone wires are eight times
greater than the telegraph wires, and their earnings six times as
great. It is true that the telephone is vastly more used in America
than in other parts of the world, and yet it is figured that in the
world at large almost as many messages are now telephoned as are sent
by post.
And the mystery of the telephone grows no less the more one studies
it. You speak against a tiny disc of sheet-iron, and the disc
trembles. It has millions and millions of varieties of trembles, as
many as there are sounds in the universe. A piece of copper wire,
connected with an electric battery, stretches from the disc against
which you have spoken to another disc miles and miles away. The
tremble of your disc sends an electric thrill along the wire to that
other disc and makes it tremble exactly as yours did. And that
trembling sounds the very note you spoke, the very note in millions of
possible notes, and as accurately as if the sound wave had only
traveled three feet through clear air. That is what happens when you
telephone, but when you realize it the mystery gains rather than
decreases.