WHAT CAME AFTERWARD
"Was that first telephone like ours?" inquired Ted later as, their
lunch finished, they sat idly looking out at the river.
"Not wholly. Time has improved the first crude instrument," Mr. Hazen
replied. "The initial principle of the telephone, however, has never
varied from Mr. Bell's primary idea. Before young Watson tumbled into
bed on that epoch-making night, he had finished the instrument Bell had
asked him to have ready, every part of it being made by the eager
assistant who probably only faintly realized the mammoth importance of
his task. Yet whether he realized it or not, he had caught a sufficient
degree of the inventor's excitement to urge him forward. Over one of
the receivers, as Mr. Bell directed, he mounted a small drumhead of
goldbeater's skin, joined the center of it to the free end of the
receiver spring, and arranged a mouthpiece to talk into. The plan was
to force the steel spring to answer the vibrations of the voice and at
the same time generate a current of electricity that should vary in
intensity just as the air varies in density during the utterance of
speech sounds. Not only did Watson make this instrument as specified,
but in his interest he went even farther, and as the rooms in the loft
seemed too near together, the tireless young man ran a special wire
from the attic down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor of
the shop and ended it near his workbench at the rear of the building,
thus constructing the first telephone line in history.
"Then the next day Mr. Bell came to test out his invention and, as you
can imagine, there was great excitement."
"I hope it worked," put in Laurie.
"It worked all right although at this early stage of the game it was
hardly to be expected that the instrument produced was perfect.
Nevertheless, the demonstration proved that the principle behind it was
sound and that was all Mr. Bell really wanted to make sure of. Watson,
as it chanced, got far more out of this initial performance than did Mr.
Bell himself for because of the inventor's practical work in phonics the
vibrations of his voice carried more successfully than did those of the
assistant. Yet the youthful Watson was not without his compensations.
Nature had blessed him with unusually acute hearing and as a result he
could catch Bell's tones perfectly as they came over the wire and could
almost distinguish his words; but shout as he would, poor Mr. Bell could
not hear _him_. This dilemma nevertheless discouraged neither of them
for Watson had plenty of energy and was quite willing to leap up the two
flights of stairs and repeat what he had heard; and this report greatly
reassured Mr. Bell, who outlined a list of other improvements for
another telephone that should be ready on the following day."
"I suppose they kept remodelling the telephones all the time after
that, didn't they?" inquired Ted.
"You may be sure they did," was Mr. Hazen's response. "The harmonic
telegraph was entirely sidetracked and the interest of both men turned
into this newer channel. Mr. Bell, in the meantime, was giving less and
less energy to his teaching and more and more to his inventing. Before
many days the two could talk back and forth and hear one another's
voices without difficulty, although ten full months of hard work was
necessary before they were able to understand what was said. It was not
until after this long stretch of patient toil that Watson unmistakably
heard Mr. Bell say one day, '_Mr. Watson, please come here, I want
you._' The message was a very ordinary, untheatrical one for a moment
so significant but neither of the enthusiasts heeded that. The
thrilling fact was that the words had come clear-cut over the wire."
"Gee!" broke in Laurie.
"It certainly must have been a dramatic moment," Mr. Hazen agreed. "Mr.
Bell, now convinced beyond all doubt of the value of his idea, hired
two rooms at a cheap boarding-house situated at Number 5 Exeter Place,
Boston. In one of these he slept and in the other he equipped a
laboratory. Watson connected these rooms by a wire and afterward all
Mr. Bell's experimenting was done here instead of at the Williams's
shop. It was at the Exeter Place rooms that this first wonderful
message came to Watson's ears. From this period on the telephone took
rapid strides forward. By the summer of 1876, it had been improved
until a simple sentence was understandable if carefully repeated three
or four times."
"Repeated three or four times!" gasped Laurie in dismay.
The tutor smiled at the boy's incredulousness.
"You forget we are not dealing with a finished product," said he
gently. "I am a little afraid you would have been less patient with the
imperfections of an infant invention than were Bell and Watson."
"I know I should," was the honest retort.
"The telephone was a very delicate instrument to perfect," explained
Mr. Hazen. "Always remember that. An inventor must not only be a man
who has unshaken faith in his idea but he must also have the courage to
cling stubbornly to his belief through every sort of mechanical
vicissitude. This Mr. Bell did. June of 1876 was the year of the great
Centennial at Philadelphia, the year that marked the first century of
our country's progress. As the exhibition was to be one symbolic of our
national development in every line, Mr. Bell decided to show his
telephone there; to this end he set Watson, who was still at the
Williams's shop, to making exhibition telephones of the two varieties
they had thus far worked out."
"I'll bet Watson was almighty proud of his job," Ted interrupted.
"I fancy he was and certainly he had a right to be," answered Mr.
Hazen. "I have always been glad, too, that it fell to his lot to have
this honor; for he had worked long and faithfully, and if there were
glory to be had, he should share it. To his unflagging zeal and
intelligence Mr. Bell owed a great deal. Few men could so
whole-heartedly have effaced their own personality and thrown
themselves with such zest into the success of another as did Thomas
Watson."
The tutor paused.
"Up to this time," he presently went on, "the telephones used by Bell
and Watson in their experiments had been very crude affairs; but those
designed for the Centennial were glorified objects. Watson says that
you could see your face in them. The Williams's shop outdid itself and
more splendid instruments never went forth from its doors. You can
therefore imagine Watson's chagrin when, after highly commending Mr.
Bell's invention, Sir William Thompson added, '_This, perhaps, greatest
marvel hitherto achieved by electric telegraph has been obtained by
appliances of quite a homespun and rudimentary character._'"
Both Ted and Laurie joined in the laughter of the tutor.
"And now the telephone was actually launched?" Ted asked.
"Well, it was not really in clear waters," Mr. Hazen replied, with a
dubious shrug of his shoulders, "but at least there was no further
question as to which of his schemes Mr. Bell should perfect. Both Mr.
Hubbard and Mr. Saunders, who were assisting him financially, agreed
that for the present it must be the telephone; and recognizing the
value of Watson's services, they offered him an interest in Mr. Bell's
patents if he would give up his work at Williams's shop and put in all
his time on this device. Nevertheless they did not entirely abandon the
harmonic telegraph for Bell's success with the other invention had only
served to strengthen their confidence in his ability and genius. It was
also decided that Mr. Bell should move from Salem to Boston, take an
additional room at the Exeter Place house (which would give him the
entire floor where his laboratory was), and unhampered by further
teaching plunge into the inventive career for which heaven had so
richly endowed him and which he loved with all his heart. You can
picture to yourselves the joy these decisions gave him and the
eagerness with which he and Watson took up their labors together.
"They made telephones of every imaginable size in their attempts to
find out whether there was anything that would work more satisfactorily
than the type they now had. But in spite of their many experiments they
came back to the kind of instrument with which they had started,
discovering nothing that was superior to their original plan. Except
that they compelled the transmitter to do double duty and act also as a
receiver, the telephone that emerged from these many tests was
practically similar in principle to the one of to-day."
"Had they made any long-distance trials up to this time?" questioned
Laurie.
"No," Mr. Hazen admitted. "They had lacked opportunity to make such
tests since no great span of wires was accessible to them. But on
October 9, 1876, the Walworth Manufacturing Company gave them
permission to try out their device on the Company's private telegraph
line that ran from Boston to Cambridge. The distance to be sure was
only two miles but it might as well have been two thousand so far as
the excitement of the two workers went. Their baby had never been out
of doors. Now at last it was to take the air! Fancy how thrilling the
prospect was! As the wire over which they were to make the experiment
was in use during the day, they were forced to wait until the plant was
closed for the night. Then Watson, with his tools and his telephone
under his arm, went to the Cambridge office where he impatiently
listened for Mr. Bell's signal to come over the Morse sounder. When he
had heard this and thereby made certain that Bell was at the other end
of the line, he cut out the sounder, connected the telephone he had
brought with him, and put his ear to the transmitter."
The hut was so still one could almost hear the breathing of the lads,
who were listening intently.
"Go on!" Laurie said quickly. "Tell us what happened."
"_Nothing happened!_" answered the tutor. "Watson listened but there
was not a sound."
"Great Scott!"
"The poor assistant was aghast," went on Mr. Hazen. "He was at a
complete loss to understand what was the matter. Could it be that the
contrivance which worked so promisingly in the Boston rooms would not
work under these other conditions? Perhaps an electric current was too
delicate a thing to carry sound very far. Or was it that the force of
the vibration filtered off at each insulator along the line until it
became too feeble to be heard? All these possibilities flashed into
Watson's mind while at his post two miles away from Mr. Bell he struggled
to readjust the instrument. Then suddenly an inspiration came to his
alert brain. Might there not be another Morse sounder somewhere about?
If there were, that would account for the whole difficulty. Springing
up, he began to search the room and after following the wires, sure
enough, he traced them to a relay with a high resistance coil in the
circuit. Feverishly he cut this out and rushed back to his telephone.
Plainly over the wire came Bell's voice, '_Ahoy! Ahoy!_' For a few
seconds both of them were too delighted to say much of anything else.
Then they sobered down and began this first long-distance conversation.
Now one of the objections Mr. Bell had constantly been forced to meet
from the skeptical public was that while the telegraph delivered
messages that were of unchallenged accuracy telephone conversations
were liable to errors of misunderstanding. One could not therefore rely
so completely on the trustworthiness of the latter as on that of the
former. To refute this charge Mr. Bell had insisted that both he and
Watson carefully write out whatever they heard that the two records
might afterward be compared and verified. '_That is_,' Mr. Bell had
added with the flicker of a smile, '_if we succeed in talking at all_!'
Well, they did succeed, as you have heard. At first they held only a
stilted dialogue and conscientiously jotted it down; but afterward
their exuberance got the better of them and in sheer joy they chattered
away like magpies until long past midnight. Then, loath to destroy the
connection, Watson detached his telephone, replaced the Company's
wires, and set out for Boston. In the meantime Mr. Bell, who had
previously made an arrangement with the _Boston Advertiser_ to publish
on the following morning an account of the experiment, together with
the recorded conversations, had gone to the newspaper office to carry
his material to the press. Hence he was not at the Exeter Place rooms
when the jubilant Watson arrived. But the early morning hour did not
daunt the young electrician; and when, after some delay, Mr. Bell came
in, the two men rushed toward one another and regardless of everything
else executed what Mr. Watson has since characterized as a _war dance_.
Certainly they were quite justified in their rejoicings and perhaps if
their landlady had understood the cause of their exultations she might
have joined in the dance herself. Unluckily she had only a scant
sympathy with inventive genius and since the victory celebration not
only aroused her, but also wakened most of her boarders from their
slumbers, her ire was great and the next morning she informed the two
men that if they could not be more quiet at night they would have to
leave her house."
An appreciative chuckle came from the listeners.
"If she had known what she was sheltering, I suppose she would have
been proud as a peacock and promptly told all her neighbors," grinned
Ted.
"Undoubtedly! But she did not know, poor soul!" returned Mr. Hazen.
"After this Mr. Bell and Mr. Watson must have shot ahead by leaps and
bounds," commented Laurie.
"There is no denying that that two-mile test did give them both courage
and assurance," responded the tutor. "They got chances to try out the
invention on longer telegraph wires; and in spite of the fact that no
such thing as hard-drawn copper wire was in existence they managed to
get results even over rusty wires with their unsoldered joinings.
Through such experiments an increasingly wider circle of outside
persons heard of the telephone and the marvel began to attract greater
attention. Mr. Bell's modest little laboratory became the mecca of
scientists and visitors of every imaginable type. Moses G. Farmer, well
known in the electrical world, came to view the wonder and confessed to
Mr. Bell that more than once he had lingered on the threshold of the
same mighty discovery but had never been able to step across it into
success. It amused both Mr. Bell and Mr. Watson to see how embarrassed
persons were when allowed to talk over the wire. Standing up and
speaking into a box has long since become too much a matter of course
with us to appear ridiculous; but those experiencing the novelty for
the first time were so overwhelmed by self-consciousness that they
could think of nothing to say. One day when Mr. Watson called from his
end of the line, 'How do you do?' a dignified lawyer who was trying the
instrument answered with a foolish giggle, 'Rig-a-jig-jig and away we
go!' The psychological reaction was too much for many a well-poised
individual and I do not wonder it was, do you?"
"It must have been almost as good as a vaudeville show to watch the
people," commented Ted.
"Better! Lots better!" echoed Laurie.
"In April, 1877, the first out-of-door telephone line running on its
own private wires was installed in the shop of Charles Williams at
Number 109 Court Street and carried from there out to his house at
Somerville. Quite a little ceremony marked the event. Both Mr. Bell and
Mr. Watson attended the christening and the papers chronicled the
circumstance in bold headlines the following day. Immediately patrons
who wanted telephones began to pop up right and left like so many
mushrooms. But alas, where was the money to come from that should
enable Mr. Bell and his associates to branch out and grasp the
opportunities that now beckoned them? The inventor's own resources were
at a low ebb; Watson, like many another young man, had more brains than
fortune; and neither Mr. Hubbard nor Mr. Saunders felt they could
provide the necessary capital. Already the Western Union had refused
Mr. Hubbard's offer to sell all Mr. Bell's patents for one hundred
thousand dollars, the Company feeling that the price asked was much too
high. Two years later, however, they would willingly have paid
twenty-five million dollars for the privilege they had so summarily
scorned. What was to be done? Money must be secured for without it all
further progress was at a standstill. Was success to be sacrificed now
that the goal was well within sight? And must the telephone be shut
away from the public and never take its place of service in the great
world? Why, if a thing was not to be used it might almost as well never
have been invented! The spirits of the telephone pioneers sank lower
and lower. The only way to raise money seemed to be to sell the
telephone instruments outright and this Mr. Bell, who desired simply to
lease them, was unwilling to do. Then an avenue of escape from this
dilemma presented itself to him."
"What was it?" asked Laurie.
"He would give lectures, accompanying them with practical
demonstrations of the telephone. This would bring in money and banish
for a time, at least, the possibility of having to sell instead of rent
telephones. The plan succeeded admirably. The first lecture was given
at Salem where, because of Mr. Bell's previous residence and many
friends, a large audience packed the hall. Then Boston desired to know
more of the invention and an appeal for a lecture signed by Longfellow,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other distinguished citizens was forwarded
to Mr. Bell. The Boston lectures were followed by others in New York,
Providence, and the principal cities throughout New England."
"It seems a shame Mr. Bell should have had to take his time to do that,
doesn't it?" mused Ted. "How did they manage the lectures?"
"The lectures had a checkered existence," smiled Mr. Hazen. "Many very
amusing incidents centered about them. Were I to talk until doomsday I
could not begin to tell you the multitudinous adventures Mr. Bell and
Mr. Watson had during their platform career; for although Mr. Watson
was never really before the footlights as Mr. Bell was, he was an
indispensable part of the show,--the power behind the scenes, the man
at the other end of the wire, who furnished the lecture hall with such
stunts as would not only convince an audience but also entertain them.
It was a dull, thankless position, perhaps, to be so far removed from
the excitement and glamor, to be always playing or singing into a
little wooden box and never catching a glimpse of the fun that was
going on at the other end of the line; but since Mr. Watson was a
rather shy person it is possible he was quite as well pleased. After
all, it was Mr. Bell whom everybody wanted to see and of course Mr.
Watson understood this. Therefore he was quite content to act his
modest role and not only gather together at his end of the wire cornet
soloists, electric organs, brass bands, or whatever startling novelties
the occasion demanded, but talk or sing himself. The shyest of men can
sometimes out-Herod Herod if not obliged to face their listeners in
person. As Watson had spoken so much over the telephone, he was
thoroughly accustomed to it and played the parts assigned him far
better than more gifted but less practically trained soloists did. It
always amused him intensely after he had bellowed _Pull for the Shore_,
_Hold the Fort_ or _Yankee Doodle_ into the transmitter to hear the
applause that followed his efforts. Probably singing before a large
company was about the last thing Tom Watson expected his electrical
career would lead him into. Had he been told that such a fate awaited
him, he would doubtless have jeered at the prophecy. But here he was,
singing away with all his lung power, before a great hall full of
people and not minding it in the least; nay, I rather think he may have
enjoyed it. Once, desiring to give a finer touch than usual to the
entertainment, Mr. Bell hired a professional singer; but this soloist
had never used a telephone and although he possessed the art of singing
he was not able to get it across the wire. No one in the lecture hall
could hear him. Mr. Bell promptly summoned Watson (who was doubtless
congratulating himself on being off duty) to render _Hold the Fort_
in his customary lusty fashion. After this Mr. Watson became the star
soloist and no more singers were engaged."
A ripple of amusement passed over the faces of the lads listening.
"Ironically enough, as Mr. Watson's work kept him always in the
background furnishing the features of these entertainments, he never
himself heard Mr. Bell lecture. He says, however, that the great
inventor was a very polished, magnetic speaker who never failed to
secure and hold the attention of his hearers. Of course, every venture
has its trials and these lecture tours were no exception to the general
rule. Once, for example, the Northern Lights were responsible for
demoralizing the current and spoiling a telephone demonstration at
Lawrence; and although both Watson and a cornetist strained their lungs
to bursting, neither of them could be heard at the hall. Then the
sparks began to play over the wires and the show had to be called off.
Nevertheless such disasters occurred seldom, and for the most part the
performances went smoothly, the people were delighted, and Mr. Bell
increased not only his fame but his fortune."
Mr. Hazen stopped a moment.
"You must not for an instant suppose," he resumed presently, "that the
telephone was a perfected product. Transmitters of sufficient delicacy
to do away with shouting and screaming had not yet made their
appearance and in consequence when one telephoned all the world knew
it; it was not until the Blake transmitter came into use that a
telephone conversation could be to any extent confidential. In its
present state, the longer the range the more lung power was demanded;
and probably had not this been the condition, people would have shouted
anyway, simply from instinct. Even with our own delicately adjusted
instruments we are prone to forget and commit this folly. But in the
early days one was forced to uplift his voice at the telephone and if
he had no voice to uplift woe betide his telephoning. And apropos of
this matter, I recall reading that once, when Mr. Bell was to lecture
in New York, he thought what a drawing card it would be if he could
have his music and other features of entertainment come from Boston.
Therefore he arranged to use the wires of the Atlantic and Pacific
Telegraph Company and to this end he and Watson planned a dress
rehearsal at midnight in order to try out the inspiration. Now it
chanced that the same inflexible landlady ruled at Number 5 Exeter
Place, and remembering his former experience, Mr. Watson felt something
must be done to stifle the shouting he foresaw he would be compelled to
do at that nocturnal hour. So he gathered together all the blankets and
rolled them into a sort of cone and to the small end of this he tied
his telephone. Then he crept into this stuffy, breathless shelter, the
ancestor of our sound-proof telephone booth, and for nearly three hours
shouted to Mr. Bell in New York--or tried to. But the experiment was
not a success. He could be heard, it is true, but not distinctly enough
to risk such an unsatisfactory demonstration before an uninitiated
audience. Hence the scheme was abandoned and Mr. Watson scrambled his
things together and betook himself to a point nearer the center of
action."
"It must all have been great fun, mustn't it?" said Laurie
thoughtfully.
"Great fun, no doubt, but very hard work," was the tutor's answer.
"Many a long, discouraging hour was yet to follow before the telephone
became a factor in the everyday world. Yet each step of the climb to
success had its sunlight as well as its shadow, its humor as well as
its pathos; and it was fortunate both men appreciated this fact for it
floated them over many a rough sea. Man can spare almost any other
attribute better than his sense of humor. Without this touchstone he is
ill equipped to battle with life," concluded Mr. Hazen whimsically.