Besides the regular work at Williams’, there was a constant stream of
wild-eyed inventors, with big ideas in their heads and little money in
their pockets, coming to the shop to have their ideas tried out in brass
and iron. Most of them had an “angel” whom they had hypnotized into
paying the bills. My enthusiasm, and perhaps my sympathetic nature, made
me a favorite workman with those men of visions, and in 1873-74 my work
had become largely making experimental apparatus for such men. Few of
their ideas ever amounted to anything, but I liked to do the work, as it
kept me roaming in fresh fields and pastures new all the time. Had it
not been, however, for my youthful enthusiasm—always one of my chief
assets—I fear this experience would have made me so skeptical and
cynical as to the value of electrical inventions that my future
prospects might have been injured.
[Illustration: _Thomas Sanders in 1878, at the Time He Was the Sole
Financial Backer of the Telephone_]
I remember one limber-tongued patriarch who had induced some men to
subscribe $1,000 to build what he claimed to be an entirely new electric
engine. I had made much of it for him. There was nothing new in the
engine, but he intended to generate his electric current in a series of
iron tanks the size of trunks, to be filled with nitric acid with the
usual zinc plates suspended therein. When the engine was finished and
the acid poured into the tanks for the first time, no one waited to see
the engine run, for inventor, “angel,” and workmen all tried to see who
could get out of the shop quickest. I won the race as I had the best
start.
I suppose there is just such a crowd of crude minds still besieging the
work-shops, men who seem incapable of finding out what has been already
done, and so keep on, year after year, threshing old straw.
The “Harmonic Telegraph”
All the men I worked for at that time were not of that type. There were
a few very different. Among them, dear old Moses G. Farmer, perhaps the
leading practical electrician of that day. He was full of good ideas,
which he was constantly bringing to Williams to have worked out. I did
much of his work and learned from him more about electricity than ever
before or since. He was electrician at that time for the United States
Torpedo Station at Newport, Rhode Island, and in the early winter of
1874 I was making for him some experimental torpedo exploding apparatus.
That apparatus will always be connected in my mind with the telephone,
for one day when I was hard at work on it, a tall, slender,
quick-motioned man with pale face, black side whiskers, and drooping
mustache, big nose and high sloping forehead crowned with bushy, jet
black hair, came rushing out of the office and over to my work bench. It
was Alexander Graham Bell, whom I saw then for the first time. He was
bringing to me a piece of mechanism which I had made for him under
instructions from the office. It had not been made as he had directed
and he had broken down the rudimentary discipline of the shop in coming
directly to me to get it altered. It was a receiver and a transmitter of
his “Harmonic Telegraph,” an invention of his with which he was then
endeavoring to win fame and fortune. It was a simple affair by means of
which, utilizing the law of sympathetic vibration, he expected to send
six or eight Morse messages on a single wire at the same time, without
interference.
[Illustration: _Home of Mrs. Mary Ann (Brown) Sanders, Salem, Mass.,
where Professor Bell carried on experiments for three years which
led to the discovery of the principle of the telephone_]
Although most of you are probably familiar with the device, I must, to
make my story clear, give you a brief description of the instruments,
for though Bell never succeeded in perfecting his telegraph, his
experimenting on it led to a discovery of the highest importance.
[Illustration: _The Birthplace of the Telephone, 109 Court Street,
Boston.—On the top floor of this building, in 1875, Prof. Bell
carried on his experiments and first succeeded in transmitting
speech by electricity_]
The essential parts of both transmitter and receiver were an
electro-magnet and a flattened piece of steel clock spring. The spring
was clamped by one end to one pole of the magnet, and had its other end
free to vibrate over the other pole. The transmitter had, besides this,
make-and-break points like an ordinary vibrating bell which, when the
current was on, kept the spring vibrating in a sort of nasal whine, of a
pitch corresponding to the pitch of the spring. When the signalling key
was closed, an electrical copy of that whine passed through the wire and
the distant receiver. There were, say, six transmitters with their
springs tuned to six different pitches and six receivers with their
springs tuned to correspond. Now, theoretically, when a transmitter sent
its electrical whine into the line wire, its own faithful receiver
spring at the distant station would wriggle sympathetically but all the
others on the same line would remain coldly quiescent. Even when all the
transmitters were whining at once through their entire gamut, making a
row as if all the miseries this world of trouble ever produced were
concentrated there, each receiver spring along the line would select its
own from that sea of troubles and ignore all the others. Just see what a
simple, sure-to-work invention this was; for just break up those various
whines into the dots and dashes of Morse messages and one wire would do
the work of six, and the “Duplex” telegraph that had just been invented
would be beaten to a frazzle. Bell’s reward would be immediate and rich,
for the “Duplex” had been bought by the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph
Company, giving them a great advantage over their only competitor, the
Western Union Company, and the latter would, of course, buy Bell’s
invention and his financial problems would be solved.
[Illustration: _The Garret, 109 Court St., Boston, where Bell
Verified the Principle of Electrical Speech Transmission_]
All this was, as I have said, theoretical, and it was mighty lucky for
Graham Bell that it was, for had his harmonic telegraph been a well
behaved apparatus that always did what its parent wanted it to do, the
speaking telephone might never have emerged from a certain marvelous
conception, that had even then been surging back of Bell’s high forehead
for two or three years. What that conception was, I soon learned, for he
couldn’t help speaking about it, although his friends tried to hush it
up. They didn’t like to have him get the reputation of being visionary,
or—something worse.
To go on with my story; after Mr. Farmer’s peace-making machines were
finished, I made half a dozen pairs of the harmonic instruments for
Bell. He was surprised, when he tried them, to find that they didn’t
work as well as he expected. The cynical Watson wasn’t at all surprised
for he had never seen anything electrical yet that worked at first the
way the inventor thought it would. Bell wasn’t discouraged in the least
and a long course of experiments followed which gave me a steady job
that winter and brought me into close contact with a wonderful
personality that did more to mould my life rightly than anything else
that ever came into it.
I became mightily tired of those “whiners” that winter. I called them by
that name, perhaps, as an inadequate expression of my disgust with their
persistent perversity, the struggle with which soon began to take all
the joy out of my young life, not being endowed with the power of
Macbeth’s weird sisters to
“Look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not.”
Let me say here, that I have always had a feeling of respect for Elisha
Gray, who, a few years later, made that harmonic telegraph work, and
vibrate well-behaved messages, that would go where they were sent
without fooling with every receiver on the line.
Most of Bell’s early experimenting on the harmonic telegraph was done in
Salem, at the home of Mrs. George Sanders, where he resided for several
years, having charge of the instruction of her deaf nephew. The present
Y. M. C. A. building is on the site of that house. I would occasionally
work with Bell there, but most of his experimenting in which I took part
was done in Boston.