Mr. Bell—What do you think is the matter with the instruments?
Mr. Watson—There is nothing the matter with them.
“Talking” from Boston to Cambridge
Progress was rapid, and on October 9, 1876, we were ready to take the
baby outdoors for the first time. We got permission from the Walworth
Manufacturing Company to use their private wire running from Boston to
Cambridge, about two miles long. I went to Cambridge that evening with
one of our best telephones, and waited until Bell signalled from the
Boston office on the Morse sounder. Then I cut out the sounder and
connected in the telephone and listened. Not a murmur came through!
Could it be that, although the thing worked all right in the house, it
wouldn’t work under practical line conditions? I knew that we were using
the most complex and delicate electric current that had ever been
employed for a practical purpose and that it was extremely “intense,”
for Bell had talked through a circuit composed of 20 or 30 human beings
joined hand to hand. Could it be, I thought, that these high tension
vibrations leaking off at each insulator along the line, had vanished
completely before they reached the Charles River? That fear passed
through my mind as I worked over the instrument, adjusting it and
tightening the wires in the binding posts, without improving matters in
the least. Then the thought struck me that perhaps there was another
Morse sounder in some other room. I traced the wires from the place they
entered the building and sure enough I found a relay with a high
resistance coil in the circuit. I cut it out with a piece of wire across
the binding posts and rushed back to my telephone and listened. That was
the trouble. Plainly as one could wish came Bell’s “ahoy,” “ahoy!”[1] I
ahoyed back, and the first long distance telephone conversation began.
Skeptics had been objecting that the telephone could never compete with
the telegraph as its messages would not be accurate. For this reason
Bell had arranged that we should make a record of all we said and heard
that night, if we succeeded in talking at all. We carried out this plan
and the entire conversation was published in parallel columns in the
next morning’s _Advertiser_, as the latest startling scientific
achievement. Infatuated with the joy of talking over an actual telegraph
wire, we kept up our conversation until long after midnight. It was a
very happy boy that traveled back to Boston in the small hours with the
telephone under his arm done up in a newspaper. Bell had taken his
record to the newspaper office and was not at the laboratory when I
arrived there, but when he came in there ensued a jubilation and war
dance that elicited next morning from our landlady, who wasn’t at all
scientific in her tastes, the remark that we’d have to vacate if we
didn’t make less noise nights.
Tests on still longer telegraph lines soon followed—the success of each
experiment being in rather exact accordance with the condition of the
poor, rusty-joined wires we had to use. Talk about imps that baffle
inventors! There was one of an especially vicious and malignant type in
every unsoldered joint of the old wires. The genial Tom Doolittle hadn’t
even thought of his hard-drawn copper wire then, with which he later
eased the lot of the struggling telephone men.