In the following August, Professor Bell married and went to England,
taking with him a complete set of up-to-date telephones, with which he
intended to start the trouble in that country. Fred Gower became so
fascinated with lecturing on the telephone that he gave up an exclusive
right Mr. Hubbard had granted him for renting telephones all over New
England, for the exclusive privilege of using the telephone for lecture
purposes all over the United States. But it wasn’t remunerative after
Bell and I gave it up. The discriminating public preferred Mr. Bell as
speaker—and I always felt that the singing never reached the early
heights.
[Illustration: _Magneto Wall Set (Williams’ Coffin)_]
Gower went to England later. There he made some small modification of
Bell’s telephone, called it the “Gower-Bell” telephone, and made a
fortune out of his hyphenated atrocity. Later he married Lillian
Nordica, although she soon separated from him. He became interested in
ballooning. The last scene in his life before the curtain dropped showed
a balloon over the waters of the English Channel. A fishing boat hails
him, “Where are you bound?” Gower’s voice replies, “To London.” Then the
balloon and its pilot drifted into the mist forever.
Developing a Calling Apparatus; the Watson “Buzzer”
[Illustration: _Francis Blake_]
As I said, I went back to work, and my next two years was a continuous
performance. It began to dawn on us that people engaged in getting their
living in the ordinary walks of life couldn’t be expected to keep the
telephone at their ear all the time waiting for a call, especially as it
weighed about ten pounds then and was as big as a small packing case, so
it devolved on me to get up some sort of a call signal. Williams on his
line used to call by thumping the diaphragm through the mouthpiece with
the butt of a lead pencil. If there was someone close to the telephone
at the other end, and it was very still, it did pretty well, but it
seriously damaged the vitals of the machine and therefore I decided it
wasn’t really practical for the general public; besides, we might have
to supply a pencil with every telephone and that would be expensive.
Then I rigged a little hammer inside the box with a button on the
outside. When the button was thumped the hammer would hit the side of
the diaphragm where it could not be damaged, the usual electrical
transformation took place, and a much more modest but still unmistakable
thump would issue from the telephone at the other end.
That was the first calling apparatus ever devised for use with the
telephone, not counting Williams’ lead pencil, and several with that
attachment were put into practical use. But the exacting public wanted
something better, and I devised the Watson “Buzzer”—the only practical
use we ever made of the harmonic telegraph relics. Many of these were
sent out. It was a vast improvement on the Watson “Thumper,” but still
it didn’t take the popular fancy. It made a sound quite like the
horseradish grater automobile signal we are so familiar with nowadays,
and aroused just the same feeling of resentment which that does. It
brought me only a fleeting fame for I soon superseded it by a
magneto-electric call bell that solved the problem, and was destined to
make a long-suffering public turn cranks for the next fifteen years or
so, as it never had before, or ever will hereafter.
[Illustration: _The Blake Transmitter_]
Perhaps I didn’t have any trouble with the plaguy thing! The generator
part of it was only an adaptation of a magneto shocking machine I found
in Davis’ Manual of Magnetism and worked well enough, but I was guilty
of the jingling part of it. At any rate, I felt guilty when letters
began to come from our agents reciting their woes with the thing, which
they said had a trick of sticking and failing on the most important
occasions to tinkle in response to the frantic crankings of the man who
wanted you. But I soon got it so it behaved itself and it has been good
ever since, for Chief Engineer Carty told me the other day that nothing
better has ever been invented, that they have been manufactured by the
millions all over the world, and that identical jingler to-day does
practically all the world’s telephone calling.
“Williams’ Coffins”
For some reason, my usual good luck I presume, the magneto call bells
didn’t get my name attached to them. I never regretted this, for the
agents, who bought them from Williams, impressed by the long and narrow
box in which the mechanism was placed, promptly christened them
“Williams’ Coffins.” I always thought that a narrow escape for me!
The first few hundreds of these call bells were a continuous shock to me
for other reasons than their failure to respond. I used on them a
switch, that had to be thrown one way by hand, when the telephone was
being used, and then thrown back by hand to put the bell in circuit
again. But the average man or woman wouldn’t do this more than half the
time, and I was obliged to try a series of devices, which culminated in
that remarkable achievement of the human brain—the automatic switch—that
only demanded of the public that it should hang up the telephone after
it got through talking. This the public learned to do quite well after a
few years of practice.
[Illustration: _The First Commercial Telephone Switchboard, Used in
New Haven, Conn., in 1878 with Eight Lines and Twenty-one
Subscribers_]