You wouldn’t believe me if I should tell you a tithe of the difficulties
we got into by flexible cords breaking inside the covering, when we
first began to use hand telephones!
Then they began to clamor for switchboards for the first centrals, and
individual call bells began to keep me awake nights. The latter were
very important then, for such luxuries as one station lines were scarce.
Six to twenty stations on a wire was the rule, and we were trying hard
to get a signal that would call one station without disturbing the whole
town. All of these and many other things had to be done at once, and, as
if this was not enough, it suddenly became necessary for me to devise a
battery transmitter. The Western Union people had discovered that the
telephone was not such a toy as they had thought, and as our $100,000
offer was no longer open for acceptance, they decided to get a share of
the business for themselves, and Edison evolved for them his
carbon-button transmitter. This was the hardest blow yet.
[Illustration: _Theodore N. Vail in 1878_]
We were still using the magneto transmitter, although Bell’s patent
clearly covered the battery transmitter. Our transmitter was doing much
to develop the American voice and lungs, making them powerful but not
melodious. This was, by the way, the telephone epoch when they used to
say that all the farmers waiting in a country grocery would rush out and
hold their horses when they saw any one preparing to use the telephone.
Edison’s transmitter talked louder than the magnetos we were using and
our agents began to clamor for them, and I had to work nights to get up
something just as good. Fortunately for my constitution, Frank Blake
came along with his transmitter. We bought it and I got a little sleep
for a few days. Then our little David of a corporation sued that big
Goliath, the Western Union Company, for infringing the Bell patents, and
I had to devote my leisure to testifying in that suit, and making
reproductions of the earliest apparatus to prove to the court that they
would really talk and were not a bluff, as our opponents were asserting.
Then I put in the rest of my leisure making trips among our agents this
side of the Mississippi to bring them up to date and see what the enemy
were up to. I kept a diary of those trips. It reads rather funnily
to-day, but I won’t go into that. It would detract from the seriousness
of this discourse.