Produced by Charles Keller
THE HISTORY OF THE TELEPHONE
By Herbert N. Casson
PREFACE
Thirty-five short years, and presto! the newborn art of telephony is
fullgrown. Three million telephones are now scattered abroad in foreign
countries, and seven millions are massed here, in the land of its birth.
So entirely has the telephone outgrown the ridicule with which, as many
people can well remember, it was first received, that it is now in
most places taken for granted, as though it were a part of the natural
phenomena of this planet. It has so marvellously extended the
facilities of conversation--that "art in which a man has all mankind for
competitors"--that it is now an indispensable help to whoever would
live the convenient life. The disadvantage of being deaf and dumb to
all absent persons, which was universal in pre-telephonic days, has now
happily been overcome; and I hope that this story of how and by whom it
was done will be a welcome addition to American libraries.
It is such a story as the telephone itself might tell, if it could speak
with a voice of its own. It is not technical. It is not statistical. It
is not exhaustive. It is so brief, in fact, that a second volume could
readily be made by describing the careers of telephone leaders whose
names I find have been omitted unintentionally from this book--such
indispensable men, for instance, as William R. Driver, who has signed
more telephone cheques and larger ones than any other man; Geo. S.
Hibbard, Henry W. Pope, and W. D. Sargent, three veterans who know
telephony in all its phases; George Y. Wallace, the last survivor of the
Rocky Mountain pioneers; Jasper N. Keller, of Texas and New England;
W. T. Gentry, the central figure of the Southeast, and the following
presidents of telephone companies: Bernard E. Sunny, of Chicago; E. B.
Field, of Denver; D. Leet Wilson, of Pittsburg; L. G. Richardson, of
Indianapolis; Caspar E. Yost, of Omaha; James E. Caldwell, of Nashville;
Thomas Sherwin, of Boston; Henry T. Scott, of San Francisco; H. J.
Pettengill, of Dallas; Alonzo Burt, of Milwaukee; John Kilgour, of
Cincinnati; and Chas. S. Gleed, of Kansas City.
I am deeply indebted to most of these men for the information which
is herewith presented; and also to such pioneers, now dead, as O. E.
Madden, the first General Agent; Frank L. Pope, the noted electrical
expert; C. H. Haskins, of Milwaukee; George F. Ladd, of San Francisco;
and Geo. F. Durant, of St. Louis.
H. N. C. PINE HILL, N. Y., June 1, 1910.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I THE BIRTH OF THE TELEPHONE
II THE BUILDING OF THE BUSINESS
III THE HOLDING OF THE BUSINESS
IV THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ART
V THE EXPANSION OF THE BUSINESS
VI NOTABLE USERS OF THE TELEPHONE
VII THE TELEPHONE AND NATIONAL EFFICIENCY
VIII THE TELEPHONE IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES
IX THE FUTURE OF THE TELEPHONE
THE HISTORY OF THE TELEPHONE
CHAPTER I. THE BIRTH OF THE TELEPHONE
In that somewhat distant year 1875, when the telegraph and the Atlantic
cable were the most wonderful things in the world, a tall young
professor of elocution was desperately busy in a noisy machine-shop
that stood in one of the narrow streets of Boston, not far from Scollay
Square. It was a very hot afternoon in June, but the young professor had
forgotten the heat and the grime of the workshop. He was wholly absorbed
in the making of a nondescript machine, a sort of crude harmonica with
a clock-spring reed, a magnet, and a wire. It was a most absurd toy in
appearance. It was unlike any other thing that had ever been made in any
country. The young professor had been toiling over it for three years
and it had constantly baffled him, until, on this hot afternoon in June,
1875, he heard an almost inaudible sound--a faint TWANG--come from the
machine itself.
For an instant he was stunned. He had been expecting just such a sound
for several months, but it came so suddenly as to give him the sensation
of surprise. His eyes blazed with delight, and he sprang in a passion of
eagerness to an adjoining room in which stood a young mechanic who was
assisting him.
"Snap that reed again, Watson," cried the apparently irrational young
professor. There was one of the odd-looking machines in each room, so
it appears, and the two were connected by an electric wire. Watson had
snapped the reed on one of the machines and the professor had heard from
the other machine exactly the same sound. It was no more than the gentle
TWANG of a clock-spring; but it was the first time in the history of the
world that a complete sound had been carried along a wire, reproduced
perfectly at the other end, and heard by an expert in acoustics.
That twang of the clock-spring was the first tiny cry of the newborn
telephone, uttered in the clanging din of a machine-shop and happily
heard by a man whose ear had been trained to recognize the strange voice
of the little newcomer. There, amidst flying belts and jarring wheels,
the baby telephone was born, as feeble and helpless as any other baby,
and "with no language but a cry."
The professor-inventor, who had thus rescued the tiny foundling of
science, was a young Scottish American. His name, now known as widely
as the telephone itself, was Alexander Graham Bell. He was a teacher
of acoustics and a student of electricity, possibly the only man in his
generation who was able to focus a knowledge of both subjects upon the
problem of the telephone. To other men that exceedingly faint sound
would have been as inaudible as silence itself; but to Bell it was a
thunder-clap. It was a dream come true. It was an impossible thing which
had in a flash become so easy that he could scarcely believe it. Here,
without the use of a battery, with no more electric current than that
made by a couple of magnets, all the waves of a sound had been carried
along a wire and changed back to sound at the farther end. It was
absurd. It was incredible. It was something which neither wire nor
electricity had been known to do before. But it was true.
No discovery has ever been less accidental. It was the last link of
a long chain of discoveries. It was the result of a persistent and
deliberate search. Already, for half a year or longer, Bell had known
the correct theory of the telephone; but he had not realized that the
feeble undulatory current generated by a magnet was strong enough
for the transmission of speech. He had been taught to undervalue the
incredible efficiency of electricity.
Not only was Bell himself a teacher of the laws of speech, so highly
skilled that he was an instructor in Boston University. His father,
also, his two brothers, his uncle, and his grandfather had taught the
laws of speech in the universities of Edinburgh, Dublin, and London.
For three generations the Bells had been professors of the science
of talking. They had even helped to create that science by several
inven-tions. The first of them, Alexander Bell, had invented a system
for the correction of stammering and similar defects of speech. The
second, Alexander Melville Bell, was the dean of British elocutionists,
a man of creative brain and a most impressive facility of rhetoric. He
was the author of a dozen text-books on the art of speaking correctly,
and also of a most ingenious sign-language which he called "Visible
Speech." Every letter in the alphabet of this language represented a
certain action of the lips and tongue; so that a new method was provided
for those who wished to learn foreign languages or to speak their own
language more correctly. And the third of these speech-improving Bells,
the inventor of the telephone, inherited the peculiar genius of his
fathers, both inventive and rhetorical, to such a degree that as a boy
he had constructed an artificial skull, from gutta-percha and India
rubber, which, when enlivened by a blast of air from a hand-bellows,
would actually pronounce several words in an almost human manner.
The third Bell, the only one of this remarkable family who concerns us
at this time, was a young man, barely twenty-eight, at the time when his
ear caught the first cry of the telephone. But he was already a man of
some note on his own account. He had been educated in Edinburgh, the
city of his birth, and in London; and had in one way and another picked
up a smattering of anatomy, music, electricity, and telegraphy. Until he
was sixteen years of age, he had read nothing but novels and poetry and
romantic tales of Scottish heroes. Then he left home to become a teacher
of elocution in various British schools, and by the time he was of age
he had made several slight discoveries as to the nature of vowel-sounds.
Shortly afterwards, he met in London two distinguished men, Alexander J.
Ellis and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who did far more than they ever knew
to forward Bell in the direction of the telephone.
Ellis was the president of the London Philological Society. Also, he was
the translator of the famous book on "The Sensations of Tone," written
by Helmholtz, who, in the period from 1871 to 1894 made Berlin the
world-centre for the study of the physical sciences. So it happened that
when Bell ran to Ellis as a young enthusiast and told his experiments,
Ellis informed him that Helmholtz had done the same things several years
before and done them more completely. He brought Bell to his house and
showed him what Helmholtz had done--how he had kept tuning-forks in
vibration by the power of electro-magnets, and blended the tones of
several tuning-forks together to produce the complex quality of the
human voice.
Now, Helmholtz had not been trying to invent a telephone, nor any sort
of message-carrier. His aim was to point out the physical basis of
music, and nothing more. But this fact that an electro-magnet would set
a tuning-fork humming was new to Bell and very attractive. It appealed
at once to him as a student of speech. If a tuning-fork could be made to
sing by a magnet or an electrified wire, why would it not be possible
to make a musical telegraph--a telegraph with a piano key-board, so that
many messages could be sent at once over a single wire? Unknown to Bell,
there were several dozen inven-tors then at work upon this problem,
which proved in the end to be very elusive. But it gave him at least a
starting-point, and he forthwith commenced his quest of the telephone.
As he was then in England, his first step was naturally to visit Sir
Charles Wheatstone, the best known English expert on telegraphy. Sir
Charles had earned his title by many inventions. He was a simple-natured
scientist, and treated Bell with the utmost kindness. He showed him an
ingenious talking-machine that had been made by Baron de Kempelin. At
this time Bell was twenty-two and unknown; Wheatstone was sixty-seven
and famous. And the personality of the veteran scientist made so vivid
a picture upon the mind of the impressionable young Bell that the grand
passion of science became henceforth the master-motif of his life.
From this summit of glorious ambition he was thrown, several months
later, into the depths of grief and despondency. The White Plague had
come to the home in Edinburgh and taken away his two brothers. More, it
had put its mark upon the young inventor himself. Nothing but a change
of climate, said his doctor, would put him out of danger. And so, to
save his life, he and his father and mother set sail from Glasgow and
came to the small Canadian town of Brantford, where for a year he fought
down his tendency to consumption, and satisfied his nervous energy by
teaching "Visible Speech" to a tribe of Mohawk Indians.
By this time it had become evident, both to his parents and to his
friends, that young Graham was destined to become some sort of a
creative genius. He was tall and supple, with a pale complexion, large
nose, full lips, jet-black eyes, and jet-black hair, brushed high
and usually rumpled into a curly tangle. In temperament he was a true
scientific Bohemian, with the ideals of a savant and the disposition
of an artist. He was wholly a man of enthusiasms, more devoted to ideas
than to people; and less likely to master his own thoughts than to be
mastered by them. He had no shrewdness, in any commercial sense, and
very little knowledge of the small practical details of ordinary living.
He was always intense, always absorbed. When he applied his mind to a
problem, it became at once an enthralling arena, in which there went
whirling a chariot-race of ideas and inventive fancies.
He had been fascinated from boyhood by his father's system of "Visible
Speech." He knew it so well that he once astonished a professor of
Oriental languages by repeating correctly a sentence of Sanscrit that
had been written in "Visible Speech" characters. While he was living in
London his most absorbing enthusiasm was the instruction of a class of
deaf-mutes, who could be trained to talk, he believed, by means of the
"Visible Speech" alphabet. He was so deeply impressed by the progress
made by these pupils, and by the pathos of their dumbness, that when he
arrived in Canada he was in doubt as to which of these two tasks was the
more important--the teaching of deaf-mutes or the invention of a musical
telegraph.
At this point, and before Bell had begun to experiment with his
telegraph, the scene of the story shifts from Canada to Massachusetts.
It appears that his father, while lecturing in Boston, had mentioned
Graham's exploits with a class of deaf-mutes; and soon afterward the
Boston Board of Education wrote to Graham, offering him five hundred
dollars if he would come to Boston and introduce his system of teaching
in a school for deaf-mutes that had been opened recently. The young man
joyfully agreed, and on the first of April, 1871, crossed the line and
became for the remainder of his life an American.
For the next two years his telegraphic work was laid aside, if not
forgotten. His success as a teacher of deaf-mutes was sudden and
overwhelming. It was the educational sensation of 1871. It won him a
professorship in Boston University; and brought so many pupils around
him that he ventured to open an ambitious "School of Vocal Physiology,"
which became at once a profitable enterprise. For a time there seemed
to be little hope of his escaping from the burden of this success and
becoming an inventor, when, by a most happy coincidence, two of his
pupils brought to him exactly the sort of stimulation and practical help
that he needed and had not up to this time received.
One of these pupils was a little deaf-mute tot, five years of age, named
Georgie Sanders. Bell had agreed to give him a series of private lessons
for $350 a year; and as the child lived with his grandmother in the city
of Salem, sixteen miles from Boston, it was agreed that Bell should make
his home with the Sanders family. Here he not only found the keenest
interest and sympathy in his air-castles of invention, but also was
given permission to use the cellar of the house as his workshop.
For the next three years this cellar was his favorite retreat. He
littered it with tuning-forks, magnets, batteries, coils of wire, tin
trumpets, and cigar-boxes. No one outside of the Sanders family was
allowed to enter it, as Bell was nervously afraid of having his ideas
stolen. He would even go to five or six stores to buy his supplies, for
fear that his intentions should be discovered. Almost with the secrecy
of a conspirator, he worked alone in this cellar, usually at night, and
quite oblivious of the fact that sleep was a necessity to him and to the
Sanders family.
"Often in the middle of the night Bell would wake me up," said Thomas
Sanders, the father of Georgie. "His black eyes would be blazing with
excitement. Leaving me to go down to the cellar, he would rush wildly to
the barn and begin to send me signals along his experimental wires. If I
noticed any improvement in his machine, he would be delighted. He would
leap and whirl around in one of his `war-dances' and then go contentedly
to bed. But if the experiment was a failure, he would go back to his
workbench and try some different plan."
The second pupil who became a factor--a very considerable factor--in
Bell's career was a fifteen-year-old girl named Mabel Hubbard, who had
lost her hearing, and consequently her speech, through an attack of
scarlet-fever when a baby. She was a gentle and lovable girl, and Bell,
in his ardent and headlong way, lost his heart to her completely; and
four years later, he had the happiness of making her his wife. Mabel
Hubbard did much to encourage Bell. She followed each step of his
progress with the keenest interest. She wrote his letters and copied his
patents. She cheered him on when he felt himself beaten. And through her
sympathy with Bell and his ambitions, she led her father--a widely
known Boston lawyer named Gardiner G. Hubbard--to become Bell's chief
spokesman and defender, a true apostle of the telephone.
Hubbard first became aware of Bell's inventive efforts one evening when
Bell was visiting at his home in Cambridge. Bell was illustrating some
of the mysteries of acoustics by the aid of a piano. "Do you know," he
said to Hubbard, "that if I sing the note G close to the strings of
the piano, that the G-string will answer me?" "Well, what then?" asked
Hubbard. "It is a fact of tremendous importance," replied Bell. "It is
an evidence that we may some day have a musical telegraph, which will
send as many messages simultaneously over one wire as there are notes on
that piano."
Later, Bell ventured to confide to Hubbard his wild dream of sending
speech over an electric wire, but Hubbard laughed him to scorn. "Now you
are talking nonsense," he said. "Such a thing never could be more than
a scientific toy. You had better throw that idea out of your mind and go
ahead with your musical telegraph, which if it is successful will make
you a millionaire."
But the longer Bell toiled at his musical telegraph, the more he dreamed
of replacing the telegraph and its cumbrous sign-language by a new
machine that would carry, not dots and dashes, but the human voice.
"If I can make a deaf-mute talk," he said, "I can make iron talk." For
months he wavered between the two ideas. He had no more than the most
hazy conception of what this voice-carrying machine would be like.
At first he conceived of having a harp at one end of the wire, and a
speaking-trumpet at the other, so that the tones of the voice would be
reproduced by the strings of the harp.
Then, in the early Summer of 1874, while he was puzzling over this harp
apparatus, the dim outline of a new path suddenly glinted in front of
him. He had not been forgetful of "Visible Speech" all this while,
but had been making experiments with two remarkable machines--the
phonautograph and the manometric capsule, by means of which the
vibrations of sound were made plainly visible. If these could be
im-proved, he thought, then the deaf might be taught to speak by
SIGHT--by learning an alphabet of vibrations. He mentioned these
experiments to a Boston friend, Dr. Clarence J. Blake, and he, being a
surgeon and an aurist, naturally said, "Why don't you use a REAL EAR?"
Such an idea never had, and probably never could have, occurred to Bell;
but he accepted it with eagerness. Dr. Blake cut an ear from a dead
man's head, together with the ear-drum and the associated bones. Bell
took this fragment of a skull and arranged it so that a straw touched
the ear-drum at one end and a piece of moving smoked glass at the other.
Thus, when Bell spoke loudly into the ear, the vibrations of the drum
made tiny markings upon the glass.
It was one of the most extraordinary incidents in the whole history of
the telephone. To an uninitiated onlooker, nothing could have been more
ghastly or absurd. How could any one have interpreted the gruesome joy
of this young professor with the pale face and the black eyes, who stood
earnestly singing, whispering, and shouting into a dead man's ear? What
sort of a wizard must he be, or ghoul, or madman? And in Salem, too, the
home of the witchcraft superstition! Certainly it would not have gone
well with Bell had he lived two centuries earlier and been caught at
such black magic.
What had this dead man's ear to do with the invention of the telephone?
Much. Bell noticed how small and thin was the ear-drum, and yet how
effectively it could send thrills and vibrations through heavy bones.
"If this tiny disc can vibrate a bone," he thought, "then an iron disc
might vibrate an iron rod, or at least, an iron wire." In a flash the
conception of a membrane telephone was pictured in his mind. He saw in
imagination two iron discs, or ear-drums, far apart and connected by
an electrified wire, catching the vibrations of sound at one end, and
reproducing them at the other. At last he was on the right path, and had
a theoretical knowledge of what a speaking telephone ought to be. What
remained to be done was to construct such a machine and find out how the
electric current could best be brought into harness.
Then, as though Fortune suddenly felt that he was winning this
stupendous success too easily, Bell was flung back by an avalanche
of troubles. Sanders and Hubbard, who had been paying the cost of his
experiments, abruptly announced that they would pay no more unless he
confined his attention to the musical telegraph, and stopped wasting his
time on ear-toys that never could be of any financial value. What
these two men asked could scarcely be denied, as one of them was his
best-paying patron and the other was the father of the girl whom he
hoped to marry. "If you wish my daughter," said Hubbard, "you must
abandon your foolish telephone." Bell's "School of Vocal Physiology,"
too, from which he had hoped so much, had come to an inglorious end.
He had been too much absorbed in his experiments to sustain it. His
professorship had been given up, and he had no pupils except Georgie
Sanders and Mabel Hubbard. He was poor, much poorer than his associates
knew. And his mind was torn and distracted by the contrary calls of
science, poverty, business, and affection. Pouring out his sorrows in a
letter to his mother, he said: "I am now beginning to realize the cares
and anxieties of being an inventor. I have had to put off all pupils and
classes, for flesh and blood could not stand much longer such a strain
as I have had upon me."
While stumbling through this Slough of Despond, he was called to
Washington by his patent lawyer. Not having enough money to pay the cost
of such a journey, he borrowed the price of a return ticket from Sanders
and arranged to stay with a friend in Washington, to save a hotel bill
that he could not afford. At that time Professor Joseph Henry, who knew
more of the theory of electrical science than any other American,
was the Grand Old Man of Washington; and poor Bell, in his doubt and
desperation, resolved to run to him for advice.
Then came a meeting which deserves to be historic. For an entire
afternoon the two men worked together over the apparatus that Bell had
brought from Boston, just as Henry had worked over the telegraph before
Bell was born. Henry was now a veteran of seventy-eight, with only
three years remaining to his credit in the bank of Time, while Bell was
twenty-eight. There was a long half-century between them; but the youth
had discovered a New Fact that the sage, in all his wisdom, had never
known.
"You are in possession of the germ of a great invention," said Henry,
"and I would advise you to work at it until you have made it complete."
"But," replied Bell, "I have not got the electrical knowledge that is
necessary."
"Get it," responded the aged scientist.
"I cannot tell you how much these two words have encouraged me," said
Bell afterwards, in describing this interview to his parents. "I live
too much in an atmosphere of discouragement for scientific pursuits; and
such a chimerical idea as telegraphing VOCAL SOUNDS would indeed seem to
most minds scarcely feasible enough to spend time in working over."
By this time Bell had moved his workshop from the cellar in Salem to 109
Court Street, Boston, where he had rented a room from Charles Williams,
a manufacturer of electrical supplies. Thomas A. Watson was his
assistant, and both Bell and Watson lived nearby, in two cheap little
bedrooms. The rent of the workshop and bedrooms, and Watson's wages
of nine dollars a week, were being paid by Sanders and Hubbard.
Consequently, when Bell returned from Washington, he was compelled
by his agreement to devote himself mainly to the musical telegraph,
although his heart was now with the telephone. For exactly three months
after his interview with Professor Henry, he continued to plod ahead,
along both lines, until, on that memorable hot afternoon in June, 1875,
the full TWANG of the clock-spring came over the wire, and the telephone
was born.
From this moment, Bell was a man of one purpose. He won over Sanders and
Hubbard. He converted Watson into an enthusiast. He forgot his musical
telegraph, his "Visible Speech," his classes, his poverty. He threw
aside a profession in which he was already locally famous. And he
grappled with this new mystery of electricity, as Henry had advised
him to do, encouraging himself with the fact that Morse, who was only
a painter, had mastered his electrical difficulties, and there was no
reason why a professor of acoustics should not do as much.
The telephone was now in existence, but it was the youngest and feeblest
thing in the nation. It had not yet spoken a word. It had to be taught,
developed, and made fit for the service of the irritable business world.
All manner of discs had to be tried, some smaller and thinner than
a dime and others of steel boiler-plate as heavy as the shield of
Achilles. In all the books of electrical science, there was nothing to
help Bell and Watson in this journey they were making through an unknown
country. They were as chartless as Columbus was in 1492. Neither they
nor any one else had acquired any experience in the rearing of a young
telephone. No one knew what to do next. There was nothing to know.
For forty weeks--long exasperating weeks--the telephone could do no more
than gasp and make strange inarticulate noises. Its educators had not
learned how to manage it. Then, on March 10, 1876, IT TALKED. It said
distinctly--
"MR. WATSON, COME HERE, I WANT YOU." Watson, who was at the lower end of
the wire, in the basement, dropped the receiver and rushed with wild joy
up three flights of stairs to tell the glad tidings to Bell. "I can hear
you!" he shouted breathlessly. "I can hear the WORDS."
It was not easy, of course, for the weak young telephone to make itself
heard in that noisy workshop. No one, not even Bell and Watson, was
familiar with its odd little voice. Usually Watson, who had a
remarkably keen sense of hearing, did the listening; and Bell, who was
a professional elocutionist, did the talking. And day by day the tone
of the baby instrument grew clearer--a new note in the orchestra of
civilization.
On his twenty-ninth birthday, Bell received his patent, No.
174,465--"the most valuable single patent ever issued" in any country.
He had created something so entirely new that there was no name for it
in any of the world's languages. In describing it to the officials
of the Patent Office, he was obliged to call it "an improvement in
telegraphy," when, in truth, it was nothing of the kind. It was as
different from the telegraph as the eloquence of a great orator is from
the sign-language of a deaf-mute.
Other inventors had worked from the standpoint of the telegraph; and
they never did, and never could, get any better results than signs and
symbols. But Bell worked from the standpoint of the human voice. He
cross-fertilized the two sciences of acoustics and electricity. His
study of "Visible Speech" had trained his mind so that he could mentally
SEE the shape of a word as he spoke it. He knew what a spoken word was,
and how it acted upon the air, or the ether, that carried its vibrations
from the lips to the ear. He was a third-generation specialist in the
nature of speech, and he knew that for the transmission of spoken words
there must be "a pulsatory action of the electric current which is the
exact equivalent of the aerial impulses."
Bell knew just enough about electricity, and not too much. He did
not know the possible from the impossible. "Had I known more about
electricity, and less about sound," he said, "I would never have
invented the telephone." What he had done was so amazing, so foolhardy,
that no trained electrician could have thought of it. It was "the
very hardihood of invention," and yet it was not in any sense a chance
discovery. It was the natural output of a mind that had been led to
assemble just the right materials for such a product.
As though the very stars in their courses were working for this young
wizard with the talking wire, the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia
opened its doors exactly two months after the telephone had learned to
talk. Here was a superb opportunity to let the wide world know what
had been done, and fortunately Hubbard was one of the Centennial
Commissioners. By his influence a small table was placed in the
Department of Education, in a narrow space between a stairway and a
wall, and on this table was deposited the first of the telephones.
Bell had no intention of going to the Centennial himself. He was too
poor. Sanders and Hubbard had never done more than pay his room-rent and
the expense of his experiments. For his three or four years of inventing
he had received nothing as yet--nothing but his patent. In order
to live, he had been compelled to reorganize his classes in "Visible
Speech," and to pick up the ravelled ends of his neglected profession.
But one Friday afternoon, toward the end of June, his sweetheart, Mabel
Hubbard, was taking the train for the Centennial; and he went to the
depot to say good-bye. Here Miss Hubbard learned for the first time that
Bell was not to go. She coaxed and pleaded, without effect. Then, as the
train was starting, leaving Bell on the platform, the affectionate young
girl could no longer control her feelings and was overcome by a passion
of tears. At this the susceptible Bell, like a true Sir Galahad, dashed
after the moving train and sprang aboard, without ticket or baggage,
oblivious of his classes and his poverty and of all else except this one
maiden's distress. "I never saw a man," said Watson, "so much in love as
Bell was."
As it happened, this impromptu trip to the Centennial proved to be one
of the most timely acts of his life. On the following Sunday after-noon
the judges were to make a special tour of inspection, and Mr. Hubbard,
after much trouble, had obtained a promise that they would spend a
few minutes examining Bell's telephone. By this time it had been on
exhibition for more than six weeks, without attracting the serious
attention of anybody.
When Sunday afternoon arrived, Bell was at his little table, nervous,
yet confident. But hour after hour went by, and the judges did not
arrive. The day was intensely hot, and they had many wonders to examine.
There was the first electric light, and the first grain-binder, and the
musical telegraph of Elisha Gray, and the marvellous exhibit of printing
telegraphs shown by the Western Union Company. By the time they came to
Bell's table, through a litter of school-desks and blackboards, the
hour was seven o'clock, and every man in the party was hot, tired, and
hungry. Several announced their intention of returning to their hotels.
One took up a telephone receiver, looked at it blankly, and put it
down again. He did not even place it to his ear. Another judge made a
slighting remark which raised a laugh at Bell's expense. Then a most
marvellous thing happened--such an incident as would make a chapter in
"The Arabian Nights Entertainments."
Accompanied by his wife, the Empress Theresa, and by a bevy of
courtiers, the Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro de Alcantara, walked into
the room, advanced with both hands outstretched to the bewildered Bell,
and exclaimed: "Professor Bell, I am delighted to see you again." The
judges at once forgot the heat and the fatigue and the hunger. Who was
this young inventor, with the pale complexion and black eyes, that he
should be the friend of Emperors? They did not know, and for the moment
even Bell himself had forgotten, that Dom Pedro had once visited Bell's
class of deaf-mutes at Boston University. He was especially interested
in such humanitarian work, and had recently helped to organize the first
Brazilian school for deaf-mutes at Rio de Janeiro. And so, with the
tall, blond-bearded Dom Pedro in the centre, the assembled judges, and
scientists--there were fully fifty in all--entered with unusual zest
into the proceedings of this first telephone exhibition.
A wire had been strung from one end of the room to the other, and while
Bell went to the transmitter, Dom Pedro took up the receiver and placed
it to his ear. It was a moment of tense expectancy. No one knew clearly
what was about to happen, when the Emperor, with a dramatic gesture,
raised his head from the receiver and exclaimed with a look of utter
amazement: "MY GOD--IT TALKS!"
Next came to the receiver the oldest scientist in the group, the
venerable Joseph Henry, whose encouragement to Bell had been so timely.
He stopped to listen, and, as one of the bystanders afterwards said,
no one could forget the look of awe that came into his face as he heard
that iron disc talking with a human voice. "This," said he, "comes
nearer to overthrowing the doctrine of the conservation of energy than
anything I ever saw."
Then came Sir William Thomson, latterly known as Lord Kelvin. It was
fitting that he should be there, for he was the foremost electrical
scientist at that time in the world, and had been the engineer of the
first Atlantic Cable. He listened and learned what even he had not known
before, that a solid metallic body could take up from the air all the
countless varieties of vibrations produced by speech, and that these
vibrations could be carried along a wire and reproduced exactly by a
second metallic body. He nodded his head solemnly as he rose from
the receiver. "It DOES speak," he said emphatically. "It is the most
wonderful thing I have seen in America."
So, one after another, this notable company of men listened to the voice
of the first telephone, and the more they knew of science, the less they
were inclined to believe their ears. The wiser they were, the more they
wondered. To Henry and Thomson, the masters of electrical magic, this
instrument was as surprising as it was to the man in the street. And
both were noble enough to admit frankly their astonishment in the
reports which they made as judges, when they gave Bell a Certificate
of Award. "Mr. Bell has achieved a result of transcendent scientific
interest," wrote Sir William Thomson. "I heard it speak distinctly
several sentences.... I was astonished and delighted.... It is the
greatest marvel hitherto achieved by the electric telegraph."
Until nearly ten o'clock that night the judges talked and listened by
turns at the telephone. Then, next morning, they brought the apparatus
to the judges' pavilion, where for the remainder of the summer it was
mobbed by judges and scientists. Sir William Thomson and his wife ran
back and forth between the two ends of the wire like a pair of delighted
children. And thus it happened that the crude little instrument that
had been tossed into an out-of-the-way corner became the star of
the Centennial. It had been given no more than eighteen words in the
official catalogue, and here it was acclaimed as the wonder of wonders.
It had been conceived in a cellar and born in a machine-shop; and now,
of all the gifts that our young American Republic had received on its
one-hundredth birthday, the telephone was honored as the rarest and most
welcome of them all.