The telephone business did not really begin to grow big and overspread
the earth until 1896, but the keynote of expansion was first sounded by
Theodore Vail in the earliest days, when as yet the telephone was a babe
in arms. In 1879 Vail said, in a letter written to one of his captains:
"Tell our agents that we have a proposition on foot to connect the
different cities for the purpose of personal communication, and in other
ways to organize a GRAND TELEPHONIC SYSTEM."
This was brave talk at that time, when there were not in the whole world
as many telephones as there are to-day in Cincinnati. It was brave talk
in those days of iron wire, peg switchboards, and noisy diaphragms. Most
telephone men regarded it as nothing more than talk. They did not see
any business future for the telephone except in short-distance service.
But Vail was in earnest. His previous experience as the head of the
railway mail service had lifted him up to a higher point of view.
He knew the need of a national system of communication that would be
quicker and more direct than either the telegraph or the post office.
"I saw that if the telephone could talk one mile to-day," he said, "it
would be talking a hundred miles to-morrow." And he persisted, in spite
of a considerable deal of ridicule, in maintaining that the telephone
was destined to connect cities and nations as well as individuals.
Four months after he had prophesied the "grand telephonic system," he
encouraged Charles J. Glidden, of world-tour fame, to build a telephone
line between Boston and Lowell. This was the first inter-city line. It
was well placed, as the owners of the Lowell mills lived in Boston, and
it made a small profit from the start. This success cheered Vail on to
a master-effort. He resolved to build a line from Boston to Providence,
and was so stubbornly bent upon doing this that when the Bell Company
refused to act, he picked up the risk and set off with it alone.
He organized a company of well-known Rhode Islanders--nicknamed the
"Governors' Company"--and built the line. It was a failure at first,
and went by the name of "Vail's Folly." But Engineer Carty, by a happy
thought, DOUBLED THE WIRE, and thus in a moment established two new
factors in the telephone business--the Metallic Circuit and the Long
Distance line.
At once the Bell Company came over to Vail's point of view, bought
his new line, and launched out upon what seemed to be the foolhardy
enterprise of stringing a double wire from Boston to New York. This
was to be not only the longest of all telephone lines, strung on ten
thousand poles; it was to be a line de luxe, built of glistening red
copper, not iron. Its cost was to be seventy thousand dollars, which was
an enormous sum in those hardscrabble days. There was much opposition to
such extravagance, and much ridicule. "I would n't take that line as a
gift," said one of the Bell Company's officials.
But when the last coil of wire was stretched into place, and the first
"Hello" leaped from Boston to New York, the new line was a victorious
success. It carried messages from the first day; and more, it raised the
whole telephone business to a higher level. It swept away the prejudice
that telephone service could become nothing more than a neighborhood
affair. "It was the salvation of the business," said Edward J. Hill. It
marked a turning-point in the history of the telephone, when the day
of small things was ended and the day of great things was begun. No
one man, no hundred men, had created it. It was the final result of ten
years of invention and improvement.
While this epoch-making line was being strung, Vail was pushing his
"grand telephonic system" policy by organizing The American Telephone
and Telegraph Company. This, too, was a master-stroke. It was the
introduction of the staff-and-line method of organization into business.
It was doing for the forty or fifty Bell Companies what Von Moltke
did for the German army prior to the Franco-Prussian War. It was the
creation of a central company that should link all local companies
together, and itself own and operate the means by which these companies
are united. This central company was to grapple with all national
problems, to own all telephones and long-distance lines, to protect all
patents, and to be the headquarters of invention, information, capital,
and legal protection for the entire federation of Bell Companies.
Seldom has a company been started with so small a capital and so vast a
purpose. It had no more than $100,000 of capital stock, in 1885; but
its declared object was nothing less than to establish a system of
wire communication for the human race. Here are, in its own words, the
marching orders of this Company: "To connect one or more points in each
and every city, town, or place an the State of New York, with one or
more points in each and every other city, town, or place in said State,
and in each and every other of the United States, and in Canada, and
Mexico; and each and every of said cities, towns, and places is to be
connected with each and every other city, town, or place in said States
and countries, and also by cable and other appropriate means with the
rest of the known world."
So ran Vail's dream, and for nine years he worked mightily to make it
come true. He remained until the various parts of the business had grown
together, and until his plan for a "grand telephonic system" was under
way and fairly well understood. Then he went out, into a series of
picturesque enterprises, until he had built up a four-square fortune;
and recently, in 1907, he came back to be the head of the telephone
business, and to complete the work of organization that he started
thirty years before.
When Vail said auf wiedersehen to the telephone business, it had passed
from infancy to childhood. It was well shaped but not fully grown. Its
pioneering days were over. It was self-supporting and had a little money
in the bank. But it could not then have carried the load of traffic that
it carries to-day. It had still too many problems to solve and too
much general inertia to overcome. It needed to be conserved, drilled,
educated, popularized. And the man who was finally chosen to replace
Vail was in many respects the appropriate leader for such a preparatory
period.
Hudson--John Elbridge Hudson--was the name of the new head of the
telephone people. He was a man of middle age, born in Lynn and bred in
Boston; a long-pedigreed New Englander, whose ancestors had smelted
iron ore in Lynn when Charles the First was King. He was a lawyer by
profession and a university professor by temperament. His specialty, as
a man of affairs, had been marine law; and his hobby was the collection
of rare books and old English engravings. He was a master of the Greek
language, and very fond of using it. On all possible occasions he used
the language of Pericles in his conversation; and even carried this
preference so far as to write his business memoranda in Greek. He was
above all else a scholar, then a lawyer, and somewhat incidentally the
central figure in the telephone world.
But it was of tremendous value to the telephone business at that time to
have at its head a man of Hudson's intellectual and moral calibre.
He gave it tone and prestige. He built up its credit. He kept it clean
and clear above all suspicion of wrong-doing. He held fast whatever
had been gained. And he prepared the way for the period of expansion by
borrowing fifty millions for improvements, and by adding greatly to the
strength and influence of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.
Hudson remained at the head of the telephone table until his death, in
1900, and thus lived to see the dawn of the era of big business. Under
his regime great things were done in the development of the art. The
business was pushed ahead at every point by its captains. Every man in
his place, trying to give a little better service than yesterday--that
was the keynote of the Hudson period. There was no one preeminent
genius. Each important step forward was the result of the cooperation of
many minds, and the prodding necessities of a growing traffic.
By 1896, when the Common Battery system created a new era, the telephone
engineer had pretty well mastered his simpler troubles. He was able to
handle his wires, no matter how many. By this time, too, the public
was ready for the telephone. A new generation had grown up, without the
prejudices of its fathers. People had grown away from the telegraphic
habit of thought, which was that wire communications were expensive
luxuries for the few. The telephone was, in fact, a new social nerve,
so new and so novel that very nearly twenty years went by before it
had fully grown into place, and before the social body developed the
instinct of using it.
Not that the difficulties of the telephone engineers were over, for they
were not. They have seemed to grow more numerous and complex every year.
But by 1896 enough had been done to warrant a forward movement. For the
next ten-year period the keynote of telephone history was EXPANSION.
Under the prevailing flat-rate plan of payment, all customers paid
the same yearly price and then used their telephones as often as they
pleased. This was a simple method, and the most satisfactory for small
towns and farming regions. But in a great city such a plan grew to be
suicidal. In New York, for instance, the price had to be raised to $240,
which lifted the telephone as high above the mass of the citizens as
though it were a piano or a diamond sunburst. Such a plan was strangling
the business. It was shutting out the small users. It was clogging the
wires with deadhead calls. It was giving some people too little service
and others too much. It was a very unsatisfactory situation.
How to extend the service and at the same time cheapen it to small
users--that was the Gordian knot; and the man who unquestionably did
most to untie it was Edward J. Hall. Mr. Hall founded the telephone
business in Buffalo in 1878, and seven years afterwards became the chief
of the long-distance traffic. He was then, and is to-day, one of the
statesmen of the telephone. For more than thirty years he has been the
"candid friend" of the business, incessantly suggesting, probing, and
criticising. Keen and dispassionate, with a genius for mercilessly
cutting to the marrow of a proposition, Hall has at the same time been a
zealot for the improvement and extension of telephone service. It was he
who set the agents free from the ball-and-chain of royalties, allowing
them to pay instead a percentage of gross receipts. And it was he who
"broke the jam," as a lumberman would say, by suggesting the MESSAGE
RATE system.
By this plan, which U. N. Bethell developed to its highest point in New
York, a user of the telephone pays a fixed minimum price for a certain
number of messages per year, and extra for all messages over this
number. The large user pays more, and the little user pays less. It
opened up the way to such an expansion of telephone business as Bell,
in his rosiest dreams, had never imagined. In three years, after 1896,
there were twice as many users; in six years there were four times as
many; in ten years there were eight to one. What with the message rate
and the pay station, the telephone was now on its way to be universal.
It was adapted to all kinds and conditions of men. A great corporation,
nerved at every point with telephone wires, may now pay fifty thousand
dollars to the Bell Company, while at the same time a young Irish
immigrant boy, just arrived in New York City, may offer five coppers and
find at his disposal a fifty million dollar telephone system.
When the message rate was fairly well established, Hudson died--fell
suddenly to the ground as he was about to step into a railway carriage.
In his place came Frederick P. Fish, also a lawyer and a Bostonian. Fish
was a popular, optimistic man, with a "full-speed-ahead" temperament.
He pushed the policy of expansion until he broke all the records. He
borrowed money in stupendous amounts--$150,000,000 at one time--and
flung it into a campaign of red-hot development. More business he
demanded, and more, and more, until his captains, like a thirty-horse
team of galloping horses, became very nearly uncontrollable.
It was a fast and furious period. The whole country was ablaze with a
passion of prosperity. After generations of conflict, the men with large
ideas had at last put to rout the men of small ideas. The waste
and folly of competition had everywhere driven men to the policy of
cooperation. Mills were linked to mills and factories to factories, in
a vast mutualism of industry such as no other age, perhaps, has ever
known. And as the telephone is essentially the instrument of co-working
and interdependent people, it found itself suddenly welcomed as the most
popular and indispensable of all the agencies that put men in touch with
each other.
To describe this growth in a single sentence, we might say that the
Bell telephone secured its first million of capital in 1879; its first
million of earnings in 1882; its first million of dividends in 1884; its
first million of surplus in 1885. It had paid out its first million for
legal expenses by 1886; began first to send a million messages a day
in 1888; had strung its first million miles of wire in 1900; and had
installed its first million telephones in 1898. By 1897 it had spun as
many cobwebs of wire as the mighty Western Union itself; by 1900 it had
twice as many miles of wire as the Western Union, and in 1905 FIVE TIMES
as many. Such was the plunging progress of the Bell Companies in this
period of expansion, that by 1905 they had swept past all European
countries combined, not only in the quality of the service but in the
actual number of telephones in use. This, too, without a cent of public
money, or the protection of a tariff, or the prestige of a governmental
bureau.
By 1892 Boston and New York were talking to Chicago, Milwaukee,
Pittsburg, and Washington. One-half of the people of the United States
were within talking distance of each other. The THOUSAND-MILE TALK had
ceased to be a fairy tale. Several years later the western end of the
line was pushed over the plains to Nebraska, enabling the spoken word in
Boston to be heard in Omaha. Slowly and with much effort the public were
taught to substitute the telephone for travel. A special long-distance
salon was fitted up in New York City to entice people into the habit
of talking to other cities. Cabs were sent for customers; and when one
arrived, he was escorted over Oriental rugs to a gilded booth, draped
with silken curtains. This was the famous "Room Nine." By such and many
other allurements a larger idea of telephone service was given to the
public mind; until in 1909 at least eighteen thousand New York-Chicago
conversations were held, and the revenue from strictly long-distance
messages was twenty-two thousand dollars a day.
By 1906 even the Rocky Mountain Bell Company had grown to be a
ten-million-dollar enterprise. It began at Salt Lake City with a hundred
telephones, in 1880. Then it reached out to master an area of four
hundred and thirteen thousand square miles--a great Lone Land of
undeveloped resources. Its linemen groped through dense forests where
their poles looked like toothpicks beside the towering pines and cedars.
They girdled the mountains and basted the prairies with wire, until the
lonely places were brought together and made sociable. They drove off
the Indians, who wanted the bright wire for ear-rings and bracelets;
and the bears, which mistook the humming of the wires for the buzzing
of bees, and persisted in gnawing the poles down. With the most heroic
optimism, this Rocky Mountain Company persevered until, in 1906, it had
created a seventy-thousand-mile nerve-system for the far West.
Chicago, in this year, had two hundred thou-sand telephones in use, in
her two hundred square miles of area. The business had been built up by
General Anson Stager, who was himself wealthy, and able to attract the
support of such men as John Crerar, H. H. Porter, and Robert T. Lincoln.
Since 1882 it has paid dividends, and in one glorious year its stock
soared to four hundred dollars a share. The old-timers--the men who
clambered over roof-tops in 1878 and tacked iron wires wherever they
could without being chased off--are still for the most part in control
of the Chicago company.
But as might have been expected, it was New York City that was the
record-breaker when the era of telephone expansion arrived. Here the
flood of big business struck with the force of a tidal wave. The number
of users leaped from 56,000 in 1900 up to 810,000 in 1908. In a single
year of sweating and breathless activity, 65,000 new telephones were
put on desks or hung on walls--an average of one new user for every two
minutes of the business day.
Literally tons, and hundreds of tons, of telephones were hauled in drays
from the factory and put in place in New York's homes and offices. More
and more were demanded, until to-day there are more telephones in New
York than there are in the four countries, France, Belgium, Holland, and
Switzerland combined. As a user of telephones New York has risen to be
unapproachable. Mass together all the telephones of London, Glasgow,
Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffleld, Bristol, and
Belfast, and there will even then be barely as many as are carrying the
conversations of this one American city.
In 1879 the New York telephone directory was a small card, showing
two hundred and fifty-two names; but now it has grown to be an
eight-hundred-page quarterly, with a circulation of half a million, and
requiring twenty drays, forty horses, and four hundred men to do the
work of distribution. There was one shabby little exchange thirty years
ago; but now there are fifty-two exchanges, as the nerve-centres of
a vast fifty-million-dollar system. Incredible as it may seem to
foreigners, it is literally true that in a single building in New York,
the Hudson Terminal, there are more telephones than in Odessa or Madrid,
more than in the two kingdoms of Greece and Bulgaria combined.
Merely to operate this system requires an army of more than five
thousand girls. Merely to keep their records requires two hundred and
thirty-five million sheets of paper a year. Merely to do the writing of
these records wears away five hundred and sixty thousand lead pencils.
And merely to give these girls a cup of tea or coffee at noon, compels
the Bell Company to buy yearly six thousand pounds of tea, seventeen
thousand pounds of coffee, forty-eight thousand cans of condensed milk,
and one hundred and forty barrels of sugar.
The myriad wires of this New York system are tingling with talk every
minute of the day and night. They are most at rest between three and
four o'clock in the morning, although even then there are usually ten
calls a minute. Between five and six o'clock, two thousand New Yorkers
are awake and at the telephone. Half an hour later there are twice as
many. Between seven and eight twenty-five thousand people have called
up twenty-five thousand other people, so that there are as many people
talking by wire as there were in the whole city of New York in the
Revolutionary period. Even this is only the dawn of the day's business.
By half-past eight it is doubled; by nine it is trebled; by ten it is
multiplied sixfold; and by eleven the roar has become an incredible
babel of one hundred and eighty thousand conversations an hour, with
fifty new voices clamoring at the exchanges every second.
This is "the peak of the load." It is the topmost pinnacle of talk. It
is the utmost degree of service that the telephone has been required to
give in any city. And it is as much a world's wonder, to men and
women of imagination, as the steel mills of Homestead or the turbine
leviathans that curve across the Atlantic Ocean in four and a half days.
As to the men who built it up: Charles F. Cutler died in 1907, but
most of the others are still alive and busy. Union N. Bethell, now
in Cutler's place at the head of the New York Company, has been the
operating chief for eighteen years. He is a man of shrewdness and
sympathy, with a rare sagacity in solving knotty problems, a president
of the new type, who regards his work as a sort of obligation he owes
to the public. And just as foreigners go to Pittsburg to see the steel
business at its best; just as they go to Iowa and Kansas to see the
New Farmer, so they make pilgrimages to Bethell's office to learn the
profession of telephony.
This unparalleled telephone system of New York grew up without having
at any time the rivalry of competition. But in many other cities and
especially in the Middle West, there sprang up in 1895 a medley of
independent companies. The time of the original patents had expired, and
the Bell Companies found themselves freed from the expense of litigation
only to be snarled up in a tangle of duplication. In a few years there
were six thousand of these little Robinson Crusoe companies. And by 1901
they had put in use more than a million telephones and were professing
to have a capital of a hundred millions.
Most of these companies were necessary and did much to expand the
telephone business into new territory. They were in fact small mutual
associations of a dozen or a hundred farmers, whose aim was to get
telephone service at cost. But there were other companies, probably
a thousand or more, which were organized by promoters who built their
hopes on the fact that the Bell Companies were unpopular, and on the
myth that they were fabulously rich. Instead of legitimately extending
telephone lines into communities that had none, these promoters
proceeded to inflict the messy snarl of an overlapping system upon
whatever cities would give them permission to do so.
In this way, masked as competition, the nuisance and waste of
duplication began in most American cities. The telephone business was
still so young, it was so little appreciated even by the telephone
officials and engineers, that the public regarded a second or a
third telephone system in one city as quite a possible and desirable
innovation. "We have two ears," said one promoter; "why not therefore
have two telephones?"
This duplication went merrily on for years before it was generally
discovered that the telephone is not an ear, but a nerve system; and
that such an experiment as a duplicate nerve system has never been
attempted by Nature, even in her most frivolous moods. Most people
fancied that a telephone system was practically the same as a gas or
electric light system, which can often be duplicated with the result of
cheaper rates and better service. They did not for years discover that
two telephone companies in one city means either half service or double
cost, just as two fire departments or two post offices would.
Some of these duplicate companies built up a complete plant, and gave
good local service, while others proved to be mere stock bubbles. Most
of them were over-capitalized, depending upon public sympathy to atone
for deficiencies in equipment. One which had printed fifty million
dollars of stock for sale was sold at auction in 1909 for four hundred
thousand dollars. All told, there were twenty-three of these bubbles
that burst in 1905, twenty-one in 1906, and twelve in 1907. So high
has been the death-rate among these isolated companies that at a recent
convention of telephone agents, the chairman's gavel was made of
thirty-five pieces of wood, taken from thirty-five switchboards of
thirty-five extinct companies.
A study of twelve single-system cities and twenty-seven double-system
cities shows that there are about eleven per cent more telephones under
the double-system, and that where the second system is put in, every
fifth user is obliged to pay for two telephones. The rates are alike,
whether a city has one or two systems. Duplicating companies raised
their rates in sixteen cities out of the twenty-seven, and reduced them
in one city. Taking the United States as a whole, there are to-day fully
two hundred and fifty thousand people who are paying for two telephones
instead of one, an economic waste of at least ten million dollars a
year.
A fair-minded survey of the entire independent telephone movement would
probably show that it was at first a stimulant, followed, as stimulants
usually are, by a reaction. It was unquestionably for several years a
spur to the Bell Companies. But it did not fulfil its promises of cheap
rates, better service, and high dividends; it did little or nothing to
improve telephonic apparatus, producing nothing new except the automatic
switchboard--a brilliant invention, which is now in its experimental
period. In the main, perhaps, it has been a reactionary and troublesome
movement in the cities, and a progressive movement among the farmers.
By 1907 it was a wave that had spent its force. It was no longer rolling
along easily on the broad ocean of hope, but broken and turned aside
by the rocks of actual conditions. One by one the telephone promoters
learned the limitations of an isolated company, and asked to be included
as members of the Bell family. In 1907 four hundred and fifty-eight
thousand independent telephones were linked by wire to the nearest Bell
Company; and in 1908 these were followed by three hundred and fifty
thousand more. After this landslide to the policy of consolidation,
there still remained a fairly large assortment of independent companies;
but they had lost their dreams and their illusions.
As might have been expected, the independent movement produced a number
of competent local leaders, but none of national importance. The Bell
Companies, on the other hand, were officered by men who had for a
quarter of a century been surveying telephone problems from a national
point of view. At their head, from 1907 onwards, was Theodore N. Vail,
who had returned dramatically, at the precise moment when he was needed,
to finish the work that he had begun in 1878. He had been absent for
twenty years, developing water-power and building street-railways in
South America. In the first act of the telephone drama, it was he
who put the enterprise upon a business basis, and laid down the first
principles of its policy. In the second and third acts he had no place;
but when the curtain rose upon the fourth act, Vail was once more the
central figure, standing white-haired among his captains, and pushing
forward the completion of the "grand telephonic system" that he had
dreamed of when the telephone was three years old.
Thus it came about that the telephone business was created by Vail,
conserved by Hudson, expanded by Fish, and is now in process of being
consolidated by Vail. It is being knit together into a stupendous Bell
System--a federation of self-governing companies, united by a central
company that is the busiest of them all. It is no longer protected by
any patent monopoly. Whoever is rich enough and rash enough may enter
the field. But it has all the immeasurable advantages that come from
long experience, immense bulk, the most highly skilled specialists,
and an abundance of capital. "The Bell System is strong," says Vail,
"because we are all tied up together; and the success of one is
therefore the concern of all."
The Bell System! Here we have the motif of American telephone
development. Here is the most comprehensive idea that has entered any
telephone engineer's brain. Already this Bell System has grown to be so
vast, so nearly akin to a national nerve system, that there is nothing
else to which we can compare it. It is so wide-spread that few are
aware of its greatness. It is strung out over fifty thousand cities and
communities.
If it were all gathered together into one place, this Bell System, it
would make a city of Telephonia as large as Baltimore. It would contain
half of the telephone property of the world. Its actual wealth would be
fully $760,000,000, and its revenue would be greater than the revenue of
the city of New York.
Part of the property of the city of Telephonia consists of ten million
poles, as many as would make a fence from New York to California, or put
a stockade around Texas. If the Telephonians wished to use these poles
at home, they might drive them in as piles along their water-front, and
have a twenty-five thousand-acre dock; or if their city were a hundred
square miles in extent, they might set up a seven-ply wall around it
with these poles.
Wire, too! Eleven million miles of it! This city of Telephonia would
be the capital of an empire of wire. Not all the men in New York State
could shoulder this burden of wire and carry it. Throw all the people
of Illinois in one end of the scale, and put on the other side the
wire-wealth of Telephonia, and long before the last coil was in place,
the Illinoisans would be in the air.
What would this city do for a living? It would make two-thirds of
the telephones, cables, and switchboards of all countries. Nearly
one-quarter of its citizens would work in factories, while the others
would be busy in six thousand exchanges, making it possible for the
people of the United States to talk to one another at the rate of SEVEN
THOUSAND MILLION CONVERSATIONS A YEAR.
The pay-envelope army that moves to work every morning in Telephonia
would be a host of one hundred and ten thousand men and girls, mostly
girls,--as many girls as would fill Vassar College a hundred times and
more, or double the population of Nevada. Put these men and girls in
line, march them ten abreast, and six hours would pass before the last
company would arrive at the reviewing stand. In single file this throng
of Telephonians would make a living wall from New York to New Haven.
Such is the extraordinary city of which Alexander Graham Bell was the
only resident in 1875. It has been built up without the backing of any
great bank or multi-millionaire. There have been no Vanderbilts in it,
no Astors, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Harrimans. There are even now
only four men who own as many as ten thousand shares of the stock of
the central company. This Bell System stands as the life-work of
unprivileged men, who are for the most part still alive and busy. With
very few and trivial exceptions, every part of it was made in the
United States. No other industrial organism of equal size owes foreign
countries so little. Alike in its origin, its development, and
its highest point of efficiency and expansion, the telephone is as
essentially American as the Declaration of Independence or the monument
on Bunker Hill.