The larger significance of the telephone is that it completes the work
of eliminating the hermit and gypsy elements of civilization. In an
almost ideal way, it has made intercommunication possible without
travel. It has enabled a man to settle permanently in one place, and yet
keep in personal touch with his fellows.
Until the last few centuries, much of the world was probably what
Morocco is to-day--a region without wheeled vehicles or even roads of
any sort. There is a mythical story of a wonderful speaking-trumpet
possessed by Alexander the Great, by which he could call a soldier who
was ten miles distant; but there was probably no substitute for the
human voice except flags and beacon-fires, or any faster method of
travel than the gait of a horse or a camel across ungraded plains. The
first sensation of rapid transit doubtless came with the sailing vessel;
but it was the play-toy of the winds, and unreliable. When Columbus
dared to set out on his famous voyage, he was five weeks in crossing
from Spain to the West Indies, his best day's record two hundred miles.
The swift steamship travel of to-day did not begin until 1838, when the
Great Western raced over the Atlantic in fifteen days.
As for organized systems of intercommunication, they were unknown even
under the rule of a Pericles or a Caesar. There was no post office in
Great Britain until 1656--a generation after America had begun to be
colonized. There was no English mail-coach until 1784; and when Benjamin
Franklin was Postmaster General at Philadelphia, an answer by mail from
Boston, when all went well, required not less than three weeks. There
was not even a hard-surface road in the thirteen United States until
1794; nor even a postage stamp until 1847, the year in which Alexander
Graham Bell was born. In this same year Henry Clay delivered his
memorable speech on the Mexican War, at Lexington, Kentucky, and it was
telegraphed to The New York Herald at a cost of five hundred dollars,
thus breaking all previous records for news-gathering enterprise. Eleven
years later the first cable established an instantaneous sign-language
between Americans and Europeans; and in 1876 there came the perfect
distance-talking of the telephone.
No invention has been more timely than the telephone. It arrived at the
exact period when it was needed for the organization of great cities
and the unification of nations. The new ideas and energies of science,
commerce, and cooperation were beginning to win victories in all parts
of the earth. The first railroad had just arrived in China; the first
parliament in Japan; the first constitution in Spain. Stanley was moving
like a tiny point of light through the heart of the Dark Continent. The
Universal Postal Union had been organized in a little hall in Berne. The
Red Cross movement was twelve years old. An International Congress of
Hygiene was being held at Brussells, and an International Congress of
Medicine at Philadelphia. De Lesseps had finished the Suez Canal and
was examining Panama. Italy and Germany had recently been built into
nations; France had finally swept aside the Empire and the Commune and
established the Republic. And what with the new agencies of railroads,
steamships, cheap newspapers, cables, and telegraphs, the civilized
races of mankind had begun to be knit together into a practical
consolidation.
To the United States, especially, the telephone came as a friend in
need. After a hundred years of growth, the Republic was still a loose
confederation of separate States, rather than one great united nation.
It had recently fallen apart for four years, with a wide gulf of blood
between; and with two flags, two Presidents, and two armies. In 1876
it was hesitating halfway between doubt and confidence, between the old
political issues of North and South, and the new industrial issues of
foreign trade and the development of material resources. The West was
being thrown open. The Indians and buffaloes were being driven back.
There was a line of railway from ocean to ocean. The population was
gaining at the rate of a million a year. Colorado had just been
baptized as a new State. And it was still an unsolved problem whether or
not the United States could be kept united, whether or not it could be
built into an organic nation without losing the spirit of self-help and
democracy.
It is not easy for us to realize to-day how young and primitive was the
United States of 1876. Yet the fact is that we have twice the population
that we had when the telephone was invented. We have twice the wheat
crop and twice as much money in circulation. We have three times the
railways, banks, libraries, newspapers, exports, farm values, and
national wealth. We have ten million farmers who make four times as much
money as seven million farmers made in 1876. We spend four times as
much on our public schools, and we put four times as much in the savings
bank. We have five times as many students in the colleges. And we have
so revolutionized our methods of production that we now produce seven
times as much coal, fourteen times as much oil and pig-iron, twenty-two
times as much copper, and forty-three times as much steel.
There were no skyscrapers in 1876, no trolleys, no electric lights, no
gasoline engines, no self-binders, no bicycles, no automobiles. There
was no Oklahoma, and the combined population of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho,
and Arizona was about equal to that of Des Moines. It was in this
year that General Custer was killed by the Sioux; that the flimsy iron
railway bridge fell at Ashtabula; that the "Molly Maguires" terrorized
Pennsylvania; that the first wire of the Brooklyn Bridge was strung; and
that Boss Tweed and Hell Gate were both put out of the way in New York.
The Great Elm, under which the Revolutionary patriots had met, was still
standing on Boston Common. Daniel Drew, the New York financier, who was
born before the American Constitution was adopted, was still alive; so
were Commodore Vanderbilt, Joseph Henry, A. T. Stewart, Thurlow Weed,
Peter Cooper, Cyrus McCormick, Lucretia Mott, Bryant, Longfellow, and
Emerson. Most old people could remember the running of the first railway
train; people of middle age could remember the sending of the first
telegraph message; and the children in the high schools remembered the
laying of the first Atlantic Cable.
The grandfathers of 1876 were fond of telling how Webster opposed taking
Texas and Oregon into the Union; how George Washington advised against
including the Mississippi River; and how Monroe warned Congress that
a country that reached from the Atlantic to the Middle West was "too
extensive to be governed but by a despotic monarchy." They told how
Abraham Lincoln, when he was postmaster of New Salem, used to carry the
letters in his coon-skin cap and deliver them at sight; how in 1822 the
mails were carried on horseback and not in stages, so as to have the
quickest possible service; and how the news of Madison's election was
three weeks in reaching the people of Kentucky. When the telegraph
was mentioned, they told how in Revolutionary days the patriots used a
system of signalling called "Washington's Tele-graph," consisting of a
pole, a flag, a basket, and a barrel.
So, the young Republic was still within hearing distance of its
childhood, in 1876. Both in sentiment and in methods of work it
was living close to the log-cabin period. Many of the old slow ways
survived, the ways that were fast enough in the days of the stage-coach
and the tinder-box. There were seventy-seven thousand miles of railway,
but poorly built and in short lengths. There were manufacturing
industries that employed two million, four hundred thousand people, but
every trade was broken up into a chaos of small competitive units, each
at war with all the others. There were energy and enterprise in the
highest degree, but not efficiency or organization. Little as we knew
it, in 1876 we were mainly gathering together the plans and the raw
materials for the building up of the modern business world, with its
quick, tense life and its national structure of immense coordinated
industries.
In 1876 the age of specialization and community of interest was in its
dawn. The cobbler had given place to the elaborate factory, in which
seventy men cooperated to make one shoe. The merchant who had hitherto
lived over his store now ventured to have a home in the suburbs. No man
was any longer a self-sufficient Robinson Crusoe. He was a fraction,
a single part of a social mechanism, who must necessarily keep in the
closest touch with many others.
A new interdependent form of civilization was about to be developed, and
the telephone arrived in the nick of time to make this new civilization
workable and convenient. It was the unfolding of a new organ. Just as
the eye had become the telescope, and the hand had become machinery, and
the feet had become railways, so the voice became the telephone. It was
a new ideal method of communication that had been made indispensable by
new conditions. The prophecy of Carlyle had come true, when he said that
"men cannot now be bound to men by brass collars; you will have to bind
them by other far nobler and cunninger methods."
Railways and steamships had begun this work of binding man to man by
"nobler and cunninger methods." The telegraph and cable had gone still
farther and put all civilized people within sight of each other, so that
they could communicate by a sort of deaf and dumb alphabet. And then
came the telephone, giving direct instantaneous communication and
putting the people of each nation within hearing distance of each
other. It was the completion of a long series of inventions. It was
the keystone of the arch. It was the one last improvement that enabled
interdependent nations to handle themselves and to hold together.
To make railways and steamboats carry letters was much, in the evolution
of the means of communication. To make the electric wire carry signals
was more, because of the instantaneous transmission of important news.
But to make the electric wire carry speech was MOST, because it put
all fellow-citizens face to face, and made both message and answer
instantaneous. The invention of the telephone taught the Genie of
Electricity to do better than to carry mes-sages in the sign language of
the dumb. It taught him to speak. As Emerson has finely said:
"We had letters to send. Couriers could not go fast enough, nor far
enough; broke their wagons, foundered their horses; bad roads in Spring,
snowdrifts in Winter, heat in Summer--could not get their horses out
of a walk. But we found that the air and the earth were full of
electricity, and always going our way, just the way we wanted to send.
WOULD HE TAKE A MESSAGE, Just as lief as not; had nothing else to do;
would carry it in no time."
As to the exact value of the telephone to the United States in dollars
and cents, no one can tell. One statistician has given us a total of
three million dollars a day as the amount saved by using telephones.
This sum may be far too high, or too low. It can be no more than a
guess. The only adequate way to arrive at the value of the telephone
is to consider the nation as a whole, to take it all in all as a going
concern, and to note that such a nation would be absolutely impossible
without its telephone service. Some sort of a slower and lower grade
republic we might have, with small industrial units, long hours of
labor, lower wages, and clumsier ways. The money loss would be enormous,
but more serious still would be the loss in the QUALITY OF THE NATIONAL
LIFE. Inevitably, an untelephoned nation is less social, less unified,
less progressive, and less efficient. It belongs to an inferior species.
How to make a civilization that is organized and quick, instead of
a barbarism that was chaotic and slow--that is the universal human
problem, not wholly solved to-day. And how to develop a science of
intercommunication, which commenced when the wild animals began to
travel in herds and to protect themselves from their enemies by a
language of danger-signals, and to democratize this science until the
entire nation becomes self-conscious and able to act as one living
being--that is the part of this universal problem which finally
necessitated the invention of the telephone.
With the use of the telephone has come a new habit of mind. The slow and
sluggish mood has been sloughed off. The old to-morrow habit has been
superseded by "Do It To-day"; and life has become more tense, alert,
vivid. The brain has been relieved of the suspense of waiting for an
answer, which is a psychological gain of great importance. It receives
its reply at once and is set free to consider other matters. There is
less burden upon the memory and the WHOLE MIND can be given to each new
proposition.
A new instinct of speed has been developed, much more fully in the
United States than elsewhere. "No American goes slow," said Ian
Maclaren, "if he has the chance of going fast; he does not stop to talk
if he can talk walking; and he does not walk if he can ride." He is as
pleased as a child with a new toy when some speed record is broken,
when a pair of shoes is made in eleven minutes, when a man lays twelve
hundred bricks in an hour, or when a ship crosses the Atlantic in
four and a half days. Even seconds are now counted and split up into
fractions. The average time, for instance, taken to reply to a telephone
call by a New York operator, is now three and two-fifth seconds; and
even this tiny atom of time is being strenuously worn down.
As a witty Frenchman has said, one of our most lively regrets is that
while we are at the telephone we cannot do business with our feet. We
regard it as a victory over the hostility of nature when we do an hour's
work in a minute or a minute's work in a second. Instead of saying, as
the Spanish do, "Life is too short; what can one person do?" an American
is more apt to say, "Life is too short; therefore I must do to-day's
work to-day." To pack a lifetime with energy--that is the American plan,
and so to economize that energy as to get the largest results. To get
a question asked and answered in five minutes by means of an electric
wire, instead of in two hours by the slow trudging of a messenger
boy--that is the method that best suits our passion for instantaneous
service.
It is one of the few social laws of which we are fairly sure, that
a nation organizes in proportion to its velocity. We know that a
four-mile-an-hour nation must remain a huge inert mass of peasants and
villagers; or if, after centuries of slow toil, it should pile up a
great city, the city will sooner or later fall to pieces of its own
weight. In such a way Babylon rose and fell, and Nineveh, and Thebes,
and Carthage, and Rome. Mere bulk, unorganized, becomes its own
destroyer. It dies of clogging and congestion. But when Stephenson's
Rocket ran twenty-nine miles an hour, and Morse's telegraph clicked its
signals from Washington to Baltimore, and Bell's telephone flashed the
vibrations of speech between Boston and Salem, a new era began. In came
the era of speed and the finely organized nations. In came cities of
unprecedented bulk, but held together so closely by a web-work of steel
rails and copper wires that they have become more alert and cooperative
than any tiny hamlet of mud huts on the banks of the Congo.
That the telephone is now doing most of all, in this binding together
of all manner of men, is perhaps not too much to claim, when we remember
that there are now in the United States seventy thousand holders of Bell
telephone stock and ten million users of telephone service. There are
two hundred and sixty-four wires crossing the Mississippi, in the Bell
system; and five hundred and forty-four crossing Mason and Dixon's
Line. It is the telephone which does most to link together cottage
and skyscraper and mansion and factory and farm. It is not limited to
experts or college graduates. It reaches the man with a nickel as
well as the man with a million. It speaks all languages and serves all
trades. It helps to prevent sectionalism and race feuds. It gives
a common meeting place to capitalists and wage-workers. It is so
essentially the instrument of all the people, in fact, that we might
almost point to it as a national emblem, as the trade-mark of democracy
and the American spirit.
In a country like ours, where there are eighty nationalities in the
public schools, the telephone has a peculiar value as a part of the
national digestive apparatus. It prevents the growth of dialects and
helps on the process of assimilation. Such is the push of American life,
that the humble immigrants from Southern Europe, before they have been
here half a dozen years, have acquired the telephone habit and
have linked on their small shops to the great wire network of
intercommunication. In the one community of Brownsville, for example,
settled several years ago by an overflow of Russian Jews from the East
Side of New York, there are now as many telephones as in the kingdom of
Greece. And in the swarming East Side itself, there is a single exchange
in Orchard Street which has more wires than there are in all the
exchanges of Egypt.
There can be few higher ideals of practical democracy than that which
comes to us from the telephone engineer. His purpose is much more
comprehensive than the supplying of telephones to those who want them.
It is rather to make the telephone as universal as the water faucet, to
bring within speaking distance every economic unit, to connect to the
social organism every person who may at any time be needed. Just as
the click of the reaper means bread, and the purr of the sewing-machine
means clothes, and the roar of the Bessemer converter means steel, and
the rattle of the press means education, so the ring of the telephone
bell has come to mean unity and organization.
Already, by cable, telegraph, and telephone, no two towns in the
civilized world are more than one hour apart. We have even girdled the
earth with a cablegram in twelve minutes. We have made it possible for
any man in New York City to enter into conversation with any other
New Yorker in twenty-one seconds. We have not been satisfied with
establishing such a system of transportation that we can start any day
for anywhere from anywhere else; neither have we been satisfied with
establishing such a system of communication that news and gossip are
the common property of all nations. We have gone farther. We have
established in every large region of population a system of voice-nerves
that puts every man at every other man's ear, and which so magically
eliminates the factor of distance that the United States becomes three
thousand miles of neighbors, side by side.
This effort to conquer Time and Space is above all else the instinct
of material progress. To shrivel up the miles and to stretch out the
minutes--this has been one of the master passions of the human race. And
thus the larger truth about the telephone is that it is vastly more than
a mere convenience. It is not to be classed with safety razors and piano
players and fountain pens. It is nothing less than the high-speed tool
of civilization, gearing up the whole mechanism to more effective social
service. It is the symbol of national efficiency and cooperation.
All this the telephone is doing, at a total cost to the nation of
probably $200,000,000 a year--no more than American farmers earn in ten
days. We pay the same price for it as we do for the potatoes, or for
one-third of the hay crop, or for one-eighth of the corn. Out of every
nickel spent for electrical service, one cent goes to the telephone. We
could settle our telephone bill, and have several millions left over,
if we cut off every fourth glass of liquor and smoke of tobacco. Whoever
rents a typewriting machine, or uses a street car twice a day, or has
his shoes polished once a day, may for the same expense have a very good
telephone service. Merely to shovel away the snow of a single storm in
1910 cost the city government of New York as much as it will pay for
five or six years of telephoning.
This almost incredible cheapness of telephony is still far from being
generally perceived, mainly for psychological reasons. A telephone is
not impressive. It has no bulk. It is not like the Singer Building or
the Lusitania. Its wires and switchboards and batteries are scattered
and hidden, and few have sufficient imagination to picture them in all
their complexity. If only it were possible to assemble the hundred or
more telephone buildings of New York in one vast plaza, and if the two
thousand clerks and three thousand maintenance men and six thousand girl
operators were to march to work each morning with bands and banners,
then, perhaps, there might be the necessary quality of impressiveness by
which any large idea must always be imparted to the public mind.
For lack of a seven and one-half cent coin, there is now five-cent
telephony even in the largest American cities. For five cents whoever
wishes has an entire wire-system at his service, a system that is kept
waiting by day and night, so that it will be ready the instant he needs
it. This system may have cost from twenty to fifty millions, yet it
may be hired for one-eighth the cost of renting an automobile. Even in
long-distance telephony, the expense of a message dwindles when it is
compared with the price of a return railway ticket. A talk from New
York to Philadelphia, for instance, costs seventy-five cents, while
the railway fare would be four dollars. From New York to Chicago a talk
costs five dollars as against seventy dollars by rail. As Harriman once
said, "I can't get from my home to the depot for the price of a talk to
Omaha."
To say what the net profits have been, to the entire body of people who
have invested money in the telephone, will always be more or less of a
guess. The general belief that immense fortunes were made by the lucky
holders of Bell stock, is an exaggeration that has been kept alive by
the promoters of wildcat companies. No such fortunes were made. "I do
not believe," says Theodore Vail, "that any one man ever made a
clear million out of the telephone." There are not apt to be any
get-rich-quick for-tunes made in corporations that issue no watered
stock and do not capitalize their franchises. On the contrary, up
to 1897, the holders of stock in the Bell Companies had paid in four
million, seven hundred thousand dollars more than the par value; and in
the recent consolidation of Eastern companies, under the presidency of
Union N. Bethell, the new stock was actually eight millions less than
the stock that was retired.
Few telephone companies paid any profits at first. They had undervalued
the cost of building and maintenance. Denver expected the cost to be two
thousand, five hundred dollars and spent sixty thousand dollars. Buffalo
expected to pay three thousand dollars and had to pay one hundred and
fifty thousand dollars. Also, they made the unwelcome discovery that an
exchange of two hundred costs more than twice as much as an exchange of
one hundred, because of the greater amount of traffic. Usually a dollar
that is paid to a telephone company is divided as follows:
Rent............ 4c
Taxes........... 4c
Interest........ 6c
Surplus......... 8c
Maintenance.... 16c
Dividends...... 18c
Labor.......... 44c
---- $1.00
Most of the rate troubles (and their name has been legion) have arisen
because the telephone business was not understood. In fact, until
recently, it did not understand itself. It persisted in holding to
a local and individualistic view of its business. It was slow to put
telephones in unprofitable places. It expected every instrument to
pay its way. In many States, both the telephone men and the public
overlooked the most vital fact in the case, which is that the members of
a telephone system are above all else INTERDEPENDENT.
One telephone by itself has no value. It is as useless as a reed cut
out of an organ or a finger that is severed from a hand. It is not even
ornamental or adaptable to any other pur-pose. It is not at all like a
piano or a talking-machine, which has a separate existence. It is useful
only in proportion to the number of other telephones it reaches. AND
EVERY TELEPHONE ANYWHERE ADDS VALUE TO EVERY OTHER TELEPHONE ON THE SAME
SYSTEM OF WIRES. That, in a sentence, is the keynote of equitable rates.
Many a telephone, for the general good, must be put where it does not
earn its own living. At any time some sudden emergency may arise that
will make it for the moment priceless. Especially since the advent of
the automobile, there is no nook or corner from which it may not be
supremely necessary, now and then, to send a message. This principle
was acted upon recently in a most practical way by the Pennsylvania
Railroad, which at its own expense installed five hundred and
twenty-five telephones in the homes of its workmen in Altoona. In the
same way, it is clearly the social duty of the telephone company
to widen out its system until every point is covered, and then to
distribute its gross charges as fairly as it can. The whole must
carry the whole--that is the philosophy of rates which must finally be
recognized by legislatures and telephone companies alike. It can never,
of course, be reduced to a system or formula. It will always be a matter
of opinion and compromise, requiring much skill and much patience. But
there will seldom be any serious trouble when once its basic principles
are understood.
Like all time-saving inventions, like the railroad, the reaper, and the
Bessemer converter, the telephone, in the last analysis, COSTS NOTHING;
IT IS THE LACK OF IT THAT COSTS. THE NATION THAT MOST IS THE NATION
WITHOUT IT.