In the Spring of 1907 Theodore N. Vail, a rugged, ruddy, white-haired
man, was superintending the building of a big barn in northern Vermont.
His house stood near-by, on a balcony of rolling land that overlooked
the town of Lyndon and far beyond, across evergreen forests to the
massive bulk of Burke Mountain. His farm, very nearly ten square miles
in area, lay back of the house in a great oval of field and woodland,
with several dozen cottages in the clearings. His Welsh ponies and Swiss
cattle were grazing on the May grass, and the men were busy with the
ploughs and harrows and seeders. It was almost thirty years since he
had been called in to create the business structure of telephony, and to
shape the general plan of its development. Since then he had done many
other things. The one city of Buenos Ayres had paid him more, merely
for giving it a system of trolleys and electric lights, than the United
States had paid him for putting the telephone on a business basis. He
was now rich and retired, free to enjoy his play-work of the farm and to
forget the troubles of the city and the telephone.
But, as he stood among his barn-builders, there arrived from Boston and
New York a delegation of telephone directors. Most of them belonged to
the "Old Guard" of telephony. They had fought under Vail in the pioneer
days; and now they had come to ask him to return to the telephone
business, after twenty years of absence. Vail laughed at the suggestion.
"Nonsense," he said, "I'm too old. I'm sixty-two years of age." The
directors persisted. They spoke of the approaching storm-cloud of panic
and the need of another strong hand at the wheel until the crisis was
over, but Vail still refused. They spoke of old times and old memories,
but he shook his head. "All my life," he said, "I have wanted to be a
farmer."
Then they drew a picture of the telephone situation. They showed him
that the "grand telephonic system" which he had planned was unfinished.
He was its architect, and it was undone. The telephone business was
energetic and prosperous. Under the brilliant leadership of Frederick P.
Fish, it had grown by leaps and bounds. But it was still far from being
the SYSTEM that Vail had dreamed of in his younger days; and so, when
the directors put before him his unfinished plan, he surrendered.
The instinct for completeness, which is one of the dominating
characteristics of his mind, compelled him to consent. It was the call
of the telephone.
Since that May morning, 1907, great things have been done by the men of
the telephone and telegraph world. The Bell System was brought through
the panic without a scratch. When the doubt and confusion were at their
worst, Vail wrote an open letter to his stock-holders, in his practical,
farmer-like way. He said:
"Our net earnings for the last ten months were $13,715,000, as against
$11,579,000 for the same period in 1906. We have now in the banks over
$18,000,000; and we will not need to borrow any money for two years."
Soon afterwards, the work of consolidation began. Companies that
overlapped were united. Small local wire-clusters, several thousands
of them, were linked to the national lines. A policy of publicity
superseded the secrecy which had naturally grown to be a habit in the
days of patent litigation. Visitors and reporters found an open door.
Educational advertisements were published in the most popular magazines.
The corps of inventors was spurred up to conquer the long-distance
problems. And in return for a thirty million check, the control of the
historic Western Union was transferred from the children of Jay Gould
to the thirty thousand stock-holders of the American Telephone and
Telegraph Company.
From what has been done, therefore, we may venture a guess as to the
future of the telephone. This "grand telephonic system" which had no
existence thirty years ago, except in the imagination of Vail, seems to
be at hand. The very newsboys in the streets are crying it. And while
there is, of course, no exact blueprint of a best possible telephone
system, we can now see the general outlines of Vail's plan.
There is nothing mysterious or ominous in this plan. It has nothing
to do with the pools and conspiracies of Wall Street. No one will be
squeezed out except the promoters of paper companies. The simple fact is
that Vail is organizing a complete Bell System for the same reason that
he built one big comfortable barn for his Swiss cattle and his Welsh
ponies, instead of half a dozen small uncomfortable sheds. He has never
been a "high financier" to juggle profits out of other men's losses. He
is merely applying to the telephone business the same hard sense that
any farmer uses in the management of his farm. He is building a Big
Barn, metaphorically, for the telephone and telegraph.
Plainly, the telephone system of the future will be national, so that
any two people in the same country will be able to talk to one another.
It will not be competitive, for the reason that no farmer would think
for a moment of running his farm on competitive lines. It will have
a staff-and-line organization, to use a military phrase. Each local
company will continue to handle its own local affairs, and exercise to
the full the basic virtue of self-help. But there will also be, as now,
a central body of experts to handle the larger affairs that are common
to all companies. No separateness or secession on the one side, nor
bureaucracy on the other--that is the typically American idea that
underlies the ideal telephone system.
The line of authority, in such a system, will begin with the local
manager. From him it will rise to the directors of the State company;
then higher still to the directors of the national company; and finally,
above all corporate leaders to the Federal Government itself. The
failure of government ownership of the telephone in so many foreign
countries does not mean that the private companies will have absolute
power. Quite the reverse. The lesson of thirty years' experience shows
that a private telephone company is apt to be much more obedient to the
will of the people than if it were a Government department. But it is
an axiom of democracy that no company, however well conducted, will be
permitted to control a public convenience without being held strictly
responsible for its own acts. As politics becomes less of a game and
more of a responsibility, the telephone of the future will doubtless be
supervised by some sort of public committee, which will have power to
pass upon complaints, and to prevent the nuisance of duplication and the
swindle of watering stock.
As this Federal supervision becomes more and more efficient, the present
fear of monopoly will decrease, just as it did in the case of the
railways. It is a fact, although now generally forgotten, that the
first railways of the United States were run for ten years or more on
an anti-monopoly plan. The tracks were free to all. Any one who owned
a cart with flanged wheels could drive it on the rails and compete with
the locomotives. There was a happy-go-lucky jumble of trains and wagons,
all held back by the slowest team; and this continued on some railways
until as late as 1857. By that time the people saw that com-petition on
a railway track was absurd. They allowed each track to be monopolized by
one company, and the era of expansion began.
No one, certainly, at the present time, regrets the passing of the
independent teamster. He was much more arbitrary and expensive than
any railroad has ever dared to be; and as the country grew, he became
impossible. He was not the fittest to survive. For the general good, he
was held back from competing with the railroad, and taught to cooperate
with it by hauling freight to and from the depots. This, to his
surprise, he found much more profitable and pleasant. He had been
squeezed out of a bad job into a good one. And by a similar process of
evolution, the United States is rapidly outgrowing the small independent
telephone companies. These will eventually, one by one, rise as the
teamster did to a higher social value, by clasping wires with the main
system of telephony.
Until 1881 the Bell System was in the hands of a family group. It was
a strictly private enterprise. The public had been asked to help in its
launching, and had refused. But after 1881 it passed into the control of
the small stock-holders, and has remained there without a break. It is
now one of our most democratized businesses, scattering either wages or
dividends into more than a hundred thousand homes. It has at times been
exclusive, but never sordid. It has never been dollar-mad, nor frenzied
by the virus of stock-gambling. There has always been a vein of
sentiment in it that kept it in touch with human nature. Even at the
present time, each check of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company
carries on it a picture of a pretty Cupid, sitting on a chair upon which
he has placed a thick book, and gayly prattling into a telephone.
Several sweeping changes may be expected in the near future, now that
there is team-play between the Bell System and the Western Union.
Already, by a stroke of the pen, five million users of telephones
have been put on the credit books of the Western Union; and every Bell
telephone office is now a telegraph office. Three telephone messages and
eight telegrams may be sent AT THE SAME TIME over two pairs of wires:
that is one of the recent miracles of science, and is now to be tried
out upon a gigantic scale. Most of the long-distance telephone wires,
fully two million miles, can be used for telegraphic purposes; and a
third of the Western Union wires, five hundred thousand miles, may with
a few changes be used for talking.
The Western Union is paying rent for twenty-two thousand, five hundred
offices, all of which helps to make telegraphy a luxury of the few. It
is employing as large a force of messenger-boys as the army that marched
with General Sherman from Atlanta to the sea. Both of these items of
expense will dwindle when a Bell wire and a Morse wire can be brought to
a common terminal; and when a telegram can be received or delivered by
telephone. There will also be a gain, perhaps the largest of all, in
removing the trudging little messenger-boy from the streets and sending
him either to school or to learn some useful trade.
The fact is that the United States is the first country that has
succeeded in putting both telephone and telegraph upon the proper basis.
Elsewhere either the two are widely apart, or the telephone is a mere
adjunct of a telegraphic department. According to the new American plan,
the two are not competitive, but complementary. The one is a supplement
to the other. The post office sends a package; the telegraph sends
the contents of the package; but the telephone sends nothing. It is an
apparatus that makes conversation possible between two separated people.
Each of the three has a distinct field of its own, so that there has
never been any cause for jealousy among them.
To make the telephone an annex of the post office or the telegraph has
become absurd. There are now in the whole world very nearly as many
messages sent by telephone as by letter; and there are THIRTY-TWO
TIMES as many telephone calls as telegrams. In the United States, the
telephone has grown to be the big brother of the telegraph. It has six
times the net earnings and eight times the wire. And it transmits as
many messages as the combined total of telegrams, letters, and railroad
passengers.
This universal trend toward consolidation has introduced a variety of
problems that will engage the ablest brains in the telephone world for
many years to come. How to get the benefits of organization without its
losses, to become strong without losing quickness, to become systematic
without losing the dash and dare of earlier days, to develop the
working force into an army of high-speed specialists without losing the
bird's-eye view of the whole situation,--these are the riddles of the
new type, for which the telephonists of the next generation must
find the answers. They illustrate the nature of the big jobs that the
telephone has to offer to an ambitious and gifted young man of to-day.
"The problems never were as large or as complex as they are right now,"
says J. J. Carty, the chief of the telephone engineers. The eternal
struggle remains between the large and little ideas--between the men who
see what might be and the men who only see what IS. There is still the
race to break records. Already the girl at the switchboard can find the
person wanted in thirty seconds. This is one-tenth of the time that was
taken in the early centrals; but it is still too long. It is one-half of
a valuable minute. It must be cut to twenty-five seconds, or twenty or
fifteen.
There is still the inventors' battle to gain miles. The distance over
which conversations can be held has been increased from twenty miles
to twenty-five hundred. But this is not far enough. There are some
civilized human beings who are twelve thousand miles apart, and who have
interests in common. During the Boxer Rebellion in China, for instance,
there were Americans in Peking who would gladly have given half of their
fortune for the use of a pair of wires to New York.
In the earliest days of the telephone, Bell was fond of prophesying that
"the time will come when we will talk across the Atlantic Ocean"; but
this was regarded as a poetical fancy until Pupin invented his method
of automatically propelling the electric current. Since then the
most conservative engineer will discuss the problem of transatlantic
telephony. And as for the poets, they are now dreaming of the time
when a man may speak and hear his own voice come back to him around the
world.
The immediate long-distance problem is, of course, to talk from New York
to the Pacific. The two oceans are now only three and a half days apart
by rail. Seattle is clamoring for a wire to the East. San Diego wants
one in time for her Panama Canal Exposition in 1915. The wires are
already strung to San Francisco, but cannot be used in the present stage
of the art. And Vail's captains are working now with almost breathless
haste to give him a birthday present of a talk across the continent from
his farm in Vermont.
"I can see a universal system of telephony for the United States in the
very near future," says Carty. "There is a statue of Seward standing in
one of the streets of Seattle. The inscription upon it is, `To a United
Country.' But as an Easterner stands there, he feels the isolation of
that Far Western State, and he will always feel it, until he can
talk from one side of the United States to the other. For my part,"
continues Carty, "I believe we will talk across continents and across
oceans. Why not? Are there not more cells in one human body than there
are people in the whole earth?"
Some future Carty may solve the abandoned problem of the single wire,
and cut the copper bill in two by restoring the grounded circuit. He may
transmit vision as well as speech. He may perfect a third-rail system
for use on moving trains. He may conceive of an ideal insulating
material to supersede glass, mica, paper, and enamel. He may establish
a universal code, so that all persons of importance in the United States
shall have call-numbers by which they may instantly be located, as books
are in a library.
Some other young man may create a commercial department on wide lines, a
work which telephone men have as yet been too specialized to do. Whoever
does this will be a man of comprehensive brain. He will be as closely
in touch with the average man as with the art of telephony. He will
know the gossip of the street, the demands of the labor unions, and the
policies of governors and presidents. The psychology of the Western
farmer will concern him, and the tone of the daily press, and the
methods of department stores. It will be his aim to know the subtle
chemistry of public opinion, and to adapt the telephone service to the
shifting moods and necessities of the times. HE WILL FIT TELEPHONY LIKE
A GARMENT AROUND THE HABITS OF THE PEOPLE.
Also, now that the telephone business has become strong, its next
anxiety must be to develop the virtues, and not the defects, of
strength. Its motto must be "Ich dien"--I serve; and it will be the work
of the future statesmen of the telephone to illustrate this motto in all
its practical variations. They will cater and explain, and explain and
cater. They will educate and educate, until they have created an expert
public. They will teach by pictures and lectures and exhibitions. They
will have charts and diagrams hung in the telephone booths, so that the
person who is waiting for a call may learn a little and pass the time
more pleasantly. They will, in a word, attend to those innumerable
trifles that make the perfection of public service.
Already the Bell System has gone far in this direction by organizing
what might fairly be called a foresight department. Here is where the
fortune-tellers of the business sit. When new lines or exchanges are to
be built, these men study the situation with an eye to the future. They
prepare a "fundamental plan," outlining what may reasonably be expected
to happen in fifteen or twenty years. Invariably they are optimists.
They make provision for growth, but none at all for shrinkage. By their
advice, there is now twenty-five million dollars' worth of reserve plant
in the various Bell Companies, waiting for the country to grow up to it.
Even in the city of New York, one-half of the cable ducts are empty,
in expectation of the greater city of eight million population which
is scheduled to arrive in 1928. There are perhaps few more impressive
evidences of practical optimism and confidence than a new telephone
exchange, with two-thirds of its wires waiting for the business of the
future.
Eventually, this foresight department will expand. It may, if a leader
of genius appear, become the first real corps of practical sociologists,
which will substitute facts for the present hotch-potch of theories. It
will prepare a "fundamental plan" of the whole United States, showing
the centre of each industry and the main runways of traffic. It will
act upon the basic fact that WHEREVER THERE IS INTERDEPENDENCE, THERE
IS BOUND TO BE TELEPHONY; and it will therefore prepare maps of
interdependence, showing the widely scattered groups of industry and
finance, and the lines that weave them into a pattern of national
cooperation.
As yet, no nation, not even our own, has seen the full value of the
long-distance telephone. Few have the imagination to see what has been
made possible, and to realize that an actual face-to-face conversation
may take place, even though there be a thousand miles between. Neither
can it seem credible that a man in a distant city may be located as
readily as though he were close at hand. It is too amazing to be true,
and possibly a new generation will have to arrive before it will be
taken for granted and acted upon freely. Ultimately, there can be no
doubt that long-distance telephony will be regarded as a national asset
of the highest value, for the reason that it can prevent so much of the
enormous economic waste of travel.
Nothing that science can say will ever decrease the marvel of a
long-distance conversation, and there may come in the future
an Interpreter who will put it before our eyes in the form of a
moving-picture. He will enable us to follow the flying words in a talk
from Boston to Denver. We will flash first to Worcester, cross the
Hudson on the high bridge at Poughkeepsie, swing southwest through
a dozen coal towns to the outskirts of Philadelphia, leap across
the Susquehanna, zigzag up and down the Alleghenies into the murk
of Pittsburg, cross the Ohio at Wheeling, glance past Columbus and
Indianapolis, over the Wabash at Terre Haute, into St. Louis by the Eads
bridge, through Kansas City, across the Missouri, along the corn-fields
of Kansas, and then on--on--on with the Sante Fe Railway, across vast
plains and past the brink of the Grand Canyon, to Pueblo and the lofty
city of Denver. Twenty-five hundred miles along a thousand tons of
copper wire! From Bunker Hill to Pike's Peak IN A SECOND!
Herbert Spencer, in his autobiography, alludes to the impressive fact
that while the eye is reading a single line of type, the earth has
travelled thirty miles through space. But this, in telephony, would be
slow travelling. It is simple everyday truth to say that while your eye
is reading this dash,--, a telephone sound can be carried from New York
to Chicago.
There are many reasons to believe that for the practical idealists of
the future, the supreme study will be the force that makes such miracles
possible. Six thousand million dollars--one-twentieth of our national
wealth--is at the present time invested in electrical development. The
Electrical Age has not yet arrived; but it is at hand; and no one can
tell how brilliant the result may be, when the creative minds of a
nation are focussed upon the subdual of this mysterious force, which has
more power and more delicacy than any other force that man has been able
to harness.
As a tame and tractable energy, Electricity is new. It has no past and
no pedigree. It is younger than many people who are now alive. Among the
wise men of Greece and Rome, few knew its existence, and none put it to
any practical use. The wisest knew that a piece of amber, when rubbed,
will attract feathery substances. But they regarded this as poetry
rather than science. There was a pretty legend among the Phoenicians
that the pieces of amber were the petrified tears of maidens who had
thrown themselves into the sea because of unrequited love, and each bead
of amber was highly prized. It was worn as an amulet and a symbol of
purity. Not for two thousand years did any one dream that within its
golden heart lay hidden the secret of a new electrical civilization.
Not even in 1752, when Benjamin Franklin flew his famous kite on the
banks of the Schuylkill River, and captured the first CANNED LIGHTNING,
was there any definite knowledge of electrical energy. His lightning-rod
was regarded as an insult to the deity of Heaven. It was blamed for
the earthquake of 1755. And not until the telegraph of Morse came into
general use, did men dare to think of the thunder-bolt of Jove as a
possible servant of the human race.
Thus it happened that when Bell invented the telephone, he surprised the
world with a new idea. He had to make the thought as well as the thing.
No Jules Verne or H. G. Wells had foreseen it. The author of the Arabian
Nights fantasies had conceived of a flying carpet, but neither he nor
any one else had conceived of flying conversation. In all the literature
of ancient days, there is not a line that will apply to the telephone,
except possibly that expressive phrase in the Bible, "And there came
a voice." In these more privileged days, the telephone has come to
be regarded as a commonplace fact of everyday life; and we are apt to
forget that the wonder of it has become greater and not less; and that
there are still honor and profit, plenty of both, to be won by the
inventor and the scientist.
The flood of electrical patents was never higher than now. There are
literally more in a single month than the total number issued by the
Patent Office up to 1859. The Bell System has three hundred experts who
are paid to do nothing else but try out all new ideas and inventions;
and before these words can pass into the printed book, new uses and
new methods will have been discovered. There is therefore no immediate
danger that the art of telephony will be less fascinating in the future
than it has been in the past. It will still be the most alluring
and elusive sprite that ever led the way through a Dark Continent of
mysterious phenomena.
There still remains for some future scientist the task of showing us in
detail exactly what the telephone current does. Such a man will study
vibrations as Darwin studied the differentiation of species. He will
investigate how a child's voice, speaking from Boston to Omaha, can
vibrate more than a million pounds of copper wire; and he will invent
a finer system of time to fit the telephone, which can do as many
different things in a second as a man can do in a day, transmitting with
every tick of the clock from twenty-five to eighty thousand vibrations.
He will deal with the various vibrations of nerves and wires and
wireless air, that are necessary in conveying thought between two
separated minds. He will make clear how a thought, originating in the
brain, passes along the nerve-wires to the vocal chords, and then in
wireless vibration of air to the disc of the transmitter. At the other
end of the line the second disc re-creates these vibrations, which
impinge upon the nerve-wires of an ear, and are thus carried to the
consciousness of another brain.
And so, notwithstanding all that has been done since Bell opened up
the way, the telephone remains the acme of electrical marvels. No
other thing does so much with so little energy. No other thing is more
enswathed in the unknown. Not even the gray-haired pioneers who have
lived with the telephone since its birth, can understand their protege.
As to the why and the how, there is as yet no answer. It is as true of
telephony to-day as it was in 1876, that a child can use what the wisest
sages cannot comprehend.
Here is a tiny disc of sheet-iron. I speak--it shudders. It has a
different shudder for every sound. It has thousands of millions of
different shudders. There is a second disc many miles away, perhaps
twenty-five hundred miles away. Between the two discs runs a copper
wire. As I speak, a thrill of electricity flits along the wire. This
thrill is moulded by the shudder of the disc. It makes the second disc
shudder. And the shudder of the second disc reproduces my voice. That is
what happens. But how--not all the scientists of the world can tell.
The telephone current is a phenomenon of the ether, say the theorists.
But what is ether? No one knows. Sir Oliver Lodge has guessed that it
is "perhaps the only substantial thing in the material universe"; but no
one knows. There is nothing to guide us in that unknown country except
a sign-post that points upwards and bears the one word--"Perhaps." The
ether of space! Here is an Eldorado for the scientists of the future,
and whoever can first map it out will go far toward discovering the
secret of telephony.
Some day--who knows?--there may come the poetry and grand opera of the
telephone. Artists may come who will portray the marvel of the wires
that quiver with electrified words, and the romance of the switchboards
that tremble with the secrets of a great city. Already Puvis de
Chavannes, by one of his superb panels in the Boston Library, has
admitted the telephone and the telegraph to the world of art. He has
embodied them as two flying figures, poised above the electric wires,
and with the following inscription underneath: "By the wondrous agency
of electricity, speech dashes through space and swift as lightning bears
tidings of good and evil."
But these random guesses as to the future of the telephone may fall far
short of what the reality will be. In these dazzling days it is idle to
predict. The inventor has everywhere put the prophet out of business.
Fact has outrun Fancy. When Morse, for instance, was tacking up his
first little line of wire around the Speedwell Iron Works, who could
have foreseen two hundred and fifty thousand miles of submarine cables,
by which the very oceans are all aquiver with the news of the world?
When Fulton's tiny tea-kettle of a boat steamed up the Hudson to Albany
in two days, who could have foreseen the steel leviathans, one-sixth of
a mile in length, that can in the same time cut the Atlantic Ocean in
halves? And when Bell stood in a dingy workshop in Boston and heard
the clang of a clock-spring come over an electric wire, who could have
foreseen the massive structure of the Bell System, built up by half the
telephones of the world, and by the investment of more actual capital
than has gone to the making of any other industrial association? Who
could have foreseen what the telephone bells have done to ring out the
old ways and to ring in the new; to ring out delay, and isolation and to
ring in the efficiency and the friendliness of a truly united people?
End of Project Gutenberg's The History of the Telephone, by Herbert N. Casson