Perhaps no other great invention of man has been within so short a
period so widely distributed as the telephone. The use of the
instrument is already co-extensive with civilization. The cost at
which the instruments are furnished is still so considerable that the
poor of the world are not able to avail themselves of the invention;
but in the so-called upper circles of society the use of the telephone
is virtually universal. It has made its way from the city to the town,
from the town to the village, from the village to the hamlet, and even
to the country-side where the millions dwell.
The telephone came by a speedy revelation. It was born of that intense
scientific activity which is the peculiarity of our age. The
antecedent knowledge out of which it sprang had existed in various
forms for a long time. The laws of acoustics were among the first to
be investigated after a true physical science began to be taught. The
phenomena of sound are so universal and experimentation in sound
production so easy, that the governing laws were readily discovered.
Acoustics, we think, foreran somewhat the science of heat, as the
science of heat preceded that of light. Electricity came last. The
telephone is an instrument belonging not wholly, not chiefly, but only
in part, to acoustics. It owes its existence to magnetic induction and
electrical transmission as much as to the mere action of sound. One
foot of the instrument, so to speak, is acoustics, and the other foot
electricity. The telephone philosophically considered is an instrument
for the conversion of a sound-wave into electrical motion, and its
reconversion into sound at a distance. The sound is, as it were,
committed to the electrical current and is thus sent to the end of the
journey, and there discharged with its message. The possibility of
this result lies first of all in the fact of electrical transmission
by wire, and in the second place to the mounting of a sound-rider on
the electrical saddle for an instantaneous journey with important
despatches!
New results in scientific progress generally seem marvelous. The
unfamiliar and unexpected thing is always a marvel; but scientifically
considered, the telephone does not seem so surprising as at first
view. The atmosphere is a conductor of sound. It is the natural agent
of transmission, and so far as the natural man is concerned, it is his
only agent for the transmission of oral utterance. If the unlearned
man have his attention called to the surprising fact of hearing his
fellow-man call out to him across a field or from far off on the
prairie, he does not think it marvelous, but only natural. Yet how
strange it is that one human being can speak to another through the
intervening space!
It is strange that one should see another at a distance; but seeing
and hearing at distances are natural functions of living creatures.
The sunlight is for one sense and the sound-wave is for the other. The
sound-wave travels on the atmosphere, and preserves its integrity. A
given sound is produced, and the same sound is heard by some ear at a
distance. All the people of the world are telephoning to one another;
for oral speech leaping from the vocal organs of one human being to
the ear of another is always telephonic. It is only when this
phenomenon of speech at a distance is taken from the soft wings of the
air, confined to a wire, and made to fly along the slender thread and
deliver itself afar in a manner to which the world has hitherto been a
stranger that the thing done and the apparatus by which it is done
seem miraculous. Indeed it is a miracle; for _miraculum_ signifies
wonderful.
The history of the invention of the telephone is easily apprehended.
The scientific principles on which it depends may be understood
without difficulty. There is, however, about the instrument and its
action something that is well nigh unbelievable. It is essentially a
thing contrary to universal experience, if not positively
inconceivable, that the slight phenomenon of the human voice should
be, so to speak, _picked up_ by a physical contrivance, carried a
thousand miles through a thread of wire not a quarter of an inch in
diameter, and delivered in its integrity to the sense of another
waiting to receive it! At all events, the history of the telephone,
belonging so distinctly to our own age, will stand as a reminder to
after times of the great stride which the human race made in inventive
skill and scientific progress in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century.
The telephone, like many similar instruments, was the work of several
ingenious minds directed at nearly the same time to the same problem.
The solution, however, must be accredited first of all to Elisha P.
Gray, of Chicago, and Alexander Graham Bell, of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. It should be mentioned, however, that Amos E.
Dolbear, of Tufts College, Massachusetts, and Thomas A. Edison, of
Menlo Park, New Jersey, likewise succeeded in solving the difficulty
in the way of telephonic communication, and in answering practically
several of the minor questions that hindered at first the complete
success of the invention. The telephone is an instrument for the
reproduction of sounds, particularly the sounds of the human voice, by
the agency of electrical conduction at long distances from the origin
of the vocal disturbance. Or it may be defined as an instrument for
the _transmission_ of the sounds referred to by the agencies
described. Indeed it were hard to say whether in a telephonic message
we receive a _reproduced_ sound or a _transmitted_ sound. On the
whole, it is more proper to speak of a reproduction of the original
sound by transmission of the waves in which that sound is first
written.
It is now well known that the phenomenon called sound consists of a
wave agitation communicated through the particles of some medium to
the organ of hearing. Every particular sound has its own physical
equivalent in the system of waves in which it is written. The only
thing, therefore, that is necessary in order to carry a sound in its
integrity to any distance, is to transmit its physical equivalent, and
to redeliver that equivalent to some organ of hearing capable of
receiving it.
Upon these principles the telephone was produced--created. Every sound
which falls by impact upon the sheet-iron disk of the instrument
communicates thereto a sort of tremor. This tremor causes the disk to
approach and recede from the magnetic pole placed just behind the
diaphragm. A current of electricity is thus induced, pulsates along
the wire to the other end, and is delivered to the metallic disk of
the second instrument, many miles away, just as it was produced in the
first. The ear of the hearer receives from the second instrument the
exact physical equivalent of the sound, or sounds, which were
delivered against the disk of the first instrument, and thus the
utterance is received at a distance just as it was given forth.
As already said, the invention of the telephone stands chiefly to the
credit of Professors Gray and Bell. It should be recorded that as
early as 1837, the philosopher Page succeeded, by means of
electro-magnetism, in transmitting _musical_ tones to a distance. It
was not, however, until 1877 that Professer Bell, in a public lecture
given at Salem, Mass., astonished his audience, and the whole country
as well, by receiving and transmitting _vocal_ messages from Boston,
twenty miles away. Incredulity had no more a place as it respected the
feasibility of talking to persons at a distance. The experiments of
Gray at Chicago, a few days later in the same month, were equally
successful. Messages were distinctly delivered between that city and
Milwaukee, a distance of eighty-five miles, nor could it be longer
doubted that a new era in the means of communication had come.
The Bell telephone, with its many modifications and improvements, has
come into rapid use. Within reasonable limits of distance, the new
method of transmitting intelligence by direct vocal utterance, has
taken the place of all slower and less convenient means of
intercommunication. The appearance of the simple instrument has been
one of the many harbingers of the oncoming better time, when the
interchange of thought and sentiment between man and man, community
and community, nation and nation, and race and race shall be the
preliminary of universal peace in the world and of the good-fellowship
of mankind.
Every such fact as the invention of the telephone, produces a complex
and almost indescribable result in human society. This result has in
it, in the first place, a change in the manners and method of the
individual There is also a change in his sentiments. He whose work in
life, whatever it may be, is accomplished in touch with the telephone
will realize that he is in touch with the whole world. This intimacy
reaches, first, his neighbors and friends. He seems to live henceforth
in their presence, and in communication with them.
The isolation of the individual life is virtually obliterated by such
an agency. Solitude disappears before it; for he whose ear is within
hearing of his instrument, knows not at what moment any one of many
thousands of people may speak to him. He knows not at what moment
intelligence of an ever-varying kind may be spoken to him from his own
community or out of the depths of distance. The mind is thus
affiliated with an enlarged and ever-present society. These
considerations do not relate to mere matters of convenience and
quickness and advantage and safety, but to the larger question of the
aggregate effect upon the individual.
The effect on the community is of like kind. The community is no
longer so segregated as it was before. The community is in touch with
other communities of like character. The conflagration in one town is
felt in the neighboring towns, if it is not seen. The epidemic of the
one is the epidemic of many. The sensation of the one community
diffuses itself instantly into several. The effect is in the
intellectual life like that of a wave produced on the lake by the
casting in of a stone. The wave widens and recedes. It may be
obstructed or unobstructed in its progress. If obstructed, the
obstructions may be removed. Then the motion of the wave will become
free and regular. So also on the tide of public thought. The telephone
is an agency _for removing mental obstructions_, and for the regular
diffusion of a common thought.
All this, however, is attended with draw-backs. One of these is the
breaking in on the privacy and seclusion of the individual life.
Individuality suffers under scientific progress. Great thinking is
accomplished best in solitude. Emerson has forcibly pointed out the
advantages which arise in the intellectual life from its isolation and
seclusion--from its free and uninterrupted communion with itself.
The convenience--the physical convenience--of life is vastly augmented
by such a contrivance as the telephone. Time is saved and trouble
obviated. But at the same time the necessity for bodily exercise is
reduced, and the overgrowth of brain at the expense of body encouraged.
The fact is that the invention of the telephone and its general use,
while it has added very greatly to the comfort of life, while it has
promoted ease and diffused a social sense that needed stimulation and
development, has at the same time brought in conditions that are not
wholly favorable to human welfare. More largely still, the truth is
that the telephone, like every other symbol and agency of progress,
has brought _enlarged responsibilities._
No man, no community, no people or nation can gain an increase of
power without accepting the accompanying increase of responsibility.
The moral nature of man is thus involved. Every forward stride of
scientific invention places upon the life of man, including his bodily
activity, his mental moods and his spiritual and moral powers, an
added stress of duty, of energy, and of rectitude in conduct from
which he may not shrink if he would be the gainer rather than the
loser. Each discovery and each improved method of employing the
beneficent forces of the natural world, brings with it a strain upon
the moral nature of man which, if he stand it, well; but if he stand
it not, then it shall go ill with him.