The Telephone, Motograph, And Microphone - 4

The Telephone, Motograph, And Microphone - 4

A year or two later the motograph cropped up again in Edison's work in a curious

manner. The telephone was being developed in England, and Edison had made

arrangements with Colonel Gouraud, his old associate in the automatic telegraph, to

represent his interests. A company was formed, a large number of instruments were made

and sent to Gouraud in London, and prospects were bright. Then there came a threat of

litigation from the owners of the Bell patent, and Gouraud found he could not push the

enterprise unless he could avoid using what was asserted to be an infringement of the

Bell receiver. He cabled for help to Edison, who sent back word telling him to hold the

fort. "I had recourse again," says Edison, "to the phenomenon discovered by me years

previous, that the friction of a rubbing electrode passing over a moist chalk surface was

varied by electricity. I devised a telephone receiver which was afterward known as the

`loud-speaking telephone,' or `chalk receiver.' There was no magnet, simply a diaphragm

and a cylinder of compressed chalk about the size of a thimble. A thin spring connected

to the centre of the diaphragm extended outwardly and rested on the chalk cylinder, and

was pressed against it with a pressure equal to that which would be due to a weight of

about six pounds. The chalk was rotated by hand. The volume of sound was very great. A

person talking into the carbon transmitter in New York had his voice so amplified that he

could be heard one thousand feet away in an open field at Menlo Park. This great excess

of power was due to the fact that the latter came from the person turning the handle. The

voice, instead of furnishing all the power as with the present receiver, merely controlled

the power, just as an engineer working a valve would control a powerful engine.

"I made six of these receivers and sent them in charge of an expert on the first steamer.

They were welcomed and tested, and shortly afterward I shipped a hundred more. At the

same time I was ordered to send twenty young men, after teaching them to become

expert. I set up an exchange, around the laboratory, of ten instruments. I would then go

out and get each one out of order in every conceivable way, cutting the wires of one,

short-circuiting another, destroying the adjustment of a third, putting dirt between the

electrodes of a fourth, and so on. A man would be sent to each to find out the trouble.

When he could find the trouble ten consecutive times, using five minutes each, he was

sent to London. About sixty men were sifted to get twenty. Before all had arrived, the

Bell company there, seeing we could not be stopped, entered into negotiations for

consolidation. One day I received a cable from Gouraud offering `30,000' for my interest.

I cabled back I would accept. When the draft came I was astonished to find it was for

L30,000. I had thought it was dollars."

In regard to this singular and happy conclusion, Edison makes some interesting

comments as to the attitude of the courts toward inventors, and the difference between

American and English courts. "The men I sent over were used to establish telephone

exchanges all over the Continent, and some of them became wealthy. It was among this

crowd in London that Bernard Shaw was employed before he became famous. The chalk

telephone was finally discarded in favor of the Bell receiver--the latter being more simple

and cheaper. Extensive litigation with new-comers followed. My carbon-transmitter

patent was sustained, and preserved the monopoly of the telephone in England for many

years. Bell's patent was not sustained by the courts. Sir Richard Webster, now Chief-

Justice of England, was my counsel, and sustained all of my patents in England for many

years. Webster has a marvellous capacity for understanding things scientific; and his

address before the courts was lucidity itself. His brain is highly organized. My experience

with the legal fraternity is that scientific subjects are distasteful to them, and it is rare in

this country, on account of the system of trying patent suits, for a judge really to reach the

meat of the controversy, and inventors scarcely ever get a decision squarely and entirely

in their favor. The fault rests, in my judgment, almost wholly with the system under

which testimony to the extent of thousands of pages bearing on all conceivable subjects,

many of them having no possible connection with the invention in dispute, is presented to

an over- worked judge in an hour or two of argument supported by several hundred pages

of briefs; and the judge is supposed to extract some essence of justice from this mass of

conflicting, blind, and misleading statements. It is a human impossibility, no matter how

able and fair-minded the judge may be. In England the case is different. There the judges

are face to face with the experts and other witnesses. They get the testimony first-hand

and only so much as they need, and there are no long-winded briefs and arguments, and

the case is decided then and there, a few months perhaps after suit is brought, instead of

many years afterward, as in this country. And in England, when a case is once finally

decided it is settled for the whole country, while here it is not so. Here a patent having

once been sustained, say, in Boston, may have to be litigated all over again in New York,

and again in Philadelphia, and so on for all the Federal circuits. Furthermore, it seems to

me that scientific disputes should be decided by some court containing at least one or two

scientific men-- men capable of comprehending the significance of an invention and the

difficulties of its accomplishment --if justice is ever to be given to an inventor. And I

think, also, that this court should have the power to summon before it and examine any

recognized expert in the special art, who might be able to testify to FACTS for or against

the patent, instead of trying to gather the truth from the tedious essays of hired experts,

whose depositions are really nothing but sworn arguments. The real gist of patent suits is

generally very simple, and I have no doubt that any judge of fair intelligence, assisted by

one or more scientific advisers, could in a couple of days at the most examine all the

necessary witnesses; hear all the necessary arguments, and actually decide an ordinary

patent suit in a way that would more nearly be just, than can now be done at an

expenditure of a hundred times as much money and months and years of preparation.

And I have no doubt that the time taken by the court would be enormously less, because

if a judge attempts to read the bulky records and briefs, that work alone would require

several days.