The Telephone, Motograph, And Microphone - 6

The Telephone, Motograph, And Microphone - 6

Mr. Bernard Shaw, the distinguished English author, has given a most vivid and amusing
picture of this introduction of Edison's telephone into England, describing the apparatus
as "a much too ingenious invention, being nothing less than a telephone of such
stentorian efficiency that it bellowed your most private communications all over the
house, instead of whispering them with some sort of discretion." Shaw, as a young man,
was employed by the Edison Telephone Company, and was very much alive to his
surroundings, often assisting in public demonstra- tions of the apparatus "in a manner
which I am persuaded laid the foundation of Mr. Edison's reputation." The sketch of the
men sent over from America is graphic: "Whilst the Edison Telephone Company lasted it
crowded the basement of a high pile of offices in Queen Victoria Street with American
artificers. These deluded and romantic men gave me a glimpse of the skilled proletariat of
the United States. They sang obsolete sentimental songs with genuine emotion; and their
language was frightful even to an Irishman. They worked with a ferocious energy which
was out of all proportion to the actual result achieved. Indomitably resolved to assert their
republican manhood by taking no orders from a tall- hatted Englishman whose stiff
politeness covered his conviction that they were relatively to himself inferior and
common persons, they insisted on being slave-driven with genuine American oaths by a
genuine free and equal American foreman. They utterly despised the artfully slow British
workman, who did as little for his wages as he possibly could; never hurried himself; and
had a deep reverence for one whose pocket could be tapped by respectful behavior. Need
I add that they were contemptuously wondered at by this same British workman as a
parcel of outlandish adult boys who sweated themselves for their employer's benefit
instead of looking after their own interest? They adored Mr. Edison as the greatest man of
all time in every possible department of science, art, and philosophy, and execrated Mr.
Graham Bell, the inventor of the rival telephone, as his Satanic adversary; but each of
them had (or intended to have) on the brink of completion an improvement on the
telephone, usually a new transmitter. They were free-souled creatures, excellent
company, sensitive, cheerful, and profane; liars, braggarts, and hustlers, with an air of
making slow old England hum, which never left them even when, as often happened,
they were wrestling with difficulties of their own making, or struggling in nothoroughfares,
from which they had to be retrieved like stray sheep by Englishmen
without imagination enough to go wrong."
Mr. Samuel Insull, who afterward became private secretary to Mr. Edison, and a leader in
the development of American electrical manufacturing and the central-station art, was
also in close touch with the London situation thus depicted, being at the time private
secretary to Colonel Gouraud, and acting for the first half hour as the amateur telephone
operator in the first experimental exchange erected in Europe. He took notes of an early
meeting where the affairs of the company were discussed by leading men like Sir John
Lubbock (Lord Avebury) and the Right Hon. E. P. Bouverie (then a cabinet minister),
none of whom could see in the telephone much more than an auxiliary for getting out
promptly in the next morning's papers the midnight debates in Parliament. "I remember
another incident," says Mr. Insull. "It was at some celebration of one of the Royal
Societies at the Burlington House, Piccadilly. We had a telephone line running across the
roofs to the basement of the building. I think it was to Tyndall's laboratory in Burlington
Street. As the ladies and gentle- men came through, they naturally wanted to look at the
great curiosity, the loud-speaking telephone: in fact, any telephone was a curiosity then.
Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone came through. I was handling the telephone at the Burlington
House end. Mrs. Gladstone asked the man over the telephone whether he knew if a man
or woman was speaking; and the reply came in quite loud tones that it was a man!"
With Mr. E. H. Johnson, who represented Edison, there went to England for the
furtherance of this telephone enterprise, Mr. Charles Edison, a nephew of the inventor.
He died in Paris, October, 1879, not twenty years of age. Stimulated by the example of
his uncle, this brilliant youth had already made a mark for himself as a student and
inventor, and when only eighteen he secured in open competition the contract to install a
complete fire-alarm telegraph system for Port Huron. A few months later he was eagerly
welcomed by his uncle at Menlo Park, and after working on the telephone was sent to
London to aid in its introduction. There he made the acquaintance of Professor Tyndall,
exhibited the telephone to the late King of England; and also won the friendship of the
late King of the Belgians, with whom he took up the project of establishing telephonic
communication between Belgium and England. At the time of his premature death he was
engaged in installing the Edison quadruplex between Brussels and Paris, being one of the
very few persons then in Europe familiar with the working of that invention.
Meantime, the telephonic art in America was undergoing very rapid development. In
March, 1878, addressing "the capitalists of the Electric Telephone Company" on the
future of his invention, Bell outlined with prophetic foresight and remarkable clearness
the coming of the modern telephone exchange. Comparing with gas and water
distribution, he said: "In a similar manner, it is conceivable that cables of telephone wires
could be laid underground or suspended overhead communicating by branch wires with
private dwellings, country houses, shops, manufactories, etc., uniting them through the
main cable with a central office, where the wire could be connected as desired,
establishing direct communication between any two places in the city.... Not only so, but
I believe, in the future, wires will unite the head offices of telephone companies in
different cities; and a man in one part of the country may communicate by word of mouth
with another in a distant place."
All of which has come to pass. Professor Bell also suggested how this could be done by
"the employ of a man in each central office for the purpose of connecting the wires as
directed." He also indicated the two methods of telephonic tariff--a fixed rental and a toll;
and mentioned the practice, now in use on long-distance lines, of a time charge. As a
matter of fact, this "centralizing" was attempted in May, 1877, in Boston, with the
circuits of the Holmes burglar-alarm system, four banking-houses being thus
interconnected; while in January of 1878 the Bell telephone central-office system at New
Haven, Connecticut, was opened for business, "the first fully equipped commercial
telephone exchange ever established for public or general service."
All through this formative period Bell had adhered to and introduced the magneto form of
telephone, now used only as a receiver, and very poorly adapted for the vital function of a
speech-transmitter. From August, 1877, the Western Union Telegraph Company worked
along the other line, and in 1878, with its allied Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, it
brought into existence the American Speaking Telephone Company to introduce the
Edison apparatus, and to create telephone exchanges all over the country. In this warfare,
the possession of a good battery transmitter counted very heavily in favor of the Western
Union, for upon that the real expansion of the whole industry depended; but in a few
months the Bell system had its battery transmitter, too, tending to equalize matters. Late
in the same year patent litigation was begun which brought out clearly the merits of Bell,
through his patent, as the original and first inventor of the electric speaking telephone;
and the Western Union Telegraph Company made terms with its rival. A famous contract
bearing date of November 10, 1879, showed that under the Edison and other controlling
patents the Western Union Company had already set going some eighty- five exchanges,
and was making large quantities of telephonic apparatus. In return for its voluntary
retirement from the telephonic field, the Western Union Telegraph Company, under this
contract, received a royalty of 20 per cent. of all the telephone earnings of the Bell system
while the Bell patents ran; and thus came to enjoy an annual income of several hundred
thousand dollars for some years, based chiefly on its modest investment in Edison's work.
It was also paid several thousand dollars in cash for the Edison, Phelps, Gray, and other
apparatus on hand. It secured further 40 per cent. of the stock of the local telephone
systems of New York and Chicago; and last, but by no means least, it exacted from the
Bell interests an agreement to stay out of the telegraph field.