The History of the Telephone Part 5

In Carty, the engineer evolved into the educator. His end of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company became the University of the Telephone. He was himself a student by disposition, with a special taste for the writings of Faraday, the forerunner; Tyndall, the expounder; and Spencer, the philosopher. And in 1890, he gathered around him a winnowed group of college graduates--he has sixty of them on his staff to-day--so that he might bequeath to the telephone an engineering corps of loyal and efficient men.

The next problem that faced the young men of the telephone, as soon as they had escaped from the clamor of the mysterious noises, was the necessity of taking down the wires in the city streets and putting them underground. At first, they had strung the wires on poles and roof-tops.

They had done this, not because it was cheap, but because it was the only possible way, so far as any one knew in that kindergarten period.

A telephone wire required the daintiest of handling. To bury it was to smother it, to make it dull or perhaps entirely useless. But now that the number of wires had swollen from hundreds to thousands, the overhead method had been outgrown. Some streets in the larger cities had become black with wires. Poles had risen to fifty feet in height, then sixty--seventy--eighty. Finally the highest of all pole lines was built along West Street, New York--every pole a towering Norway pine, with its top ninety feet above the roadway, and carrying thirty cross-arms and three hundred wires.

From poles the wires soon overflowed to housetops, until in New York alone they had overspread eleven thousand roofs. These roofs had to be kept in repair, and their chimneys were the deadly enemies of the iron wires. Many a wire, in less than two or three years, was withered to the merest shred of rust. As if these troubles were not enough, there were the storms of winter, which might wipe out a year's revenue in a single day. The sleet storms were the worst. Wires were weighted down with ice, often three pounds of ice per foot of wire. And so, what with sleet, and corrosion, and the cost of roof-repairing, and the lack of room for more wires, the telephone men were between the devil and the deep sea--between the urgent necessity of burying their wires, and the inexorable fact that they did not know how to do it.

Fortunately, by the time that this problem arrived, the telephone business was fairly well established. It had outgrown its early days of ridicule and incredulity. It was paying wages and salaries and even dividends. Evidently it had arrived on the scene in the nick of time--after the telegraph and before the trolleys and electric lights.

Had it been born ten years later, it might not have been able to survive. So delicate a thing as a baby telephone could scarcely have protected itself against the powerful currents of electricity that came into general use in 1886, if it had not first found out a way of hiding safely underground.

The first declaration in favor of an underground system was made by the Boston company in 1880. "It may be expedient to place our entire system underground," said the sorely perplexed manager, "whenever a practicable method is found of accomplis.h.i.+ng: it." All manner of theories were afloat but Theodore N. Vail, who was usually the man of constructive imagination in emergencies, began in 1882 a series of actual experiments at Attleborough, Ma.s.sachusetts, to find out exactly what could, and what could not, be done with wires that were buried in the earth.

A five-mile trench was dug beside a railway track. The work was done handily and cheaply by the labor-saving plan of hitching a locomotive to a plough. Five ploughs were jerked apart before the work was finished.

Then, into this trench were laid wires with every known sort of covering. Most of them, naturally, were wrapped with rubber or gutta-percha, after the fas.h.i.+on of a submarine cable. When all were in place, the willing locomotive was harnessed to a huge wooden drag, which threw the ploughed soil back into the trench and covered the wires a foot deep. It was the most professional cable-laying that any one at that time could do, and it succeeded, not brilliantly, but well enough to encourage the telephone engineers to go ahead.

Several weeks later, the first two cables for actual use were laid in Boston and Brooklyn; and in 1883 Engineer J. P. Davis was set to grapple with the Herculean labor of putting a complete underground system in the wire-bound city of New York. This he did in spite of a bombardment of explosions from leaky gas-pipes, and with a woeful lack of experts and standard materials. All manner of makes.h.i.+fts had to be tried in place of tile ducts, which were not known in 1883. Iron pipe was used at first, then asphalt, concrete, boxes of sand and creosoted wood. As for the wires, they were first wrapped in cotton, and then twisted into cables, usually of a hundred wires each. And to prevent the least taint of moisture, which means sudden death to a telephone current, these cables were invariably soaked in oil.

This oil-filled type of cable carried the telephone business safely through half a dozen years. But it was not the final type. It was preliminary only, the best that could be made at that time. Not one is in use to-day. In 1888 Theodore Vail set on foot a second series of experiments, to see if a cable could be made that was better suited as a highway for the delicate electric currents of the telephone. A young engineer named John A. Barrett, who had already made his mark as an expert, by finding a way to twist and transpose the wires, was set apart to tackle this problem. Being an economical Vermonter, Barrett went to work in a little wooden shed in the backyard of a Brooklyn foundry. In this foundry he had seen a unique machine that could be made to mould hot lead around a rope of twisted wires. This was a notable discovery.

It meant TIGHT COVERINGS. It meant a victory over that most troublesome of enemies--moisture. Also, it meant that cables could henceforth be made longer, with fewer sleeves and splices, and without the oil, which had always been an unmitigated nuisance.

Next, having made the cable tight, Barrett set out to produce it more cheaply and by accident stumbled upon a way to make it immensely more efficient. All wires were at that time wrapped with cotton, and his plan was to find some less costly material that would serve the same purpose.

One of his workmen, a Virginian, suggested the use of paper twine, which had been used in the South during the Civil War, when cotton was scarce and expensive. Barrett at once searched the South for paper twine and found it. He bought a barrel of it from a small factory in Richmond, but after a trial it proved to be too flimsy. If such paper could be put on flat, he reasoned, it would be stronger. Just then he heard of an erratic genius who had an invention for winding paper tape on wire for the use of milliners.

Paper-wound bonnet-wire! Who could imagine any connection between this and the telephone? Yet this hint was exactly what Barrett needed. He experimented until he had devised a machine that crumpled the paper around the wire, instead of winding it tightly. This was the finis.h.i.+ng touch. For a time these paper-wound cables were soaked in oil, but in 1890 Engineer F. A. Pickernell dared to trust to the tightness of the lead sheathing, and laid a "dry core" cable, the first of the modern type, in one of the streets of Philadelphia. This cable was the event of the year. It was not only cheaper. It was the best-talking cable that had ever been harnessed to a telephone.

What Barrett had done was soon made clear. By wrapping the wire with loose paper, he had in reality cus.h.i.+oned it with AIR, which is the best possible insulator. Not the paper, but the air in the paper, had improved the cable. More air was added by the omission of the oil. And presently Barrett perceived that he had merely reproduced in a cable, as far as possible, the conditions of the overhead wires, which are separated by nothing but air.

By 1896 there were two hundred thousand miles of wire snugly wrapped in paper and lying in leaden caskets beneath the streets of the cities, and to-day there are six million miles of it owned by the affiliated Bell companies. Instead of blackening the streets, the wire nerves of the telephone are now out of sight under the roadway, and twining into the bas.e.m.e.nts of buildings like a new sort of metallic ivy. Some cables are so large that a single spool of cable will weigh twenty-six tons and require a giant truck and a sixteen-horse team to haul it to its resting-place. As many as twelve hundred wires are often bunched into one sheath, and each cable lies loosely in a little duct of its own.

It is reached by manholes where it runs under the streets and in little switching-boxes placed at intervals it is frayed out into separate pairs of wires that blossom at length into telephones.

Out in the open country there are still the open wires, which in point of talking are the best. In the suburbs of cities there are neat green posts with a single gray cable hung from a heavy wire. Usually, a telephone pole is made from a sixty-year-old tree, a cedar, chestnut, or juniper. It lasts twelve years only, so that the one item of poles is still costing the telephone companies several millions a year. The total number of poles now in the United States, used by telephone and telegraph companies, once covered an area, before they were cut down, as large as the State of Rhode Island.

But the highest triumph of wire-laying came when New York swept into the Skysc.r.a.per Age, and when hundreds of tall buildings, as high as the fall of the waters of Niagara, grew up like a range of magical cliffs upon the precious rock of Manhattan. Here the work of the telephone engineer has been so well done that although every room in these cliff-buildings has its telephone, there is not a pole in sight, not a cross-arm, not a wire. Nothing but the tip-ends of an immense system are visible. No sooner is a new skysc.r.a.per walled and roofed, than the telephones are in place, at once putting the tenants in touch with the rest of the city and the greater part of the United States. In a single one of these monstrous buildings, the Hudson Terminal, there is a cable that runs from bas.e.m.e.nt to roof and ravels out to reach three thousand desks.

This mighty geyser of wires is fifty tons in weight and would, if straightened out into a single line, connect New York with Chicago. Yet it is as invisible as the nerves and muscles of a human body.

During this evolution of the cable, even the wire itself was being remade. Vail and others had noticed that of all the varieties of wire that were for sale, not one was exactly suitable for a telephone system.

The first telephone wire was of galvanized iron, which had at least the primitive virtue of being cheap. Then came steel wire, stronger but less durable. But these wires were noisy and not good conductors of electricity. An ideal telephone wire, they found, must be made of either silver or copper. Silver was out of the question, and copper wire was too soft and weak. It would not carry its own weight.

The problem, therefore, was either to make steel wire a better conductor, or to produce a copper wire that would be strong enough. Vail chose the latter, and forthwith gave orders to a Bridgeport manufacturer to begin experiments. A young expert named Thomas B. Doolittle was at once set to work, and presently appeared the first hard-drawn copper wire, made tough-skinned by a fairly simple process. Vail bought thirty pounds of it and scattered it in various parts of the United States, to note the effect upon it of different climates. One length of it may still be seen at the Vail homestead in Lyndonville, Vermont. Then this hard-drawn wire was put to a severe test by being strung between Boston and New York. This line was a brilliant success, and the new wire was hailed with great delight as the ideal servant of the telephone.

Since then there has been little trouble with copper wire, except its price. It was four times as good as iron wire, and four times as expensive. Every mile of it, doubled, weighed two hundred pounds and cost thirty dollars. On the long lines, where it had to be as thick as a lead pencil, the expense seemed to be ruinously great. When the first pair of wires was strung between New York and Chicago, for instance, it was found to weigh 870,000 pounds--a full load for a twenty-two-car freight train; and the cost of the bare metal was $130,000. So enormous has been the use of copper wire since then by the telephone companies, that fully one-fourth of all the capital invested in the telephone has gone to the owners of the copper mines.

For several years the brains of the telephone men were focussed upon this problem--how to reduce the expenditure on copper. One uncanny device, which would seem to be a mere inventor's fantasy if it had not already saved the telephone companies four million dollars or more, is known as the "phantom circuit." It enables three messages to run at the same time, where only two ran before. A double track of wires is made to carry three talk-trains running abreast, a feat made possible by the whimsical disposition of electricity, and which is utterly inconceivable in railroading. This invention, which is the nearest approach as yet to multiple telephony, was conceived by Jacobs in England and Carty in the United States.

But the most copper money has been saved--literally tens of millions of dollars--by persuading thin wires to work as efficiently as thick ones.

This has been done by making better transmitters, by insulating the smaller wires with enamel instead of silk, and by placing coils of a certain nature at intervals upon the wires. The invention of this last device startled the telephone men like a flash of lightning out of a blue sky. It came from outside--from the quiet laboratory of a Columbia professor who had arrived in the United States as a young Hungarian immigrant not many years earlier. From this professor, Michael J.

Pupin, came the idea of "loading" a telephone line, in such a way as to reinforce the electric current. It enabled a thin wire to carry as far as a thick one, and thus saved as much as forty dollars a wire per mile.

As a reward for his cleverness, a shower of gold fell upon Pupin, and made him in an instant as rich as one of the grand-dukes of his native land.

It is now a most highly skilled occupation, supporting fully fifteen thousand families, to put the telephone wires in place and protect them against innumerable dangers. This is the profession of the wire chiefs and their men, a corps of human spiders, endlessly spinning threads under streets and above green fields, on the beds of rivers and the slopes of mountains, ma.s.sing them in cities and fluffing them out among farms and villages. To tell the doings of a wire chief, in the course of his ordinary week's work, would in itself make a lively book of adventures. Even a washerwoman, with one lone, non-electrical clothes-line of a hundred yards to operate, has often enough trouble with it. But the wire chiefs of the Bell telephone have charge of as much wire as would make TWO HUNDRED MILLION CLOTHES-LINES--ten apiece to every family in the United States; and these lines are not punctuated with clothespins, but with the most delicate of electrical instruments.

The wire chiefs must detect trouble under a thousand disguises. Perhaps a small boy has thrown a snake across the wires or driven a nail into a cable. Perhaps some self-reliant citizen has moved his own telephone from one room to another. Perhaps a sudden rainstorm has splashed its fatal moisture upon an unwiped joint. Or perhaps a submarine cable has been sat upon by the Lusitania and flattened to death. But no matter what the trouble, a telephone system cannot be stopped for repairs.

It cannot be picked up and put into a dry-dock. It must be repaired or improved by a sort of vivisection while it is working. It is an interlocking unit, a living, conscious being, half human and half machine; and an injury in any one place may cause a pain or sickness to its whole vast body.

And just as the particles of a human body change every six or seven years, without disturb-ing the body, so the particles of our telephone systems have changed repeatedly without any interruption of traffic.

The constant flood of new inventions has necessitated several complete rebuildings. Little or nothing has ever been allowed to wear out. The New York system was rebuilt three times in sixteen years; and many a costly switchboard has gone to the sc.r.a.p-heap at three or four years of age. What with repairs and inventions and new construction, the various Bell companies have spent at least $425,000,000 in the first ten years of the twentieth century, without hindering for a day the ceaseless torrent of electrical conversation.

The crowning glory of a telephone system of to-day is not so much the simple telephone itself, nor the maze and mileage of its cables, but rather the wonderful mechanism of the Switchboard. This is the part that will always remain mysterious to the public. It is seldom seen, and it remains as great a mystery to those who have seen it as to those who have not. Explanations of it are futile. As well might any one expect to learn Sanscrit in half an hour as to understand a switchboard by making a tour of investigation around it. It is not like anything else that either man or Nature has ever made. It defies all metaphors and comparisons. It cannot be shown by photography, not even in moving-pictures, because so much of it is concealed inside its wooden body. And few people, if any, are initiated into its inner mysteries except those who belong to its own cortege of inventors and attendants.

A telephone switchboard is a pyramid of inventions. If it is full-grown, it may have two million parts. It may be lit with fifteen thousand tiny electric lamps and nerved with as much wire as would reach from New York to Berlin. It may cost as much as a thousand pianos or as much as three square miles of farms in Indiana. The ten thousand wire hairs of its head are not only numbered, but enswathed in silk, and combed out in so marvellous a way that any one of them can in a flash be linked to any other. Such hair-dressing! Such puffs and braids and ringlet relays!

Whoever would learn the utmost that may be done with copper hairs of t.i.tian red, must study the fantastic coiffure of a telephone Switchboard.

If there were no switchboard, there would still be telephones, but not a telephone system. To connect five thousand people by telephone requires five thousand wires when the wires run to a switchboard; but without a switchboard there would have to be 12,497,500 wires--4,999 to every telephone. As well might there be a nerve-system without a brain, as a telephone system without a switchboard. If there had been at first two separate companies, one owning the telephone and the other the switchboard, neither could have done the business.

Several years before the telephone got a switchboard of its own, it made use of the boards that had been designed for the telegraph. These were as simple as wheelbarrows, and became absurdly inadequate as soon as the telephone business began to grow. Then there came adaptations by the dozen. Every telephone manager became by compulsion an inventor. There was no source of information and each exchange did the best it could.

Hundreds of patents were taken out. And by 1884 there had come to be a fairly definite idea of what a telephone switchboard ought to be.

The one man who did most to create the switchboard, who has been its devotee for more than thirty years, is a certain modest and little known inventor, still alive and busy, named Charles E. Scribner. Of the nine thousand switchboard patents, Scribner holds six hundred or more. Ever since 1878, when he devised the first "jackknife switch," Scribner has been the wizard of the switchboard. It was he who saw most clearly its requirements. Hundreds of others have helped, but Scribner was the one man who persevered, who never asked for an easier job, and who in the end became the master of his craft.

It may go far to explain the peculiar genius of Scribner to say that he was born in 1858, in the year of the laying of the Atlantic Cable; and that his mother was at the time profoundly interested in the work and anxious for its success. His father was a judge in Toledo; but young Scribner showed no apt.i.tude for the tangles of the law. He preferred the tangles of wire and system in miniature, which he and several other boys had built and learned to operate. These boys had a benefactor in an old bachelor named Thomas Bond. He had no special interest in telegraphy.

He was a dealer in hides. But he was attracted by the cleverness of the boys and gave them money to buy more wires and more batteries. One day he noticed an invention of young Scribner's--a telegraph repeater.

"This may make your fortune," he said, "but no mechanic in Toledo can make a proper model of it for you. You must go to Chicago, where telegraphic apparatus is made." The boy gladly took his advice and went to the Western Electric factory in Chicago. Here he accidentally met Enos M. Barton, the head of the factory. Barton noted that the boy was a genius and offered him a job, which he accepted and has held ever since. Such is the story of the entrance of Charles E. Scribner into the telephone business, where he has been well-nigh indispensable.

His monumental work has been the development of the MULTIPLE Switchboard, a much more brain-twisting problem than the building of the Pyramids or the digging of the Panama Ca.n.a.l. The earlier types of switchboard had become too c.u.mbersome by 1885. They were well enough for five hundred wires but not for five thousand. In some exchanges as many as half a dozen operators were necessary to handle a single call; and the clamor and confusion were becoming unbearable. Some handier and quieter way had to be devised, and thus arose the Multiple board. The first crude idea of such a way had sprung to life in the brain of a Chicago man named L. B. Firman, in 1879; but he became a farmer and forsook his invention in its infancy.

In the Multiple board, as it grew up under the hands of Scribner, the outgoing wires are duplicated so as to be within reach of every operator. A local call can thus be answered at once by the operator who receives it; and any operator who is overwhelmed by a sudden rush of business can be helped by her companions. Every wire that comes into the board is ta.s.selled out into many ends, and by means of a "busy test,"

invented by Scribner, only one of these ends can be put into use at a time. The normal limit of such a board is ten thousand wires, and will always remain so, unless a race of long-armed giantesses should appear, who would be able to reach over a greater expanse of board. At present, a business of more than ten thousand lines means a second exchange.

The Multiple board was enormously expensive. It grew more and more elaborate until it cost one-third of a million dollars. The telephone men racked their brains to produce something cheaper to take its place, and they failed. The Multiple boards swallowed up capital as a desert swallows water, but THEY SAVED TEN SECONDS ON EVERY CALL. This was an unanswerable argument in their favor, and by 1887 twenty-one of them were in use.

Since then, the switchboard has had three or four rebuildings. There has seemed to be no limit to the demands of the public or the fertility of Scribner's brain. Persistent changes were made in the system of signalling. The first signal, used by Bell and Watson, was a tap on the diaphragm with the finger-nail. Soon after-wards came a "buzzer," and then the magneto-electric bell. In 1887 Joseph O'Connell, of Chicago, conceived of the use of tiny electric lights as signals, a brilliant idea, as an electric light makes no noise and can be seen either by night or by day. In 1901, J. J. Carty invented the "bridging bell," a way to put four houses on a single wire, with a different signal for each house. This idea made the "party line" practicable, and at once created a boom in the use of the telephone by enterprising farmers.

In 1896 there came a most revolutionary change in switchboards. All things were made new. Instead of individual batteries, one at each telephone, a large common battery was installed in the exchange itself.

This meant better signalling and better talking. It reduced the cost of batteries and put them in charge of experts. It established uniformity.

It introduced the federal idea into the mechanism of a telephone system.

Best of all, it saved FOUR SECONDS ON EVERY CALL. The first of these centralizing switchboards was put in place at Philadelphia; and other cities followed suit as fast as they could afford the expense of rebuilding. Since then, there have come some switchboards that are wholly automatic. Few of these have been put into use, for the reason that a switchboard, like a human body, must be semi-automatic only. To give the most efficient service, there will always need to be an expert to stand between it and the public.

As the final result of all these varying changes in switchboards and signals and batteries, there grew up the modern Telephone Exchange. This is the solar plexus of the telephone body. It is the vital spot. It is the home of the switchboard. It is not any one's invention, as the telephone was. It is a growing mechanism that is not yet finished, and may never be; but it has already evolved far enough to be one of the wonders of the electrical world. There is probably no other part of an American city's equipment that is as sensitive and efficient as a telephone exchange.

The idea of the exchange is somewhat older than the idea of the telephone itself. There were communication exchanges before the invention of the telephone. Thomas B. Doolittle had one in Bridgeport, using telegraph instruments Thomas B. A. David had one in Pittsburg, using printing-telegraph machines, which required little skill to operate. And William A. Childs had a third, for lawyers only, in New York, which used dials at first and afterwards printing machines. These little exchanges had set out to do the work that is done to-day by the telephone, and they did it after a fas.h.i.+on, in a most crude and expensive way. They helped to prepare the way for the telephone, by building up small const.i.tuencies that were ready for the telephone when it arrived.

Bell himself was perhaps the first to see the future of the telephone exchange. In a letter written to some English capitalists in 1878, he said: "It is possible to connect every man's house, office or factory with a central station, so as to give him direct communication with his neighbors.... It is conceivable that cables of telephone wires could be laid underground, or suspended overhead, connecting by branch wires with private dwellings, shops, etc., and uniting them through the main cable with a central office." This remarkable prophecy has now become stale reading, as stale as Darwin's "Origin of Species," or Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations." But at the time that it was written it was a most fanciful dream.

When the first infant exchange for telephone service was born in Boston, in 1877, it was the tiny offspring of a burglar-alarm business operated by E. T. Holmes, a young man whose father had originated the idea of protecting property by electric wires in 1858. Holmes was the first practical man who dared to offer telephone service for sale. He had obtained two telephones, numbers six and seven, the first five having gone to the junk-heap; and he attached these to a wire in his burglar-alarm office. For two weeks his business friends played with the telephones, like boys with a fascinating toy; then Holmes nailed up a new shelf in his office, and on this shelf placed six box-telephones in a row. These could be switched into connection with the burglar-alarm wires and any two of the six wires could be joined by a wire cord.

Nothing could have been simpler, but it was the arrival of a new idea in the business world.

The Holmes exchange was on the top floor of a little building, and in almost every other city the first exchange was as near the roof as possible, partly to save rent and partly because most of the wires were strung on roof-tops. As the telephone itself had been born in a cellar, so the exchange was born in a garret. Usually, too, each exchange was an off-shoot of some other wire-using business. It was a medley of makes.h.i.+fts. Almost every part of its outfit had been made for other uses. In Chicago all calls came in to one boy, who bawled them up a speaking-tube to the operators. In another city a boy received the calls, wrote them on white alleys, and rolled them to the boys at the switchboard. There was no number system. Every one was called by name.

Even as late as 1880, when New York boasted fifteen hundred telephones, names were still in use. And as the first telephones were used both as transmitters and receivers, there was usually posted up a rule that was highly important: "Don't Talk with your Ear or Listen with your Mouth."