Ted and the Telephone Part 14

"You may be sure they did," was Mr. Hazen's response. "The harmonic telegraph was entirely sidetracked and the interest of both men turned into this newer channel. Mr. Bell, in the meantime, was giving less and less energy to his teaching and more and more to his inventing. Before many days the two could talk back and forth and hear one another's voices without difficulty, although ten full months of hard work was necessary before they were able to understand what was said. It was not until after this long stretch of patient toil that Watson unmistakably heard Mr. Bell say one day, '_Mr. Watson, please come here, I want you._' The message was a very ordinary, untheatrical one for a moment so significant but neither of the enthusiasts heeded that. The thrilling fact was that the words had come clear-cut over the wire."

"Gee!" broke in Laurie.

"It certainly must have been a dramatic moment," Mr. Hazen agreed. "Mr.

Bell, now convinced beyond all doubt of the value of his idea, hired two rooms at a cheap boarding-house situated at Number 5 Exeter Place, Boston. In one of these he slept and in the other he equipped a laboratory. Watson connected these rooms by a wire and afterward all Mr. Bell's experimenting was done here instead of at the Williams's shop. It was at the Exeter Place rooms that this first wonderful message came to Watson's ears. From this period on the telephone took rapid strides forward. By the summer of 1876, it had been improved until a simple sentence was understandable if carefully repeated three or four times."

"Repeated three or four times!" gasped Laurie in dismay.

The tutor smiled at the boy's incredulousness.

"You forget we are not dealing with a finished product," said he gently. "I am a little afraid you would have been less patient with the imperfections of an infant invention than were Bell and Watson."

"I know I should," was the honest retort.

"The telephone was a very delicate instrument to perfect," explained Mr. Hazen. "Always remember that. An inventor must not only be a man who has unshaken faith in his idea but he must also have the courage to cling stubbornly to his belief through every sort of mechanical vicissitude. This Mr. Bell did. June of 1876 was the year of the great Centennial at Philadelphia, the year that marked the first century of our country's progress. As the exhibition was to be one symbolic of our national development in every line, Mr. Bell decided to show his telephone there; to this end he set Watson, who was still at the Williams's shop, to making exhibition telephones of the two varieties they had thus far worked out."

"I'll bet Watson was almighty proud of his job," Ted interrupted.

"I fancy he was and certainly he had a right to be," answered Mr.

Hazen. "I have always been glad, too, that it fell to his lot to have this honor; for he had worked long and faithfully, and if there were glory to be had, he should share it. To his unflagging zeal and intelligence Mr. Bell owed a great deal. Few men could so whole-heartedly have effaced their own personality and thrown themselves with such zest into the success of another as did Thomas Watson."

The tutor paused.

"Up to this time," he presently went on, "the telephones used by Bell and Watson in their experiments had been very crude affairs; but those designed for the Centennial were glorified objects. Watson says that you could see your face in them. The Williams's shop outdid itself and more splendid instruments never went forth from its doors. You can therefore imagine Watson's chagrin when, after highly commending Mr.

Bell's invention, Sir William Thompson added, '_This, perhaps, greatest marvel hitherto achieved by electric telegraph has been obtained by appliances of quite a homespun and rudimentary character._'"

Both Ted and Laurie joined in the laughter of the tutor.

"And now the telephone was actually launched?" Ted asked.

"Well, it was not really in clear waters," Mr. Hazen replied, with a dubious shrug of his shoulders, "but at least there was no further question as to which of his schemes Mr. Bell should perfect. Both Mr.

Hubbard and Mr. Saunders, who were a.s.sisting him financially, agreed that for the present it must be the telephone; and recognizing the value of Watson's services, they offered him an interest in Mr. Bell's patents if he would give up his work at Williams's shop and put in all his time on this device. Nevertheless they did not entirely abandon the harmonic telegraph for Bell's success with the other invention had only served to strengthen their confidence in his ability and genius. It was also decided that Mr. Bell should move from Salem to Boston, take an additional room at the Exeter Place house (which would give him the entire floor where his laboratory was), and unhampered by further teaching plunge into the inventive career for which heaven had so richly endowed him and which he loved with all his heart. You can picture to yourselves the joy these decisions gave him and the eagerness with which he and Watson took up their labors together.

"They made telephones of every imaginable size in their attempts to find out whether there was anything that would work more satisfactorily than the type they now had. But in spite of their many experiments they came back to the kind of instrument with which they had started, discovering nothing that was superior to their original plan. Except that they compelled the transmitter to do double duty and act also as a receiver, the telephone that emerged from these many tests was practically similar in principle to the one of to-day."

"Had they made any long-distance trials up to this time?" questioned Laurie.

"No," Mr. Hazen admitted. "They had lacked opportunity to make such tests since no great span of wires was accessible to them. But on October 9, 1876, the Walworth Manufacturing Company gave them permission to try out their device on the Company's private telegraph line that ran from Boston to Cambridge. The distance to be sure was only two miles but it might as well have been two thousand so far as the excitement of the two workers went. Their baby had never been out of doors. Now at last it was to take the air! Fancy how thrilling the prospect was! As the wire over which they were to make the experiment was in use during the day, they were forced to wait until the plant was closed for the night. Then Watson, with his tools and his telephone under his arm, went to the Cambridge office where he impatiently listened for Mr. Bell's signal to come over the Morse sounder. When he had heard this and thereby made certain that Bell was at the other end of the line, he cut out the sounder, connected the telephone he had brought with him, and put his ear to the transmitter."

The hut was so still one could almost hear the breathing of the lads, who were listening intently.

"Go on!" Laurie said quickly. "Tell us what happened."

"_Nothing happened!_" answered the tutor. "Watson listened but there was not a sound."

"Great Scott!"

"The poor a.s.sistant was aghast," went on Mr. Hazen. "He was at a complete loss to understand what was the matter. Could it be that the contrivance which worked so promisingly in the Boston rooms would not work under these other conditions? Perhaps an electric current was too delicate a thing to carry sound very far. Or was it that the force of the vibration filtered off at each insulator along the line until it became too feeble to be heard? All these possibilities flashed into Watson's mind while at his post two miles away from Mr. Bell he struggled to readjust the instrument. Then suddenly an inspiration came to his alert brain. Might there not be another Morse sounder somewhere about?

If there were, that would account for the whole difficulty. Springing up, he began to search the room and after following the wires, sure enough, he traced them to a relay with a high resistance coil in the circuit. Feverishly he cut this out and rushed back to his telephone.

Plainly over the wire came Bell's voice, '_Ahoy! Ahoy!_' For a few seconds both of them were too delighted to say much of anything else.

Then they sobered down and began this first long-distance conversation.

Now one of the objections Mr. Bell had constantly been forced to meet from the skeptical public was that while the telegraph delivered messages that were of unchallenged accuracy telephone conversations were liable to errors of misunderstanding. One could not therefore rely so completely on the trustworthiness of the latter as on that of the former. To refute this charge Mr. Bell had insisted that both he and Watson carefully write out whatever they heard that the two records might afterward be compared and verified. '_That is_,' Mr. Bell had added with the flicker of a smile, '_if we succeed in talking at all_!'

Well, they did succeed, as you have heard. At first they held only a stilted dialogue and conscientiously jotted it down; but afterward their exuberance got the better of them and in sheer joy they chattered away like magpies until long past midnight. Then, loath to destroy the connection, Watson detached his telephone, replaced the Company's wires, and set out for Boston. In the meantime Mr. Bell, who had previously made an arrangement with the _Boston Advertiser_ to publish on the following morning an account of the experiment, together with the recorded conversations, had gone to the newspaper office to carry his material to the press. Hence he was not at the Exeter Place rooms when the jubilant Watson arrived. But the early morning hour did not daunt the young electrician; and when, after some delay, Mr. Bell came in, the two men rushed toward one another and regardless of everything else executed what Mr. Watson has since characterized as a _war dance_.

Certainly they were quite justified in their rejoicings and perhaps if their landlady had understood the cause of their exultations she might have joined in the dance herself. Unluckily she had only a scant sympathy with inventive genius and since the victory celebration not only aroused her, but also wakened most of her boarders from their slumbers, her ire was great and the next morning she informed the two men that if they could not be more quiet at night they would have to leave her house."

An appreciative chuckle came from the listeners.

"If she had known what she was sheltering, I suppose she would have been proud as a peac.o.c.k and promptly told all her neighbors," grinned Ted.

"Undoubtedly! But she did not know, poor soul!" returned Mr. Hazen.

"After this Mr. Bell and Mr. Watson must have shot ahead by leaps and bounds," commented Laurie.

"There is no denying that that two-mile test did give them both courage and a.s.surance," responded the tutor. "They got chances to try out the invention on longer telegraph wires; and in spite of the fact that no such thing as hard-drawn copper wire was in existence they managed to get results even over rusty wires with their unsoldered joinings.

Through such experiments an increasingly wider circle of outside persons heard of the telephone and the marvel began to attract greater attention. Mr. Bell's modest little laboratory became the mecca of scientists and visitors of every imaginable type. Moses G. Farmer, well known in the electrical world, came to view the wonder and confessed to Mr. Bell that more than once he had lingered on the threshold of the same mighty discovery but had never been able to step across it into success. It amused both Mr. Bell and Mr. Watson to see how embarra.s.sed persons were when allowed to talk over the wire. Standing up and speaking into a box has long since become too much a matter of course with us to appear ridiculous; but those experiencing the novelty for the first time were so overwhelmed by self-consciousness that they could think of nothing to say. One day when Mr. Watson called from his end of the line, 'How do you do?' a dignified lawyer who was trying the instrument answered with a foolish giggle, 'Rig-a-jig-jig and away we go!' The psychological reaction was too much for many a well-poised individual and I do not wonder it was, do you?"

"It must have been almost as good as a vaudeville show to watch the people," commented Ted.

"Better! Lots better!" echoed Laurie.

"In April, 1877, the first out-of-door telephone line running on its own private wires was installed in the shop of Charles Williams at Number 109 Court Street and carried from there out to his house at Somerville. Quite a little ceremony marked the event. Both Mr. Bell and Mr. Watson attended the christening and the papers chronicled the circ.u.mstance in bold headlines the following day. Immediately patrons who wanted telephones began to pop up right and left like so many mushrooms. But alas, where was the money to come from that should enable Mr. Bell and his a.s.sociates to branch out and grasp the opportunities that now beckoned them? The inventor's own resources were at a low ebb; Watson, like many another young man, had more brains than fortune; and neither Mr. Hubbard nor Mr. Saunders felt they could provide the necessary capital. Already the Western Union had refused Mr. Hubbard's offer to sell all Mr. Bell's patents for one hundred thousand dollars, the Company feeling that the price asked was much too high. Two years later, however, they would willingly have paid twenty-five million dollars for the privilege they had so summarily scorned. What was to be done? Money must be secured for without it all further progress was at a standstill. Was success to be sacrificed now that the goal was well within sight? And must the telephone be shut away from the public and never take its place of service in the great world? Why, if a thing was not to be used it might almost as well never have been invented! The spirits of the telephone pioneers sank lower and lower. The only way to raise money seemed to be to sell the telephone instruments outright and this Mr. Bell, who desired simply to lease them, was unwilling to do. Then an avenue of escape from this dilemma presented itself to him."

"What was it?" asked Laurie.

"He would give lectures, accompanying them with practical demonstrations of the telephone. This would bring in money and banish for a time, at least, the possibility of having to sell instead of rent telephones. The plan succeeded admirably. The first lecture was given at Salem where, because of Mr. Bell's previous residence and many friends, a large audience packed the hall. Then Boston desired to know more of the invention and an appeal for a lecture signed by Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other distinguished citizens was forwarded to Mr. Bell. The Boston lectures were followed by others in New York, Providence, and the princ.i.p.al cities throughout New England."

"It seems a shame Mr. Bell should have had to take his time to do that, doesn't it?" mused Ted. "How did they manage the lectures?"

"The lectures had a checkered existence," smiled Mr. Hazen. "Many very amusing incidents centered about them. Were I to talk until doomsday I could not begin to tell you the mult.i.tudinous adventures Mr. Bell and Mr. Watson had during their platform career; for although Mr. Watson was never really before the footlights as Mr. Bell was, he was an indispensable part of the show,--the power behind the scenes, the man at the other end of the wire, who furnished the lecture hall with such stunts as would not only convince an audience but also entertain them.

It was a dull, thankless position, perhaps, to be so far removed from the excitement and glamor, to be always playing or singing into a little wooden box and never catching a glimpse of the fun that was going on at the other end of the line; but since Mr. Watson was a rather shy person it is possible he was quite as well pleased. After all, it was Mr. Bell whom everybody wanted to see and of course Mr.

Watson understood this. Therefore he was quite content to act his modest role and not only gather together at his end of the wire cornet soloists, electric organs, bra.s.s bands, or whatever startling novelties the occasion demanded, but talk or sing himself. The shyest of men can sometimes out-Herod Herod if not obliged to face their listeners in person. As Watson had spoken so much over the telephone, he was thoroughly accustomed to it and played the parts a.s.signed him far better than more gifted but less practically trained soloists did. It always amused him intensely after he had bellowed _Pull for the Sh.o.r.e_, _Hold the Fort_ or _Yankee Doodle_ into the transmitter to hear the applause that followed his efforts. Probably singing before a large company was about the last thing Tom Watson expected his electrical career would lead him into. Had he been told that such a fate awaited him, he would doubtless have jeered at the prophecy. But here he was, singing away with all his lung power, before a great hall full of people and not minding it in the least; nay, I rather think he may have enjoyed it. Once, desiring to give a finer touch than usual to the entertainment, Mr. Bell hired a professional singer; but this soloist had never used a telephone and although he possessed the art of singing he was not able to get it across the wire. No one in the lecture hall could hear him. Mr. Bell promptly summoned Watson (who was doubtless congratulating himself on being off duty) to render _Hold the Fort_ in his customary l.u.s.ty fas.h.i.+on. After this Mr. Watson became the star soloist and no more singers were engaged."

A ripple of amus.e.m.e.nt pa.s.sed over the faces of the lads listening.

"Ironically enough, as Mr. Watson's work kept him always in the background furnis.h.i.+ng the features of these entertainments, he never himself heard Mr. Bell lecture. He says, however, that the great inventor was a very polished, magnetic speaker who never failed to secure and hold the attention of his hearers. Of course, every venture has its trials and these lecture tours were no exception to the general rule. Once, for example, the Northern Lights were responsible for demoralizing the current and spoiling a telephone demonstration at Lawrence; and although both Watson and a cornetist strained their lungs to bursting, neither of them could be heard at the hall. Then the sparks began to play over the wires and the show had to be called off.

Nevertheless such disasters occurred seldom, and for the most part the performances went smoothly, the people were delighted, and Mr. Bell increased not only his fame but his fortune."

Mr. Hazen stopped a moment.

"You must not for an instant suppose," he resumed presently, "that the telephone was a perfected product. Transmitters of sufficient delicacy to do away with shouting and screaming had not yet made their appearance and in consequence when one telephoned all the world knew it; it was not until the Blake transmitter came into use that a telephone conversation could be to any extent confidential. In its present state, the longer the range the more lung power was demanded; and probably had not this been the condition, people would have shouted anyway, simply from instinct. Even with our own delicately adjusted instruments we are p.r.o.ne to forget and commit this folly. But in the early days one was forced to uplift his voice at the telephone and if he had no voice to uplift woe betide his telephoning. And apropos of this matter, I recall reading that once, when Mr. Bell was to lecture in New York, he thought what a drawing card it would be if he could have his music and other features of entertainment come from Boston.

Therefore he arranged to use the wires of the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company and to this end he and Watson planned a dress rehearsal at midnight in order to try out the inspiration. Now it chanced that the same inflexible landlady ruled at Number 5 Exeter Place, and remembering his former experience, Mr. Watson felt something must be done to stifle the shouting he foresaw he would be compelled to do at that nocturnal hour. So he gathered together all the blankets and rolled them into a sort of cone and to the small end of this he tied his telephone. Then he crept into this stuffy, breathless shelter, the ancestor of our sound-proof telephone booth, and for nearly three hours shouted to Mr. Bell in New York--or tried to. But the experiment was not a success. He could be heard, it is true, but not distinctly enough to risk such an unsatisfactory demonstration before an uninitiated audience. Hence the scheme was abandoned and Mr. Watson scrambled his things together and betook himself to a point nearer the center of action."

"It must all have been great fun, mustn't it?" said Laurie thoughtfully.

"Great fun, no doubt, but very hard work," was the tutor's answer.

"Many a long, discouraging hour was yet to follow before the telephone became a factor in the everyday world. Yet each step of the climb to success had its sunlight as well as its shadow, its humor as well as its pathos; and it was fortunate both men appreciated this fact for it floated them over many a rough sea. Man can spare almost any other attribute better than his sense of humor. Without this touchstone he is ill equipped to battle with life," concluded Mr. Hazen whimsically.