The History of the Telephone Part 6

To describe one of those early telephone exchanges in the silence of a printed page is a wholly impossible thing. Nothing but a language of noise could convey the proper impression. An editor who visited the Chicago exchange in 1879 said of it: "The racket is almost deafening.

Boys are rushing madly hither and thither, while others are putting in or taking out pegs from a central framework as if they were lunatics engaged in a game of fox and geese." In the same year E. J. Hall wrote from Buffalo that his exchange with twelve boys had become "a perfect Bedlam." By the clumsy methods of those days, from two to six boys were needed to handle each call. And as there was usually more or less of a cat-and-dog squabble between the boys and the public, with every one yelling at the top of his voice, it may be imagined that a telephone exchange was a loud and frantic place.

Boys, as operators, proved to be most complete and consistent failures.

Their sins of omission and commission would fill a book. What with whittling the switchboards, swearing at subscribers, playing tricks with the wires, and roaring on all occasions like young bulls of Bashan, the boys in the first exchanges did their full share in adding to the troubles of the business. Nothing could be done with them. They were immune to all schemes of discipline. Like the MYSTERIOUS NOISES they could not be controlled, and by general consent they were abolished.

In place of the noisy and obstreperous boy came the docile, soft-voiced girl.

If ever the rush of women into the business world was an unmixed blessing, it was when the boys of the telephone exchanges were superseded by girls. Here at its best was shown the influence of the feminine touch. The quiet voice, pitched high, the deft fingers, the patient courtesy and attentiveness--these qualities were precisely what the gentle telephone required in its attendants. Girls were easier to train; they did not waste time in retaliatory conversation; they were more careful; and they were much more likely to give "the soft answer that turneth away wrath."

A telephone call under the boy regime meant Bedlam and five minutes; afterwards, under the girl regime, it meant silence and twenty seconds.

Instead of the incessant tangle and tumult, there came a new species of exchange--a quiet, tense place, in which several score of young ladies sit and answer the language of the switchboard lights. Now and then, not often, the signal lamps flash too quickly for these expert phonists.

During the panic of 1907 there was one mad hour when almost every telephone in Wall Street region was being rung up by some desperate speculator. The switchboards were ablaze with lights. A few girls lost their heads. One fainted and was carried to the rest-room. But the others flung the flying shuttles of talk until, in a single exchange fifteen thousand conversations had been made possible in sixty minutes.

There are always girls in reserve for such explosive occasions, and when the hands of any operator are seen to tremble, and she has a warning red spot on each cheek, she is taken off and given a recess until she recovers her poise.

These telephone girls are the human part of a great communication machine. They are weaving a web of talk that changes into a new pattern every minute. How many possible combinations there are with the five million telephones of the Bell System, or what unthinkable mileage of conversation, no one has ever dared to guess. But whoever has once seen the long line of white arms waving back and forth in front of the switchboard lights must feel that he has looked upon the very pulse of the city's life.

In 1902 the New York Telephone Company started a school, the first of its kind in the world, for the education of these telephone girls. This school is hidden amid ranges of skysc.r.a.pers, but seventeen thousand girls discover it in the course of the year. It is a most particular and exclusive school. It accepts fewer than two thousand of these girls, and rejects over fifteen thousand. Not more than one girl in every eight can measure up to its standards; and it cheerfully refuses as many students in a year as would make three Yales or Harvards.

This school is unique, too, in the fact that it charges no fees, pays every student five dollars a week, and then provides her with a job when she graduates. But it demands that every girl shall be in good health, quick-handed, clear-voiced, and with a certain poise and alertness of manner. Presence of mind, which, in Herbert Spencer's opinion, ought to be taught in every university, is in various ways drilled into the temperament of the telephone girl. She is also taught the knack of concentration, so that she may carry the switchboard situation in her head, as a chess-player carries in his head the arrangement of the chess-men. And she is much more welcome at this strange school if she is young and has never worked in other trades, where less speed and vigilance are required.

No matter how many millions of dollars may be spent upon cables and switchboards, the quality of telephone service depends upon the girl at the exchange end of the wire. It is she who meets the public at every point. She is the despatcher of all the talk trains; she is the ruler of the wire highways; and she is expected to give every pa.s.senger-voice an instantaneous express to its destination. More is demanded from her than from any other servant of the public. Her clients refuse to stand in line and quietly wait their turn, as they are quite willing to do in stores and theatres and barber shops and railway stations and everywhere else. They do not see her at work and they do not know what her work is.

They do not notice that she answers a call in an average time of three and a half seconds. They are in a hurry, or they would not be at the telephone; and each second is a minute long. Any delay is a direct personal affront that makes a vivid impression upon their minds. And they are not apt to remember that most of the delays and blunders are being made, not by the expert girls, but by the careless people who persist in calling wrong numbers and in ignoring the niceties of telephone etiquette.

The truth about the American telephone girl is that she has become so highly efficient that we now expect her to be a paragon of perfection.

To give the young lady her due, we must acknowledge that she has done more than any other person to introduce courtesy into the business world. She has done most to abolish the old-time roughness and vulgarity. She has made big business to run more smoothly than little business did, half a century ago. She has shown us how to take the friction out of conversation, and taught us refinements of politeness which were rare even among the Beau Brummels of pre-telephonic days.

Who, for instance, until the arrival of the telephone girl, appreciated the difference between "Who are you?" and "Who is this?" Or who else has so impressed upon us the value of the rising inflection, as a gentler habit of speech? This propaganda of politeness has gone so far that to-day the man who is profane or abusive at the telephone, is cut off from the use of it. He is cast out as unfit for a telephone-using community.

And now, so that there shall be no anticlimax in this story of telephone development, we must turn the spot-light upon that immense aggregation of workshops in which have been made three-fifths of the telephone apparatus of the world--the Western Electric. The mother factory of this globe-trotting business is the biggest thing in the s.p.a.cious back-yard of Chicago, and there are eleven smaller factories--her children--scattered over the earth from New York to Tokio. To put its totals into a sentence, it is an enterprise of 26,000-man-power, and 40,000,000-dollar-power; and the telephonic goods that it produces in half a day are worth one hundred thousand dollars--as much, by the way, as the Western Union REFUSED to pay for the Bell patents in 1877.

The Western Electric was born in Chicago, in the ashes of the big fire of 1871; and it has grown up to its present greatness quietly, without celebrating its birthdays. At first it had no telephones to make. None had been invented, so it made telegraphic apparatus, burglar-alarms, electric pens, and other such things. But in 1878, when the Western Union made its short-lived attempt to compete with the Bell Company, the Western Electric agreed to make its telephones. Three years later, when the brief spasm of compet.i.tion was ended, the Western Electric was taken in hand by the Bell people and has since then remained the great workshop of the telephone.

The main plant in Chicago is not especially remarkable from a manufacturing point of view. Here are the inevitable lumber-yards and foundries and machine-shops. Here is the mad waltz of the spindles that whirl silk and cotton threads around the copper wires, very similar to what may be seen in any braid factory. Here electric lamps are made, five thousand of them in a day, in the same manner as elsewhere, except that here they are so small and dainty as to seem designed for fairy palaces.

The things that are done with wire in the Western Electric factories are too many for any mere outsider to remember. Some wire is wrapped with paper tape at a speed of nine thousand miles a day. Some is fashioned into fantastic shapes that look like absurd sea-monsters, but which in reality are only the nerve systems of switchboards. And some is twisted into cables by means of a dozen whirling drums--a dizzying sight, as each pair of drums revolve in opposite directions. Because of the fact that a cable's inevitable enemy is moisture, each cable is wound on an immense spool and rolled into an oven until it is as dry as a cinder.

Then it is put into a strait-jacket of lead pipe, sealed at both ends, and trundled into a waiting freight car.

No other company uses so much wire and hard rubber, or so many tons of bra.s.s rods, as the Western Electric. Of platinum, too, which is more expensive than gold, it uses one thousand pounds a year in the making of telephone transmitters. This is imported from the Ural Mountains.

The silk thread comes from Italy and j.a.pan; the iron for magnets, from Norway; the paper tape, from Manila; the mahogany, from South America; and the rubber, from Brazil and the valley of the Congo. At least seven countries must cooperate to make a telephone message possible.

Perhaps the most extraordinary feature in the Western Electric factories is the mult.i.tude of its inspectors. No other sort of manufacturing, not even a Government navy-yard, has so many. Nothing is too small to escape these sleuths of inspection. They test every tiny disc of mica, and throw away nine out of ten. They test every telephone by actual talk, set up every switchboard, and try out every cable. A single transmitter, by the time it is completed, has had to pa.s.s three hundred examinations; and a single coin-box is obliged to count ten thousand nickels before it graduates into the outer world. Seven hundred inspectors are on guard in the two main plants at Chicago and New York. This is a ruinously large number, from a profit-making point of view; but the inexorable fact is that in a telephone system nothing is insignificant. It is built on such altruistic lines that an injury to any one part is the concern of all.

As usual, when we probe into the history of a business that has grown great and overspread the earth, we find a Man; and the Western Electric is no exception to this rule. Its Man, still fairly hale and busy after forty years of leadership, is Enos M. Barton. His career is the typical American story of self-help. He was a telegraph messenger boy in New York during the Civil War, then a telegraph operator in Cleveland. In 1869 his salary was cut down from one hundred dollars a month to ninety dollars; whereupon he walked out and founded the Western Electric in a shabby little machine-shop. Later he moved to Chicago, took in Elisha Gray as his partner, and built up a trade in the making of telegraphic materials.

When the telephone was invented, Barton was one of the sceptics. "I well remember my disgust," he said, "when some one told me it was possible to send conversation along a wire." Several months later he saw a telephone and at once became one of its apostles. By 1882 his plant had become the official workshop of the Bell Companies. It was the headquarters of invention and manufacturing. Here was gathered a notable group of young men, brilliant and adventurous, who dared to stake their futures on the success of the telephone. And always at their head was Barton, as a sort of human switchboard, who linked them all together and kept them busy.

In appearance, Enos M. Barton closely resembles ex-President Eliot, of Harvard. He is slow in speech, simple in manner, and with a rare sagacity in business affairs. He was not an organizer, in the modern sense. His policy was to pick out a man, put him in a responsible place, and judge him by results. Engineers could become bookkeepers, and bookkeepers could become engineers. Such a plan worked well in the earlier days, when the art of telephony was in the making, and when there was no source of authority on telephonic problems. Barton is the bishop emeritus of the Western Electric to-day; and the big industry is now being run by a group of young hustlers, with H. B. Thayer at the head of the table. Thayer is a Vermonter who has climbed the ladder of experience from its lower rungs to the top. He is a typical Yankee--lean, shrewd, tireless, and with a cold-blooded sense of justice that fits him for the leadership of twenty-six thousand people.

So, as we have seen, the telephone as Bell invented it, was merely a brilliant beginning in the development of the art of telephony. It was an elfin birth--an elusive and delicate sprite that had to be nurtured into maturity. It was like a soul, for which a body had to be created; and no one knew how to make such a body. Had it been born in some less energetic country, it might have remained feeble and undeveloped; but not in the United States. Here in one year it had become famous, and in three years it had become rich. Bell's invincible patent was soon b.u.t.tressed by hundreds of others. An open-door policy was adopted for invention. Change followed change to such a degree that the experts of 1880 would be lost to-day in the mazes of a telephone exchange.

The art of the telephone engineer has in thirty years grown from the most crude and clumsy of experiments into an exact and comprehensive profession. As Carty has aptly said, "At first we invariably approached every problem from the wrong end. If we had been told to load a herd of cattle on a steamer, our method would have been to hire a Hagenbeck to train the cattle for a couple of years, so that they would know enough to walk aboard of the ship when he gave the signal; but to-day, if we had to ship cattle, we would know enough to make a greased chute and slide them on board in a jiffy."

The telephone world has now its own standards and ideals. It has a language of its own, a telephonese that is quite unintelligible to outsiders. It has as many separate branches of study as medicine or law.

There are few men, half a dozen at most, who can now be said to have a general knowledge of telephony. And no matter how wise a telephone expert may be, he can never reach perfection, because of the amazing variety of things that touch or concern his profession.

"No one man knows all the details now," said Theodore Vail. "Several days ago I was walking through a telephone exchange and I saw something new. I asked Mr. Carty to explain it. He is our chief engineer; but he did not understand it. We called the manager. He did n't know, and called his a.s.sistant. He did n't know, and called the local engineer, who was able to tell us what it was."

To sum up this development of the art of tele-phony--to present a bird's-eye view--it may be divided into four periods:

1. Experiment. 1876 to 1886. This was the period of invention, in which there were no experts and no authorities. Telephonic apparatus consisted of makeshifts and adaptations. It was the period of iron wire, imperfect transmitters, grounded circuits, boy operators, peg switchboards, local batteries, and overhead lines.

2. Development. 1886 to 1896. In this period amateurs became engineers.

The proper type of apparatus was discovered, and was improved to a high point of efficiency. In this period came the multiple switchboard, copper wire, girl operators, underground cables, metallic circuit, common battery, and the long-distance lines.

3. Expansion. 1896 to 1906. This was the era of big business. It was an autumn period, in which the telephone men and the public began to reap the fruits of twenty years of investment and hard work. It was the period of the message rate, the pay station, the farm line, and the private branch exchange.

4. Organization. 1906--. With the success of the Pupin coil, there came a larger life for the telephone. It became less local and more national.

It began to link together its scattered parts. It discouraged the waste and anarchy of duplication. It taught its older, but smaller brother, the telegraph, to cooperate. It put itself more closely in touch with the will of the public. And it is now pushing ahead, along the two roads of standardization and efficiency, toward its ideal of one universal telephone system for the whole nation. The key-word of the telephone development of to-day is this--organization.

CHAPTER V. THE EXPANSION OF THE BUSINESS

The telephone business did not really begin to grow big and overspread the earth until 1896, but the keynote of expansion was first sounded by Theodore Vail in the earliest days, when as yet the telephone was a babe in arms. In 1879 Vail said, in a letter written to one of his captains:

"Tell our agents that we have a proposition on foot to connect the different cities for the purpose of personal communication, and in other ways to organize a GRAND TELEPHONIC SYSTEM."

This was brave talk at that time, when there were not in the whole world as many telephones as there are to-day in Cincinnati. It was brave talk in those days of iron wire, peg switchboards, and noisy diaphragms. Most telephone men regarded it as nothing more than talk. They did not see any business future for the telephone except in short-distance service.

But Vail was in earnest. His previous experience as the head of the railway mail service had lifted him up to a higher point of view.

He knew the need of a national system of communication that would be quicker and more direct than either the telegraph or the post office.

"I saw that if the telephone could talk one mile to-day," he said, "it would be talking a hundred miles to-morrow." And he persisted, in spite of a considerable deal of ridicule, in maintaining that the telephone was destined to connect cities and nations as well as individuals.

Four months after he had prophesied the "grand telephonic system," he encouraged Charles J. Glidden, of world-tour fame, to build a telephone line between Boston and Lowell. This was the first inter-city line. It was well placed, as the owners of the Lowell mills lived in Boston, and it made a small profit from the start. This success cheered Vail on to a master-effort. He resolved to build a line from Boston to Providence, and was so stubbornly bent upon doing this that when the Bell Company refused to act, he picked up the risk and set off with it alone.

He organized a company of well-known Rhode Islanders--nicknamed the "Governors' Company"--and built the line. It was a failure at first, and went by the name of "Vail's Folly." But Engineer Carty, by a happy thought, DOUBLED THE WIRE, and thus in a moment established two new factors in the telephone business--the Metallic Circuit and the Long Distance line.

At once the Bell Company came over to Vail's point of view, bought his new line, and launched out upon what seemed to be the foolhardy enterprise of stringing a double wire from Boston to New York. This was to be not only the longest of all telephone lines, strung on ten thousand poles; it was to be a line de luxe, built of glistening red copper, not iron. Its cost was to be seventy thousand dollars, which was an enormous sum in those hardscrabble days. There was much opposition to such extravagance, and much ridicule. "I would n't take that line as a gift," said one of the Bell Company's officials.

But when the last coil of wire was stretched into place, and the first "h.e.l.lo" leaped from Boston to New York, the new line was a victorious success. It carried messages from the first day; and more, it raised the whole telephone business to a higher level. It swept away the prejudice that telephone service could become nothing more than a neighborhood affair. "It was the salvation of the business," said Edward J. Hill. It marked a turning-point in the history of the telephone, when the day of small things was ended and the day of great things was begun. No one man, no hundred men, had created it. It was the final result of ten years of invention and improvement.

While this epoch-making line was being strung, Vail was pushing his "grand telephonic system" policy by organizing The American Telephone and Telegraph Company. This, too, was a master-stroke. It was the introduction of the staff-and-line method of organization into business.

It was doing for the forty or fifty Bell Companies what Von Moltke did for the German army prior to the Franco-Prussian War. It was the creation of a central company that should link all local companies together, and itself own and operate the means by which these companies are united. This central company was to grapple with all national problems, to own all telephones and long-distance lines, to protect all patents, and to be the headquarters of invention, information, capital, and legal protection for the entire federation of Bell Companies.

Seldom has a company been started with so small a capital and so vast a purpose. It had no more than $100,000 of capital stock, in 1885; but its declared object was nothing less than to establish a system of wire communication for the human race. Here are, in its own words, the marching orders of this Company: "To connect one or more points in each and every city, town, or place an the State of New York, with one or more points in each and every other city, town, or place in said State, and in each and every other of the United States, and in Canada, and Mexico; and each and every of said cities, towns, and places is to be connected with each and every other city, town, or place in said States and countries, and also by cable and other appropriate means with the rest of the known world."

So ran Vail's dream, and for nine years he worked mightily to make it come true. He remained until the various parts of the business had grown together, and until his plan for a "grand telephonic system" was under way and fairly well understood. Then he went out, into a series of picturesque enterprises, until he had built up a four-square fortune; and recently, in 1907, he came back to be the head of the telephone business, and to complete the work of organization that he started thirty years before.

When Vail said auf wiedersehen to the telephone business, it had pa.s.sed from infancy to childhood. It was well shaped but not fully grown. Its pioneering days were over. It was self-supporting and had a little money in the bank. But it could not then have carried the load of traffic that it carries to-day. It had still too many problems to solve and too much general inertia to overcome. It needed to be conserved, drilled, educated, popularized. And the man who was finally chosen to replace Vail was in many respects the appropriate leader for such a preparatory period.

Hudson--John Elbridge Hudson--was the name of the new head of the telephone people. He was a man of middle age, born in Lynn and bred in Boston; a long-pedigreed New Englander, whose ancestors had smelted iron ore in Lynn when Charles the First was King. He was a lawyer by profession and a university professor by temperament. His specialty, as a man of affairs, had been marine law; and his hobby was the collection of rare books and old English engravings. He was a master of the Greek language, and very fond of using it. On all possible occasions he used the language of Pericles in his conversation; and even carried this preference so far as to write his business memoranda in Greek. He was above all else a scholar, then a lawyer, and somewhat incidentally the central figure in the telephone world.