Vitaphone Corp.

“ When I was chief wireless operator on the Andalusian I met operators from all over the world. Once when I was in London I scraped up an acquaintance with a young Swede and he had about half-a-dozen pairs of head-phones that he had picked up in different countries. Telephone receivers for wireless work are like violins in that no two of them are alike and you can’t tell by their appearance what they are really worth; like violins, too, telephone receivers improve with age provided the magnets are made of the right kind of steel and properly tempered. ”

“ In thirty years, the Western Electric has sold sixty-seven million dollars' worth of telephonic apparatus to foreign countries. But this is no more than a fair beginning. To put one telephone in China to every hundred people will mean an outlay of three hundred million dollars. To give Europe as fit an equipment as the United States now has, will mean thirty million telephones, with proper wire and switchboards to match. And while telephony for the masses is not yet a live question in many countries, sooner or later, in the relentless push of civilization, it must come. ”

“ Possibly, in that far future of peace and goodwill among nations, when each country does for all the others what it can do best, the United States may be generally recognized as the source of skill and authority on telephony. It may be called in to rebuild or operate the telephone systems of other countries, in the same way that it is now supplying oil and steel rails and farm machinery. ”

“ The laws relating to the uses of wireless, and especially the rights of governments to the sole use of the systems in case of war, are in a confused condition, but eventually order must come from this chaos as it did in the history of the telephone and telegraph.
Wireless has brought the possibility of communication between any two individuals, no matter where they may be situated, within the realm of fact. A severing of communication with any part of the world will be impossible. ”

“ But the more important trends are to be found in mobile phones and in new fixed wireless broadband networks. Mobile phones are already the dominant user platform in developing countries; it is expected there will be 2.5 billion users in those regions by 2010. By that time, if current trends continue, the typical mobile phone will have the processing power of today’s desktop PC. It will almost certainly have a powerful digital camera, capable of both still and video imagery, and the capability to receive and play digital video and audio files. ”

“ Suppose that at the expiration of this Berliner patent some new invention shall be made by which, in connection with those already free to the public, an instrument can be manufactured far surpassing in utility that used to day, and the Bell Company shall purchase that invention the public, which always insists on having the best and most serviceable, will undoubtedly take the new instrument, and in that way it may happen that what is called the 'telephone monopoly' is practically still further continued. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Data-Phone makes use of all the telephone switching devices and repeating apparatus so that any type of communicating system using frequencies within the voice range may be used. For such systems the telephone company will install equipment to separate the different types of electrical transmission to prevent interference. Because Data-Phone enables not only the sound of the human voice to be sent over a telephone circuit, but information from a teletypewriter or business machine as well, this new use for the telephone system has expanded its service to many types of business communications. ”

“ Wireless telephones will not only transmit the speech more clearly and distinctly, but have the further advantages that the initial cost is very much lower than that of wire lines, the maintenance is almost nil in comparison, the depreciation is smaller, the number of employees required is less, and a break-down is limited to the inside of the station, where it could be quickly remedied by the substitution of a duplicate spare piece of apparatus. ”

“ And thus the larger truth about the telephone is that it is vastly more than a mere convenience. It is not to be classed with safety razors and piano players and fountain pens. It is nothing less than the high-speed tool of civilization, gearing up the whole mechanism to more effective social service. It is the symbol of national efficiency and cooperation.
All this the telephone is doing, at a total cost to the nation of probably $200,000,000 a year—no more than American farmers earn in ten days. ”

“ Wireless telephony, like wireless telegraphy, but to an even greater extent, is peculiarly suited for the conveyance of marine intelligence. Wireless telephony occupies a unique position in this regard-no operator is required. The additional expense of an operator is an objection to the wireless telegraph in many cases, and forbids its installation. Anybody can operate the wireless telephone. It is also much quicker-words can be spoken more rapidly than they can be put into Morse signals and translated. ”

“ The record shows, however, that the license to use various patented devices, the patents covering which are the property of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, together with engineering, financial and advisory services, are of great actual value to the Chicago Telephone Company such value being evidenced in part by the actual annual saving effected over and above the operating costs should such devices and services not be available. ”

“ We are, in other words, watching as the self‐assembled wireless net begins to cooperate thickly enough that even infrastructure builders may not have much work left to do. Combine that with ubiquitous SIP soft phones inside your PDAs, Internet tablets, laptops. Combine that with the reluctance of most people in the young generation to buy wire line telephone service anymore, and there’s a perfect storm being set up for the bandwidth merchants. ”

“ There are even now only four men who own as many as ten thousand shares of the stock of the central company. This Bell System stands as the life-work of unprivileged men, who are for the most part still alive and busy. With very few and trivial exceptions, every part of it was made in the United States. No other industrial organism of equal size owes foreign countries so little. Alike in its origin, its development, and its highest point of efficiency and expansion, the telephone is as essentially American as the Declaration of Independence or the monument on Bunker Hill. ”

“ When PBX and voice switching and all the pieces of intellect necessary to run a telephone system can be run on commodity white box hardware at no cost, and bandwidth can be bought in bulk by buyers with deep enough pockets to buy as much backbone time as they want, the telecommunications operators of the world are in a terrible jam. ”

“ It is a matter of common knowledge that a large part of the important inventions in connection with wireless telegraphy have been the work of amateurs and private research and not the outcome of official brains or the handiwork of military or naval organisations. In fact we may say that wireless telegraphy itself in its inception was an amateur product. Numerous important inventions such as the crystal detector, the oscillating valve, the triode valve—have been due to private or amateur work. ”

“ The phone companies' customers want Symbian phones and for now, at least, the phone companies understand that if they don't sell them, someone else will.
The market opportunity for a truly capable devices is enormous. ”

“ Then the optimistic Gardiner G. Hubbard, Bell's father-in-law, threw himself against the European inertia and organized the International and Oriental Telephone Companies, which came to nothing of any importance. In the same year even Enos M. Barton, the sagacious founder of the Western Electric, went to France and England to establish an export trade in telephones, and failed.
These able men found their plans thwarted by the indifference of the public, and often by open hostility. "The telephone is little better than a toy," said the Saturday Review ”

“ One telephone by itself has no value. It is as useless as a reed cut out of an organ or a finger that is severed from a hand. It is not even ornamental or adaptable to any other pur-pose. It is not at all like a piano or a talking-machine, which has a separate existence. It is useful only in proportion to the number of other telephones it reaches. AND EVERY TELEPHONE ANYWHERE ADDS VALUE TO EVERY OTHER TELEPHONE ON THE SAME SYSTEM OF WIRES. That, in a sentence, is the keynote of equitable rates. ”

“ In these more privileged days, the telephone has come to be regarded as a commonplace fact of everyday life; and we are apt to forget that the wonder of it has become greater and not less; and that there are still honor and profit, plenty of both, to be won by the inventor and the scientist.
The flood of electrical patents was never higher than now. There are literally more in a single month than the total number issued by the Patent Office up to 1859. The Bell System has three hundred experts who are paid to do nothing else but try out all new ideas and inventions ”

“ But with smartphones, we can now take videos and pictures, play movies and music, surf the web and read e-mail, and call and text. It was difficult for long-time users of older phones to take advantage of all the capabilities offered by the new phones. They were too accustomed to the limitations of older phones. ”

“ 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. ”

“ India, which is second on the Asiatic list, has no more than nine thousand telephones—one to every thirty-three thousand of her population! Not quite so many, in fact, as there are in five of the skyscrapers of New York. The Dutch East Indies and China have only seven thousand apiece, but in China there has recently come a forward movement. A fund of twenty million dollars is to be spent in constructing a national system of telephone and telegraph. Peking is now pointing with wonder and delight to a new exchange, spick and span, with a couple of ten-thousand-wire switchboards. ”

“ Roughly speaking, there are now ten million telephones in all countries, employing two hundred and fifty thousand people, requiring twenty-one million miles of wire, representing a cost of fifteen hundred million dollars, and carrying fourteen thousand million conversations a year. All this, and yet the men who heard the first feeble cry of the infant telephone are still alive, and not by any means old.
No foreign country has reached the high American level of telephony. The United States has eight telephones per hundred of population, while no other country has one-half as many. ”

“ It’s good for a Bell to be slow and plodding, most of the time. You don’t want to go home and discover that we’ve dispatched the progress-ninjas to upgrade all your phones with video screens and a hush mode that reads your thoughts. Most of our customers still can’t figure out voice mail. Some of them can’t figure out touch-tone dialing. So we’re slow. Conservative. But we can do lots of killer R&D, we can roll out really hot upgrades on the back end, and we can provide this essential service to the world that underpins its ability to communicate. We’re not just cool, we’re essential. ”

“ By 1896, when the Common Battery system created a new era, the telephone engineer had pretty well mastered his simpler troubles. He was able to handle his wires, no matter how many. By this time, too, the public was ready for the telephone. A new generation had grown up, without the prejudices of its fathers. People had grown away from the telegraphic habit of thought, which was that wire communications were expensive luxuries for the few. ”

“ Millions of messages going in all directions, crossing and recrossing one another, as is done every day by wire, are probably an impossibility by wireless telephony. Weird and little-understood conditions of the ether, static electricity, radio disturbances, make wireless work uncertain, and such a thing as twenty-four-hour service, seven days in the week, can probably never be guaranteed. In radio communication all must use a common medium, and as its use increases, so also do the difficulties. The privacy of the wire is also lacking with the wireless telephone. ”

“ The minutest vibrations conveyed to the stand are perceived at the receiver as loud noises. The tread of a fly walking over the board, S, is heard like the tramp of a horse, and the ticks of a watch are audible in the receiver when the ear is several inches away from it. The slight touch of a feather on the stand is distinctly audible, and a current of air impinging upon it is reproduced as the noise of a stream of water. The microphone is, in fact, the most sensitive detector of vibrations that is known, and its employment as a transmitter has brought the telephone to its present perfection. ”