Telephone

“ 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. ”

“ Along the lines of civilizing contact the telephone fairly divides the wonders of the century with the telegraph, while for intimate intellectual communication it is a triumph of genius without parallel. It is the dispenser of speech in city, town, and village; in factory and mine, in army and navy ”

“ The telephone seemed quite dead.
“I don’t understand!” said Desmond to Mortimer. “What’s annoying?”
“The telephone, my dear Bellward,”—Mortimer spoke in a pompous voice—“the telephone is the symbol of the age in which we live, the age of publicity but also of indiscretion. It is almost as indiscreet to have a telephone in your house as to keep a diary. ”

“ FIG. 153.—The aerial system of a transatlantic station.
The wireless telephone enables a passenger on board ship to communicate direct with his home by relaying the message over the line wires. By the same means the captain of a ship can call his home office and communicate with the owner of the vessel.
Telegraphs and telephones are the nerves of the world, carrying swift messages from its brain centers to its hands, annihilating distance in thought. All differences between men as individuals and people as nations can be traced to the lack of close contact. ”

“ But to turn from the more whimsical aspects of this very curious discovery to its more impressive aspects, certainly nothing of modern invention has proved so extraordinary an illustration of the subjective character of space-and-time distinctions as these two kinds of telephones,—the telephone which enables a man to speak at one point and be heard at another, hundreds of miles distant, and the still more curious telephone which enables a man to speak at one point of time and be heard when not only his name, but even his nation, it may be, is forgotten. ”

“ Railways and steamships had begun this work of binding man to man by "nobler and cunninger methods." The telegraph and cable had gone still farther and put all civilized people within sight of each other, so that they could communicate by a sort of deaf and dumb alphabet. And then came the telephone, giving direct instantaneous communication and putting the people of each nation within hearing distance of each other. ”

“ The telephone has achieved a rare and exalted state for a technological artifact: it has become a HOUSEHOLD OBJECT. The telephone, like the clock, like pen and paper, like kitchen utensils and running water, has become a technology that is visible only by its absence. The telephone is technologically transparent. The global telephone system is the largest and most complex machine in the world, yet it is easy to use. ”

“ This is the longest talk on record—that is, it is the longest continuous telephone line in steady and constant use, though the human voice has been carried even greater distances with the aid of this wonderful instrument.
The telephone is so common that no one stops to consider the wonder of it, and not one person in a hundred can tell how it works. ”

“ To make the telephone an annex of the post office or the telegraph has become absurd. There are now in the whole world very nearly as many messages sent by telephone as by letter; and there are THIRTY-TWO TIMES as many telephone calls as telegrams. In the United States, the telephone has grown to be the big brother of the telegraph. It has six times the net earnings and eight times the wire. And it transmits as many messages as the combined total of telegrams, letters, and railroad passengers. ”

“ Yet marvelous as was the achievement of inventing the electric-speaking telephone, equally meritorious was the breadth of mind that could entertain at a time when poverty was pressing a prophetic vision of one vast transcontinental telephone system uniting every important village, town and city with wire highways over which messages would speed as quickly as thoughts are spoken. ”

“ THE TELEPHONE AND PHONOGRAPH. No invention of modern times equals in interest the Telephone. It has remained for an American to solve the problem of communication between persons at a distance from each other. Scientists, by means of electricity and sound, have devised an apparatus for transmitting the voice to a distance of hundreds of miles. To Alexander Graham Bell, of Massachusetts, and to Elisha P. Gray, of Chicago, is due the honor of originating this wonderful invention. ”

“ I suppose the telephone is really a useful invention. Business men tell me they wonder how they contrived to conduct their affairs without it. My own wonder always is, how any human being with the ordinary passions of his race can conduct his business, or even himself, creditably, within a hundred yards of the invention. I can imagine Job, or Griselda, or Socrates liking to have a telephone about them as exercise. Socrates, in particular, would have made quite a reputation for himself out of a three months’ subscription to a telephone. ”

“ The telephone is a nuisance—no one denies it—but it is a necessity also—no one denies that, either—and one of the greatest conveniences in an age of great conveniences. Some of the disagreeable features connected with it cannot be done away with but must be accepted with as much tranquility as we can master, like the terrific noise which an aëroplane makes or the trail of smoke and cinders which a railway train leaves behind. ”

“ CHAPTER IV. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ART
Four wire-using businesses were already in the field when the telephone was born: the fire-alarm, burglar-alarm, telegraph, and messenger-boy service; and at first, as might have been expected, the humble little telephone was huddled in with these businesses as a sort of poor relation. To the general public, it was a mere scientific toy; but there were a few men, not many, in these wire-stringing trades, who saw a glimmering chance of creating a telephone business. ”

“ On the other hand, through having a telephone of my own I now escape one of the commonest and most tiresome of life's irritations—which is to wait outside one of these call-offices while the person inside is carrying on a conversation that is not only unnecessary and frivolous, but unending. ”

“ It is the efficiency of the telephone that makes it irresistible to a great people whose passion is to "get results"—the instancy with which the communication is given, and the clear loudness of the telephone's voice in reply to yours: phenomena utterly unknown in Europe. Were I to inhabit the United States, I too should become a victim of the telephone habit, as it is practised in its most advanced form in those suburban communities to which I have already incidentally referred at the end of the previous chapter. ”

“ At the other end of the line the second disc re-creates these vibrations, which impinge upon the nerve-wires of an ear, and are thus carried to the consciousness of another brain.
And so, notwithstanding all that has been done since Bell opened up the way, the telephone remains the acme of electrical marvels. No other thing does so much with so little energy. No other thing is more enswathed in the unknown. Not even the gray-haired pioneers who have lived with the telephone since its birth, can understand their protege. ”

“ How a telephone works. A telephone is much like a delicate and complicated telegraph in which the vibrations started by your voice press the "key," and in which the sounder can vibrate swiftly in response to the electric currents passing through the wire. The "key" in the telephone is a thin metal disk that vibrates easily, back of the rubber mouthpiece. Each time an air vibration from your voice presses against it, it increases [pg 254] the current flowing in the circuit. ”

“ The telephone is the wonder of the day, but among the inventions to which the investigation of this subject has given rise is one of a kind which to us—accustomed as we now are to the electric telegraph—appears still more marvellous than even the telephone itself, one which would enable us to talk further into the future than the telephone will ever enable us to talk into space. ”

“ These uses seem wonderful to us, but each year sees the telephone helping man more and more in strange and powerful ways. It is likely that we have just begun to know a little of what this great invention can do for us.
However, if we had been boys and girls in 1875 we should have known nothing about talking over a telephone, for that was the year when the public first heard that it was possible to send sounds of the human voice along a wire from one place to another. ”

“ APPENDIX B Through the courtesy of J.J. Carty, Esq., Chief Engineer of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, there follows the clean-cut survey of the evolution of the telephone presented in his address before the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, May 17, 1916, when he received the gold medal of the Institute.
More than any other, the telephone art is a product of American institutions and reflects the genius of our people. The story of its wonderful development is a story of our own country. ”

“ The telephone grew rapidly into favor as a means of communication and in a short time it was used more than the telegraph. It is estimated that in the entire world about ten billion conversations are held over the telephone in the course of a single year.
As wonderful as the telephone was it was quickly followed by an invention even more wonderful. Al [241] most as soon as men had thoroughly mastered the art of sending messages by the aid of wires they set about trying to find a way by which messages could be sent long distances without any wires at all. ”

“ The telephone was, in fact, a new social nerve, so new and so novel that very nearly twenty years went by before it had fully grown into place, and before the social body developed the instinct of using it. ”

“ The invention of a telephone is a great blessing to mankind; it enables friends to talk to each other at a distance without the trouble of calling. [1] Sweethearts can exchange their sweet nothings, and even proposals of marriage have been made and accepted through the telephone. However, one is subjected to frequent annoyances from wrong connections at the Central Office, and sometimes grave errors are made. Once, through a serious blunder, or a mischievous joke, I lost a dinner in my Legation in Washington. ”

“ Wherever a telephone circuit has been made upon telegraph poles having other wires upon them, the inductive actions of the currents upon the other wires has been found to seriously interfere with the action of the telephones, inasmuch as the latter reproduce every other message. One skilled in reading by sound in the ordinary way can read through the telephone what message is travelling in a neighboring wire. ”

“ The idea of installing a telephone in this office is not in itself a novel one, as you may recollect that the suggestion has cropped up in the correspondence that has passed between us...."
And now, as I have said, the telephone is installed. The instrument is fashioned in a severe style (receiver and mouth-piece mounted on an ebonite column of the Roman Doric Order) , and it stands for all to see as a symbol that in the seclusion of our offices we are in touch with the world at large. ”

“ To the average citizen, the idea of the telephone is represented by, well, a TELEPHONE: a device that you talk into. To a telco professional, however, the telephone itself is known, in lordly fashion, as a "subset." ”

“ It began to dawn on us that people engaged in getting their living in the ordinary walks of life couldn’t be expected to keep the telephone at their ear all the time waiting for a call, especially as it weighed about ten pounds then and was as big as a small packing case, so it devolved on me to get up some sort of a call signal. Williams on his line used to call by thumping the diaphragm through the mouthpiece with the butt of a lead pencil. ”

“ The Bell telephone—The Edison transmitter—The granular carbon transmitter—General arrangement of a telephone circuit—Double-line circuits—Telephone exchanges—Submarine telephony.
For the purposes of everyday life the telephone is even more useful than the telegraph. Telephones now connect one room of a building with another, house with house, town with town, country with country. An infinitely greater number of words pass over the telephonic circuits of the world in a year than are transmitted by telegraph operators. ”

“ Meanwhile the fame of the invention had spread rapidly abroad and all sorts of people made pilgrimages to Bell’s laboratory to hear the telephone talk. A list of the scientists who came to the attic of that cheap boarding house to see the telephone would read like the roster of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. My old electrical mentor, Moses G. Farmer, called one day to see the latest improvements. ”

“ That the telephone is now doing most of all, in this binding together of all manner of men, is perhaps not too much to claim, when we remember that there are now in the United States seventy thousand holders of Bell telephone stock and ten million users of telephone service. ”