On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell, standing in a little attic at No. 5 Exeter Place, Boston, sent through his crude telephone the first spoken words ever carried over a wire, and the words were heard and understood by his associate, Thomas A. Watson, who was at the receiver in an adjacent room. On that day the telephone was born, and the first message went over the only telephone line in the world—a line less than a hundred feet long. On January 25, 1915, less than forty years later, this same Alexander Graham Bell, in New York, talked to this same Thomas A. Watson, in San Francisco, over a wire stretching 3,400 miles across the continent.

In that memorable year of 1876, Dom Pedro, Emperor of Brazil, while visiting the Philadelphia Centennial, was attracted to Bell’s modest telephone exhibit, picked up the receiver, listened as Professor Bell talked at the other end of the room, and, amazed at the wonder of the thing, cried out, “My God—it speaks!” From that time, the first telephone exhibit became the center of attraction at the exposition. Had Dom Pedro lived to see the Panama-Pacific Exposition he might have listened to Professor Bell talking not merely from the other end of a room, but from the other side of a continent.

Some idea of the rapid growth of the telephone business in the United States may be gathered from the statistician’s figures, which show that in 1880 there were less than 100,000 telephones in use in this country, and in 1915 there were more than 9,000,000 telephones in the Bell System alone. Of the 14,000,000 telephones in the world, 10,000,000 are in this country. Sixty-five per cent of all the telephones in the world are in this country, although it has only five and five-tenths per cent of the world’s population. The Bell System alone reaches 70,000 places, 5,000 more than the number of post-offices and 10,000 more than the number of railroad stations.

The telephone wire mileage in the United States is over 22,000,000 miles. In the Bell System there are over 18,000,000 miles of wire which carry over 26,000,000 telephone talks daily—or nearly 9,000,000,000 per year.

Essential Factor in American Life.

Such broad use is made of the telephone service of America that the progress in telephony is an essential factor in all American progress.

A visiting Englishman envying the light, airy accommodations in the tall office buildings in American cities, has sagely said that the skyscraper would be impossible without the adequate telephone service which is here provided.

In the housing of the people the telephone is a pioneering agent for better conditions. In the cities telephone service is indispensable in apartment houses and hotels which raise people above the noise and dust of the street. In the suburbs the telephone and the trolley make the waste places desirable homes, and although a man may walk some distance to reach some transportation line, the telephone must enter his own dwelling place before he is content to live there.

[219]

This desirable decentralization of the population in which the telephone has been so important a factor extends beyond the suburbs to the rural districts, and the American farmer with his wife and family is blessed by facilities for communication unknown in any other part of the world. The fact that the farms and ranches in this country, and especially in the west, have been of comparatively large area, has had a tendency to make American farm life particularly lonely. It is safe to say that nothing has done more to relieve this loneliness and prevent the drift from the farms to the cities, than the widespread establishment of rural telephone service.

The telephone development of the United States is not confined to the large centers of population, but is well distributed, the large number of farm telephones in this country being in strong contrast to the small number of farm telephones in European countries.

It is obvious that the ordinary methods of commerce and manufacture would have to be radically made over if the telephone service should lose any of its present efficiency or if it should fail to advance so as to meet the constantly increasing demands made upon it. With the first day of telephone congestion ordinary business would come to a standstill, and when an adjustment was made, everybody would find himself slowed down, doing less work in longer hours and at greater expense, and being unable to take advantage of opportunities for advancement which he had come to consider an inalienable right.

Not only would methods be changed, but the physical structure of business, especially in cities, would be completely metamorphosed. The top floors of office buildings and hotels would be immediately less desirable. In tall buildings the multitude of messengers and the frequent passing in and out would demand the increase in elevator facilities and even the enlargement of halls and doorways. Many of the narrower streets would be impassable. Factories and warehouses now located in the open country where land is cheap and the natural conditions of working and living are most favorable, would be relocated in cities as close as possible to their administrative and merchandising headquarters.

It would be hard to find a line of business where progress would not be seriously retarded by an impairment of the present telephone efficiency.

America Leads in Telephone Growth.

It is a far cry from Bell’s first telephone to Universal Service.

Bell’s invention had demonstrated the practicability of speech transmission, but there were many obstacles to overcome and many problems to be solved before the telephone could be of commercial value and take its place among the great public utilities.

Professor Bell had demonstrated that two people could talk to each other from connected telephones for a considerable distance. In order to be of commercial value, it was necessary to establish an intercommunicating system in which each telephone could be connected with every other telephone in the system. This has been accomplished through the invention of the multiple switchboard and a great number of inventions and improvements in all the apparatus used in the transmission of speech.

But it was an unexplored field into which the telephone pioneers so courageously plunged. There were no beaten paths, and the way was beset with unknown perils; there was no experience to guide. A vast amount of educational work had to be done before a skeptical public would accept the telephone at its true value, yet courage and persistency triumphed. Discoveries and inventions followed scarcely less important than Professor Bell’s original discovery.

[221]

That the United States has from the beginning far outstripped the rest of the civilized world in the growth of the telephone is shown by comparison.

In all Great Britain there are but 700,000 telephones as against 10,000,000 in the United States. France has slightly more than half as many as Greater New York. In Germany the telephone development is only one-fifth of that of the United States. Italy has not as many telephones as San Francisco, and all Russia, fewer than Chicago. Sweden, Norway and Denmark show a higher telephone development than the other European countries, but even in Denmark, where the telephone development is highest, we find but 3.9 telephones per hundred population—less than half the development in the United States.

The total number of telephones in all other European countries is considerably less than may be found in two American cities, Chicago and Philadelphia; all of South America has less than Boston, and the remainder of the world, including Asia, Africa and Oceanica, has less than the City of New York.

American Telephone Practice Superior.

The superior telephone development in America is largely due to the efficiency of American telephone equipment and practice. The mechanical development has not only kept pace with public needs, but has anticipated them.

It is the practice of the Bell System, for example, to make what are called “fundamental development plans,” in which a forecast is made of the telephone requirements of each American city twenty years ahead. The construction in each city is begun with these ultimate requirements in view. Underground conduits are built, central offices located and cables provided with an eye to the future, and if these plans are carried out important economies are obtained. If the plans are abandoned, the loss may be very great. Furthermore, there are sure to be times when the service will be interrupted and seriously impaired if such plans for the future are not made and consistently carried out.

[223]

It is characteristic of the best telephone management that while it cannot always perfectly forecast the direction of immediate growth, it should be built far enough ahead of present requirements to have a pair of wires ready for each new customer. The fact that New York and other large American cities have a considerable investment in telephone plant constructed to meet a prospective demand, is the price which must be paid by any telephone management which really supplies the wants of the American people. Every additional subscriber that is connected with the system, requires sooner or later an outlay of new capital for his proportionate share of the whole plant, including equipment, wires, poles, cables, switchboards and real estate. In America the new subscriber finds his need anticipated and the facilities provided.

It is characteristic of private management that plans can be made for the future with reasonable assurance that the necessary funds will not be arbitrarily withheld, or that the work of the past will not be ruthlessly cast aside.

Another factor of telephone service in America is promptness. Local connections are made in a few seconds. In the case of interurban and long-distance calls, to prevent the long waiting for a turn, which abroad sometimes is a matter of hours, the American engineer provides enough long-distance trunks, so that, except in cases of accident, customers at the busiest times of the day are connected with distant points without delay.

The First Transcontinental Line.

The opening of the first transcontinental line between New York and San Francisco on January 25, 1915, was an epoch-making event in telephone history. The line is 3,400 miles long. It crosses thirteen states; it is carried on 130,000 poles. Four hard-drawn copper wires, .165 of an inch in diameter, run side by side over the entire distance, establishing two physical and one phantom circuit. The ordinary telephone connection consists of two wires technically called a telephone circuit, each wire constituting one “side” of the circuit. A phantom circuit is a circuit superimposed on two ordinary circuits by so connecting the two wires or “sides” of each ordinary circuit that they can be used as one side of the phantom circuit. In this way three practical talking circuits can be obtained from four wires. One mile of single wire used in the transcontinental line weighs 435 pounds, the weight of the wires in the entire line being 5,920,000 pounds, or 2,960 tons.

In addition to the transmission wires, each circuit uses some 13,600 miles of fine hair-like insulated wire .004 of an inch in diameter in its loading coils.

It was, perhaps, little more difficult to string wires from Denver to San Francisco than from New York to Denver, but the actual construction of the line was the least of the telephone engineer’s troubles. His real problem was to make the line “talk,” to send something 3,000 miles with a breath as the motive power. In effect, the voyage of the voice across the continent is instantaneous; if its speed should be accurately measured, a fifteenth of a second would probably be nearly exact. In other words, a message flying across the continent on the new transcontinental line, travels, not at the rate of 1,160 feet per second, which is the old stagecoach speed of sound, but at 56,000 miles per second. If it were possible for sound to carry that far, a “Hello” uttered in New York and traveling through the air without the aid of wires and electricity would not reach San Francisco until four hours later. The telephone not only transmits speech, but transmits it thousands of times faster than its own natural speed.

But while the telephone is breaking speech records, it must also guarantee safe delivery of these millions of little passengers it carries every few minutes in the way of sound waves created at the rate of 2,100 a second. There must be no jostling or crowding. These tiny waves, thousands and thousands of varying shapes, which are made by the human voice, and each as irregular and as different from the other as the waves of the sea, must not tumble over each other or get into each other’s way, but must break upon the Pacific coast as they started at the Atlantic, or all the line fails and the millions of dollars spent upon it have been thrown away. And in all this line, if just one pin-point of construction is not as it should be, if there is one iota of imperfection, the miles of line are useless and the currents and waves and sounds and words do not reach the end as they should. It is such tremendous trifles, not the climbing of mountains and the bridging of chasms, that make the transcontinental line one of the wonders of the ages.

The engineer in telephony cannot increase his motive power. A breath against a metal disk changes air waves into electrical currents, and these electrical currents, millions of which are required for a single conversation, must be carried across the continent and produce the same sound waves in San Francisco as were made in New York. Here is a task so fine as to be gigantic. It was to nurse and coax this baby current of electricity 3,000 miles across the continent, under rivers and over mountains, through the blistering heat of the alkali plains and the cold of snow-capped peaks, that has taken the time and thought and labor of the brightest minds of the scientific world.

This great problem in transmission was due to the cumulative effect of improvements, great and small, in telephone, transmitter, line, cable, switchboard and every other piece of apparatus and plant required for the transmission of speech.

The opening of the transcontinental telephone line has been followed by the extension of “extreme distance” transmission into all the states of the Union, by applying these new improvements to the plant of the Bell System. It is now possible to talk from points in any one state to some points in every other state of the Union, while over a very large part of the territory covered by the Bell System, it is possible for any subscriber to talk to any other subscriber, regardless of distance.

Wireless Speech Transmission.

During the year 1915 very notable development in radio-telephony, the transmission of speech without wires, was made.

On April 4th the Bell telephone engineers were successful in transmitting speech from a radio station at Montauk Point, on Long Island, to Wilmington, Del.

On the 27th of August, with the Bell apparatus, installed by permission of the Navy Department at the Arlington, Va., radio station, speech was successfully transmitted from Arlington, Va., to the Navy wireless station equipped with Bell apparatus at the Isthmus of Panama.

On September 29th speech was successfully transmitted by wire from the headquarters of the company at 15 Dey Street, New York, to the radio station at Arlington, Va., and thence by radio or wireless telephony across the continent to the radio station at Mare Island Navy Yard, Cal.

[227]

On the next morning, at about one o’clock, Washington time, wireless telephone communication was established between Arlington, Va., and Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands, where the Bell engineer, together with United States naval officers, distinctly heard words spoken into the apparatus at Arlington.

On October 22d, from the Arlington tower in Virginia, speech was transmitted across the Atlantic Ocean to the Eiffel Tower at Paris, where the Bell engineers, in company with French military officers, heard the words spoken at Arlington.

On the same day, when speech was being transmitted by the Bell apparatus at Arlington to the engineers and the French military officers at the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the telephone company’s representative at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, together with an officer of the United States Navy, heard the words spoken from Arlington to Paris.

It is believed that wireless telephony will form a most important adjunct and extension to the existing schemes of communication. By its means communication can be established between points where it is impracticable to extend wires. For many reasons wireless telephony can never take the place of wire systems, but it may be expected to supplement them in a useful manner. Wireless telephone systems are subject to serious interference from numerous conditions, atmospheric and others. For many uses the fact that anyone suitably equipped can listen in on a wireless telephone talk would be a serious limitation to its use.

The Mobilization of Communication.

Besides these radio experiments, a demonstration has been given of the availability of the Bell System and its wonderful potentiality in case of an emergency which would require quick and satisfactory intercommunication between the different departments of the government and its scattered stations and officers throughout the whole country.

From 4 P.M., May 6, to 8 A.M., May 8, 1916, the United States Navy Department and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company co-operated in a general mobilization of the forces of communication. It was a test of what could be done in a sudden military emergency, and was gratuitously undertaken by the company at the request of the Secretary of the Navy.

It was a sort of war game that brought into play the latest scientific developments of telephone and telegraph communication, by wire and by wireless, and demonstrated an efficiency that has not been attained in any other country.

For some time the officers of the United States Navy had been working together with the engineers of the Bell System in the study of wire and wireless communications, and the Navy Department had permitted the telephone engineers to use its towers for long-distance wireless telephone experiments.

So, in the latest demonstration, the land towers of the navy were utilized in connection with a wireless telephone installation on the U.S.S. “New Hampshire,” and Captain Chandler, cruising off shore, talked directly with the Secretary’s office in Washington.

For the time being the operating forces of the telephone company all over the country were placed at the disposal of Captain W.H.G. Bullard, Chief of the Bureau of Communications, and General Superintendent of Plant F.A. Stevenson, of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, was assigned as his aide. While all the facilities of the Bell System were available, only about 53,000 miles of wire were necessary to connect all the navy yards and stations for telephonic and telegraphic communication.

The successful demonstration showed that in case of any trouble requiring any such service, because of the central control of the Bell System, the government could have ready-made at its immediate disposal a plant, equipment and operating staff which, for completeness and efficiency, would not be possible in any other way.

Why do They Call Them “Fiddler-Crabs”?

There is one member of the crab family for which the Latin name is Gelasimus, which means “laughable.” He certainly is appropriately named, for he is a very queer little fellow. The male has one claw of immense size, the other being quite small. The big claw is brightly colored, and when he runs he waves it about as if he were energetically beckoning, or playing some very stirring tune on a violin; hence he is often known as a “Calling-crab” or a “Fiddler-crab.”

Fiddler-crabs inhabit various parts of the world, and are usually found in large numbers on muddy or sandy flats left dry by the tide, where they may be seen hurrying over the sand or peering out of their holes, into which they immediately vanish when alarmed. The holes, which usually are about a foot deep, are made by the crab persistently digging up and carrying away little masses of mud or sand. When he is doing this the crab presents a very funny appearance. Scraping up a quantity of sand into a little heap, he grasps it with three of the legs on one side and hurries away with it to some little distance. Having deposited his load, he raises his eyes, which he can do quite effectively, as they are situated at the end of very long, slender stalks, peers curiously around, and scuttles back to the hole for another load of sand.

How Far can a Powerful Searchlight Send Its Rays?

Searchlights have recently been made capable of being seen nearly a hundred miles away. Such lights are very valuable for signaling purposes in time of war, and they are also much used on warships, enabling the officers to detect the approach of an enemy in the dark and to guard against torpedo boats.

[230]

We are all familiar with the less powerful ones which are universally used on automobiles for night driving and in a multitude of other every-day practices. The illustration shows a battery of powerful searchlights, the use of which furnished some very effective displays during the Panama-Pacific Exposition at San Francisco in 1915.

Searchlights are ordinarily electric arc lights of great candle-power, arranged with a parabolic reflector so that the rays are sent almost wholly in one direct line, forming a path of light which may be projected for miles.

What Started the Habit of Touching Glasses Before Drinking?

Just as athletes shake hands before the beginning of a contest today, the people who fought duels in the olden days used to pause before their fighting long enough to each drink a glass of wine furnished by their friends. In order to make sure that no attempt was made to forestall the results of the duel by poisoning the wine in either cup, they developed the habit of pouring part of the contents of each glass into the other, so that if either contestant was poisoned the other would be too.

This habit has continued up to the present time, although there is no thought given now to the danger of poison, and in the present day the ceremony of actually pouring the drink from one glass to another has been omitted, merely the motion, as if to touch the glasses, sufficing as an expression of friendliness and good will.

Touching glasses together in drinking, preparatory to a confidential talk, has come to be nicknamed “hob-nobbing” because of the equipment incidental to that action years ago. A “hob” was the flat part of the open hearth where water and spirits were warmed; and the small table, at which people sat when so engaged, was called a “nob.”

Why are Windows Broken by Explosions?

When the large cannons in the forts on our coast are discharged during target practice, there are usually a lot of windows broken in the nearby houses. In Jersey City, N.J., several freight cars and boats loaded with dynamite and ammunition full of high explosives furnished the power for an explosion which, in July, 1916, broke considerably over a hundred thousand dollars worth of windows in the lower part of New York City.

The force of an explosion, whatever its source, throws back the air in huge waves, very much like the waves of the ocean, and whatever they come in contact with must have a sort of a tug-of-war with them, the weaker side being crumpled up and pushed back by the other. Broad expanses of glass, unprotected and without any support, except at the extreme edges, present an easy mark for air waves, therefore, and the amount of damage done to windows by explosions is usually only limited by the power of the explosives which produce the force of air waves.

The earth beneath, and the roof and walls of a building above, all receive the effects of these air waves in exactly the same way as do windows, and the resulting disaster is in direct proportion to their resisting capacity as against the pressure caused by the explosion. Many striking examples of the power of explosives have been accidentally furnished of late, in the course of making munitions for the European war.

What does the Expression “Showing the White Feather” Come From?

We say people “show the white feather” when they display cowardice, because a white feather in a bird marks a cross breed, and it is not found on a fighting game-cock.