None of the inventions that have resulted from the study of electricity have been stumbled upon in the dark. Scientists in both England and America had realized the possibility of the telegraph before Morse built his first working outfit in his rooms on Washington Square. Edison took out a patent covering wireless telegraphy before Marconi gave his name to the new means of communication. Often a man who has been following one trail through this new field has come upon another, glanced down it, and decided to go back and explore it more thoroughly another day. Meantime the trail is run down by a rival. The prize has gone to that persevering one who has made that trail his own, and learned its secret while other men were only glancing at it. Alexander Graham Bell was by no means the first man to realize that the sound of the human voice could be sent over a wire. He did not happen to stumble upon this fact. He worked it out bit by bit, from what other men had already learned concerning electricity, and his object was to make the telephone of real use to the world. It so happened that Elisha Gray and Bell each filed a claim upon the telephone at the Patent Office on the same day, February 14, 1876. But it was Bell who was able to place the first telephone at the public’s service.

He came of a family that had long been interested in the study of speech. His father, his grandfather, his uncle, and two brothers had all taught elocution in one form or another at the Universities of Edinburgh, Dublin, and London. His grandfather had worked out a successful system to correct stammering, his father, widely known as a splendid elocutionist, had invented a sign-language that he called “Visible Speech,” which was of help to those learning foreign tongues, and also a system to enable the deaf to read spoken words by the movements of the lips. Naturally enough the young inventor started with a very considerable knowledge of the laws of sound.

Bell was born in Edinburgh March 1, 1847, and educated there and in London. When he was sixteen family influence was able to get him the post of teacher of elocution in certain schools, and he spent his leisure hours studying the science of sound. Soon after he came of age he met two well-known Englishmen who were experts in his line of study, Sir Charles Wheatstone and Alexander J. Ellis. Ellis had translated Helmholtz’s celebrated book on “The Sensations of Tone,” and was able to show Bell in his own laboratory how the German scientist had succeeded in keeping tuning-forks in vibration by the power of electro-magnets, and had blended the tones of several tuning-forks so as to produce approximately the sound of the human voice. This idea was new to Bell, and led him to wonder whether it would not be possible to construct what might be called a musical telegraph, sending different notes over a wire by electro-magnetism, using a piano keyboard to give the different notes.

Sir Charles Wheatstone, the leading English authority on the telegraph, received young Bell with the greatest interest, and showed him a new talking-machine that had been constructed by Baron de Kempelin. Bell studied this closely, discussed it with Wheatstone, and decided that he would devote himself to the problems of reproducing sounds mechanically.

The course of his life was then suddenly altered. His two brothers died in Edinburgh of consumption, and he was told that he must seek a change of climate. Accordingly his father and mother sailed with him to the town of Brantford in Canada. There he at once became interested in teaching his father’s system of “Visible Speech” to a tribe of Mohawk Indians in the neighborhood.

He had already had very considerable success in teaching deaf-mutes to talk by visible speech, or sign-language, and this success was repeated in Canada. Word of it went to Boston, and as a result the Board of Education of that city wrote to him, offering to pay him five hundred dollars if he would teach his system in a school for deaf-mutes there. He was glad to accept, and in 1871 moved to Boston, which he planned to make his permanent residence.

Success crowned his teaching almost immediately. Boston University offered him a professorship, and he opened a “School of Vocal Physiology,” which paid him well. Most of his remarkable skill in teaching the deaf and dumb to understand spoken words and in a manner to speak themselves was due to his father’s system, which he had carefully followed, and had in some respects improved upon.

At this time a resident of Salem, Thomas Sanders, engaged the young teacher to train his small deaf-mute son, and asked him to make his home at Sanders’ house in Salem. As he could easily reach Boston from there Bell consented, and in the cellar of Mr. Sanders’ house he set up a workshop, where for three years he experimented with tuning-forks and electric batteries along the line of his early studies in London.

At nearly the same time Miss Mabel Hubbard came to him to be taught his system of speech. He became engaged to her, and some years later they were married.

His future wife’s father was a well-known Boston lawyer, Gardiner G. Hubbard. It is related that one evening as Bell sat at the piano in Mr. Hubbard’s home in Cambridge, he said, “Do you know that if I sing the note G close to the strings of the piano, the G-string will answer me?” “What of it?” asked Mr. Hubbard. “Why, it means that some day we ought to have a musical telegraph, that will send as many messages simultaneously over one wire as there are notes on the piano.”

Bell knew the field of his work in a general way, but he had not yet decided which path to choose of several that looked as if they might lead across it. His far-distant goal was to construct a machine that would carry, not the dots and dashes of the telegraph, but the complex vibrations of the human voice. This would be much more difficult to attain than a musical telegraph, and for some time he wavered between the two ideas. His work with his deaf and dumb pupils was all in the line of making sound vibrations visible to the eye. He knew that with what was called the phonautograph he could get tracings of such sound vibrations upon blackened paper by means of a pencil or marker attached to a vibrating cord or membrane, and furthermore that he could obtain tracings of certain vowel sound vibrations upon smoked glass. He studied the effect of vibrations upon the bones of the ear, and this led him to experiment with vibrating a thin piece of iron before an electro-magnet.

His study of the effect of vibrations on the human eardrum showed Bell what path he should follow. Sound waves striking the delicate ear-drum could send thrills through the heavier bones inside the ear. He thought that if he could construct two iron discs, which should be similar to the ear-drums, and connect them by an electrified wire, he might be able to make the disc at one end vibrate with sound waves, send those vibrations through the wire to the other disc, and have that give out the vibrations again in the form of sounds. That now became his working idea, and it was the principle on which the telephone was ultimately to be built.

But Bell had been giving so much time and attention to this absorbing project that his teaching had suffered. His “School of Vocal Physiology” had had to be abandoned, and he found that his only pupils were Miss Hubbard and small George Sanders. Both Mr. Sanders and Mr. Hubbard, who had been helping him with the cost of his experiments, refused to do so any longer unless he would devote himself to working out his musical telegraph, in which both had a great deal of faith as a successful business proposition.

While he was struggling with these distracting calls of duty and science he was obliged to go to Washington to see his patent attorney. There he determined to call upon Professor Joseph Henry, who was the greatest American authority on electrical science, and who had experimented with the telegraph in the early years of the century. Bell, aged twenty-eight, explained his new idea to Henry, then aged seventy-eight. The theory was new to Henry, but he saw at once that it had tremendous possibilities. He told Bell so. “But,” said Bell, “I have not the expert knowledge of electricity that is needed.” “You can get it,” answered Henry. “You must, for you are in possession of the germ of a great invention.”

Those few words, coming from such a man, were of the greatest possible encouragement to Bell. He returned home, determined to get the knowledge of electricity he needed, and to carry on his work with the telephone.

He rented a room at 109 Court Street, Boston, for a workshop, and took a bedroom in the neighborhood. He studied electricity night and day, and he gave equal time to the musical telegraph that his friends favored and to the invention that now claimed his real interest.

The man from whom Bell rented his workshop was Charles Williams, himself a manufacturer of electrical supplies. Bell had for his assistant Thomas A. Watson, who helped him construct the two armatures, or vibrating discs, at the end of an electrified wire that stretched from the workshop to an adjoining room. Watson was working with Bell on an afternoon in June, 1875. Bell was in the workshop, and Watson in the next room. Bell was stooping down over the instrument at his end of the wire. Suddenly he gave an exclamation. He had heard a faint twang come from the disc in front of him.

He dashed into the next room. “Snap that reed again, Watson,” he commanded. Back at his own end of the wire he waited. In a minute he caught the light twang again. It was only what he had been expecting to hear at any time during the months of his work, but nevertheless he was amazed when he did catch the sound. It proved that a sound could be carried over a wire, and accurately reproduced at the farther end. And that meant that the vibrations of the human voice could ultimately be sent in the same way.

Bell’s enthusiasm had already converted his assistant, Watson; it now won over Hubbard and Sanders. They began to believe that there might be something of real value in his strange scheme, and offered to help him finance it. He went on with his studies in electricity, and gradually began to learn how he could make it serve him best.

But it was a far cry from that first faint sound to the actual transmission of words. For a long time his receiving instruments would only give out vague rumbling noises. In November, 1875, his experiments showed him that the vibrations created in a reed by the human voice could be transmitted in such a way as to reproduce words and sounds. Then, in January, 1876, he showed a few of the pupils at Monroe’s School of Oratory in Boston an apparatus by which singing could be carried more or less satisfactorily from the cellar of the building to a room on the fourth floor. But on March 10, 1876, the new instrument actually talked. Watson, who was at the basement end of the wire, heard the disc say, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” He dashed up the three flights of stairs to the room in which Bell was. “I can hear you!” he cried. “I can hear the words!”

“Had I known more about electricity, and less about sound,” Bell is reported to have said, “I would never have invented the telephone.” He had come upon his discovery by the right path, but it was a path that very few men could ever have picked out. Other inventors had tried to make a machine that would carry the voice, but they had all worked from the standpoint of the telegraph. Bell, inheriting unusual knowledge of the laws of speech and sound, came from the other direction. He started with the laws of sound transmission rather than with the laws of the telegraph. The result was that he had created something altogether new, basically different from all the other inventions that made use of electricity, for which there was as yet no common name even, and which he described in his application for a patent, as “an improvement in telegraphy.”

Only two months after the day on which the telephone had actually talked for the first time the Centennial Exposition opened in Philadelphia. Mr. Hubbard was one of the Commissioners, and he obtained permission to have Bell’s first telephone placed on a small table in the Department of Education. Bell himself was too poor to be able to go to Philadelphia, and intended to stay in Boston, and try to find new deaf-mute pupils. But when Miss Hubbard left for the Centennial, and begged him to go with her, he could not resist. He stayed on the train, without a ticket, without baggage, and reached Philadelphia with the Hubbards.

The new instrument had been at the Exposition for six weeks without attracting serious attention. But Mr. Hubbard arranged that the judges should examine it for a few minutes on the Sunday afternoon following Bell’s arrival. The afternoon, however, was very warm, and there were a great many exhibits for the judges to inspect. There was the first grain-binder, and the earliest crude electric light, and Elisha Gray’s musical telegraph, and exhibits of printing telegraphs. It was seven o’clock when the judges reached Bell’s table, and they were tired and hungry. One of the judges picked up the receiver, looked at it, and put it back on the table. The others laughed and joked as they started to go by. Then they stopped short. A man had come up to the table, with a crowd of attendants at his heels. He said to the young man at the table, “Professor Bell, I am delighted to see you again.” The new arrival was the Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil, who had once visited Bell’s school for deaf-mutes in[Pg 223]
[Pg 224] Boston. The Emperor said he would like to test Bell’s new machine.

With the judges, a group of famous scientific men, and the Emperor’s suite for audience, Bell went to the transmitter at the other end of the wire, while Dom Pedro put the receiver to his ear. There was a moment’s pause, and then the Emperor threw back his head, exclaiming, “My God—it talks!”

The Emperor put down the receiver. Joseph Henry, who had encouraged Bell in Washington, picked it up. He too heard Bell’s own words coming from the disc. He too showed his amazement. “This comes nearer to overthrowing the doctrine of the conservation of energy,” said he, “than anything I ever saw.” After him came Sir William Thomson, later known as Lord Kelvin. He had been the engineer of the first Atlantic Cable. He listened intently. “Yes,” said he at last, “it does speak. It is the most wonderful thing I have seen in America!”

Until ten o’clock that night the judges spoke into the transmitter and listened at the receiver of Bell’s instrument. Next morning it was given a place of honor, and every one begged for a chance to examine it. It became the most wonderful exhibit of the Centennial, and the judges gave Bell their Certificate of Award. Nothing more opportune could possibly have happened for the inventor.

But in spite of this launching at the hands of the most eminent scientists, business men could see little future for the new machine. It was very ingenious, they admitted, but it could only be a toy. And Bell himself was not sufficiently well versed in business affairs to know how to make the most of his invention. Fortunately Mr. Hubbard was much better acquainted with business methods. He determined to promote the telephone, and he did. He talked about it to all his friends until they could think of nothing else. He began a campaign of publicity, with the object of making the name of the new instrument a household word. He had it written up for the newspapers, and advertised public demonstrations of its powers, and arranged that Bell should lecture on it in different cities. Bell was a good lecturer, and his talks became popular. Then news was sent to the Boston Globe by telephone, and people began to wonder if there were not new possibilities in its use.

In May, 1877, a man named Emery called at Hubbard’s office, and leased two telephones for twenty dollars. That encouraged the promoters, and they issued a little circular describing the business. Then another man, who ran a burglar-alarm company, obtained permission to hang up the telephone in a few banks. They proved of use, and the same man started a service among the express companies. Before long several other small exchanges were opened, and by August, 1877, it was estimated that there were 778 telephones in use. Hubbard was very much encouraged, and he, together with Bell, Sanders, and Watson formed the “Bell Telephone Association.”

The Western Union Telegraph Company was a great corporation, controlling the telegraph business of the country. Hubbard hoped that it would purchase the Bell patents, as it had already bought many patents taken out on allied inventions. They offered them to President Orton for $100,000, but he refused to buy them, saying, “What use could this company make of an electrical toy?”

But the Western Union had many little subsidiary companies, supplying customers with printing-telegraphs and dial telegraphs and various other modifications of the usual telegraph, and one day one of these companies reported that some of their customers were preferring to use the new telephone. The Western Union bestirred itself at this sign of competition, and had shortly formed the “American Speaking-Telephone Company,” with a staff of inventors that included Edison. The war was on in earnest, for the new company not only claimed to have the best instrument on the market, but advertised that it had “the only original telephone.”

That war was actually a good thing for Bell, and Hubbard, and Sanders. With the Western Union pushing this new invention, and not only pushing it, but fighting for its claim to it, the public realized that the telephone was neither a toy nor a scientific oddity, but an instrument of great commercial value. Sanders’ relatives came to the aid of the Bell Company, and put money into its treasury, and soon Hubbard was leasing out telephones at the rate of a thousand a month.

But none of these partners was exactly the man to organize and build up such a business as this of the telephone should be, and each of them knew it. Then Hubbard discovered a young man in Washington who impressed him as having remarkable executive ability. Watson met him, and his opinion coincided with that of Hubbard. The upshot of the matter was that the partners offered the post of General Manager at a salary of thirty-five hundred dollars a year to this man, Theodore N. Vail, and Vail accepted the offer. Vail himself knew little about the telephone, but his cousin, Alfred Vail, had been the friend and assistant of Morse when he was working on his first telegraph.

Hubbard had advertised Bell’s telephone, Sanders had financed it, and now Vail pushed it on the market. He faced the powerful Western Union and fought them. He sent copies of Bell’s original patent to each of his agents, with the message, “We have the only original telephone patents, we have organized and introduced the business, and we do not propose to have it taken from us by any corporation.”

His plan was to create a national telephone system, and so he confined each of his agents to one place, and reserved all rights to connect one city with another. He made short-term contracts, and tried in every way to keep control of the whole system in the hands of the parent company. Then the Western Union came out with Edison’s new telephone transmitter, which increased the value of the telephone tenfold, and which in fact made it almost a new instrument. The Bell Company was panic-stricken, for their customers demanded a telephone as good as Edison’s.

Those were hard times for Vail and the partners back of him. The telephone war had cut the price of service to a point where neither company could show a profit. Bell, now married, returned from England with word that he had been unable to establish the telephone business there, and that he must have a thousand dollars at once to pay his most pressing debts. He was ill, and he wrote from the Massachusetts General Hospital, “Thousands of telephones are now in operation in all parts of the country, yet I have not yet received one cent from my invention. On the contrary, I am largely out of pocket by my researches, as the mere value of the profession that I have sacrificed during my three years’ work amounts to twelve thousand dollars.”

At this juncture a young Bostonian named Francis Blake wrote to Vail, announcing that he had invented a transmitter that was the equal of Edison’s, and offering to sell it for stock in the company. The purchase was made, and the claim of the inventor proved true. The Bell telephone was again as good as that of the Western Union Company. A new company, called the National Bell Telephone Company, was organized, with a capital of $850,000, and Colonel Forbes of Boston became its first president.

There have been few patent struggles to compare with that which was waged over the telephone. McCormick fought for years to uphold his rights to the invention of the reaper, but he fought a host of competitors, and the warfare was of the guerrilla order. The Bell Company fought alone against the Western Union, and it was a struggle of giants. The Western Union was certain that it could find patents antedating Bell’s, and it went on that assumption, even after its own expert had reported, “I am entirely unable to discover any apparatus or method anticipating the invention of Bell as a whole, and I conclude that his patent is valid.” It claimed that Gray was the original inventor, and instructed its lawyers to bring suits against the Bell Company for infringing on Gray’s patents.

The legal battle began in the autumn of 1878, and continued for a year. Then George Gifford, the leading counsel for the Western Union, told his clients that their claim was baseless, and advised that they come to a settlement. The Western Union saw the wisdom of this course, and went to the Bell Company with an offer of compromise. An agreement was finally reached, to remain in force for seventeen years, and the terms were that the Western Union should admit that Bell was the original inventor, that his patents were valid, and should retire from the telephone business. On the other side, the Bell Company agreed to buy the Western Union telephone system, to pay them a royalty of twenty per cent. on all their telephone rentals, and to keep out of the telegraph business.

That ended the great war. It converted a powerful rival into an ally, it gave the Bell Company fifty-six thousand new telephones in fifty-five cities, and it made that company the national system of the United States. In 1881 there was another reorganization; the American Bell Telephone Company was created, with a capital of six million dollars. The following year there was such a telephone boom that the Bell Company’s system was doubled, and the gross earnings reached more than a million dollars.

The four men who had taken hold of Bell’s invention in its infancy and brought it to maturity were ready to surrender its care into the hands of the able business men who headed the Bell Company. Sanders sold his stock in the company for a little less than a million dollars, Watson, when he resigned his interest, found himself sufficiently rich to build a ship-building plant near Boston and employ four thousand workmen to build battle-ships. Gardiner G. Hubbard retired from active business life, and transferred his remarkable energy to the affairs of the National Geographical Society. Bell had presented his stock in the company to his wife on their wedding-day, and he now took up afresh the work of his boyhood and youth, the teaching of deaf-mutes. But he was no longer unheeded nor unrewarded. In 1880 the government of France awarded him the Volta prize of fifty thousand francs and the Cross of the Legion of Honor. With the Volta prize he founded the Volta Laboratory in Washington for the use of students. In Washington he has made his home, and there scientists of all lands call to pay their respects to the patriarch of American inventors.

Shortly after the first appearance of the telephone at the Centennial Exposition men were accustomed to laugh at the new invention, and call it a freak, a scientific toy. Its mechanism was so incomprehensible to most people that they refused to regard it seriously. A Boston mechanic expressed the general ignorance when he stoutly maintained that in his opinion there must be “a hole through the middle of the wire.” And the telephone is still to most people a mystery, far more so than the telegraph or the incandescent light or the other uses to which electricity has been put. It is one thing to send a message by the mechanical process of dots and dashes made by breaking and joining a current. It is quite another to reproduce in one place the exact inflection, tone, and quality of a voice that is speaking hundreds of miles away, across rivers and mountains. There is real magic in that, the wonder that might be found in a Genii’s spell in the Arabian Nights. How can people be blamed for laughing at such pretensions, and believing that even if such a thing were true it was more fit for an exposition than for public use?

Yet this thing of magic has outdistanced every other mode of communication. It is estimated that in the United States as many messages are sent by telephone as the combined total of telegrams, letters, and railroad passengers. The telephone wires are eight times greater than the telegraph wires, and their earnings six times as great. It is true that the telephone is vastly more used in America than in other parts of the world, and yet it is figured that in the world at large almost as many messages are now telephoned as are sent by post.

And the mystery of the telephone grows no less the more one studies it. You speak against a tiny disc of sheet-iron, and the disc trembles. It has millions and millions of varieties of trembles, as many as there are sounds in the universe. A piece of copper wire, connected with an electric battery, stretches from the disc against which you have spoken to another disc miles and miles away. The tremble of your disc sends an electric thrill along the wire to that other disc and makes it tremble exactly as yours did. And that trembling sounds the very note you spoke, the very note in millions of possible notes, and as accurately as if the sound wave had only traveled three feet through clear air. That is what happens when you telephone, but when you realize it the mystery gains rather than decreases.

Scores of men claimed to have invented telephones before Bell did, but none ever proved their claims. Men who were studying improvements on the telegraph had glimpses of the ultimate possibility of transmitting speech by wire, and Elisha Gray filed a caveat on that point later on the very day that Bell filed his application for a patent. But Gray’s was a caveat, or a declaration that the applicant believes he can invent a certain device, and Bell’s was the statement that he had already perfected his invention. Bell’s claim stood against the world, and men now recognize that the telephone was born on that afternoon in June, 1875, when the young teacher of deaf-mutes first caught the faint twang of a snapping reed sent across a few yards of wire.