PREFACE
Thirty-five short years, and presto! the newborn art of telephony is fullgrown. Three million
telephones are now scattered abroad in foreign countries, and seven millions are massed here, in the land
of its birth.
So entirely has the telephone outgrown the ridicule with which, as many people can well remember,
it was first received, that it is now in most places taken for granted, as though it were a part of the natural
phenomena of this planet. It has so marvelously extended the facilities of conversation--that "art in which a
man has all mankind for competitors"--that it is now an indispensable help to whoever would live the
convenient life. The disadvantage of being deaf and dumb to all absent persons, which was universal in
pre-telephonic days, has now happily been overcome; and I hope that this story of how and by whom it was
done will be a welcome addition to American libraries
It is such a story as the telephone itself might tell, if it could speak with a voice of its own. It is not
technical. It is not statistical. It is not exhaustive. It is so brief, in fact, that a seco nd volume could readily
be made by describing the careers of telephone leaders whose names I find have been omitted
unintentionally from this book--such indispensable men, for instance, as William R. Driver, who has signed
more telephone cheques and larger ones than any other man; Geo. S. Hibbard, Henry W. Pope, and W.
D. Sargent, three veterans who know telephony in all its phases; George Y. Wallace, the last survivor of
the Rocky Mountain pioneers; Jasper N. Keller, of Texas and New England; W. T. Gentry, the central
figure of the Southeast, and the following presidents of telephone companies: Bernard E. Sunny, of
Chicago; E. B. Field, of Denver; D. Leet Wilson, of Pittsburg; L. G. Richardson, of Indianapolis;
Caspar E. Yost, of Omaha; James E. Caldwell, of Nashville; Thomas Sherwin, of Boston; Henry T. Scott,
of San Francisco; H. J. Pettengill, of Dallas; Alonzo Burt, of Milwaukee; John Kilgour, of Cincinnati; and
Chas. S. Gleed, of Kansas City.
I am deeply indebted to most of these men for the information which is herewith presented; and also
to such pioneers, now dead, as O. E. Madden, the first General Agent; Frank L. Pope, the noted
electrical expert; C. H. Haskins, of Milwaukee; George F. Ladd, of San Francisco; and Geo. F. Durant,
of St. Louis.
H. N. C. PINE HILL, N. Y., June 1, 1910
THE BIRTH OF THE TELEPHONE
In that somewhat distant year 1875, when the telegraph and the Atlantic cable were the most
wonderful things in the world, a tall young professor of elocution was desperately busy in a noisy machineshop
that stood in one of the narrow streets of Boston, not far from Scollay Square. It was a very hot
afternoon in June, but the young professor had forgotten the heat and the grime of the workshop. He was
wholly absorbed in the making of a nondescript machine, a sort of crude harmonica with a clock-spring reed,
a magnet, and a wire. It was a most absurd toy in appearance. It was unlike any other thing that had ever
been made in any country. The young professor had been toiling over it for three years and it had
constantly baffled him, until, on this hot afternoon in June, 1875, he heard an almost inaudible sound--a faint
TWANG--come from the machine itself.
For an instant he was stunned. He had been expecting just such a sound for several months, but it
came so suddenly as to give him the sensation of surprise. His eyes blazed with delight, and he sprang in a
passion of eagerness to an adjoining room in which stood a young mechanic who was assisting him.
"Snap that reed again, Watson," cried the apparently irrational young professor. There was one of
the odd-looking machines in each room, so it appears, and the two were connected by an electric wire.
Watson had snapped the reed on one of the machines and the professor had heard from the other machine
exactly the same sound. It was no more than the gentle TWANG of a clock-spring; but it was the first time
in the history of the world that a complete sound had been carried along a wire, reproduced perfectly at the
other end, and heard by an expert in acoustics.
That twang of the clock-spring was the first tiny cry of the newborn telephone, uttered in the clanging
din of a machine-shop and happily heard by a man whose ear had been trained to recognize the strange
voice of the little newcomer. There, amidst flying belts and jarring wheels, the baby telephone was born, as
feeble and helpless as any other baby, and "with no language but a cry."
The professor-inventor, who had thus rescued the tiny foundling of science, was a young Scottish
American. His name, now known as widely as the telephone itself, was Alexander Graham Bell. He was a
teacher of acoustics and a student of electricity, possibly the only man in his generation who was able to
focus a knowledge of both subjects upon the problem of the telephone. To other men that exceedingly faint
sound would have been as inaudible as silence itself; but to Bell it was a thunder-clap. It was a dream
come true. It was an impossible thing which had in a flash become so easy that he could scarcely believe
it. Here, without the use of a battery, with no more electric current than that made by a couple of magnets,
all the waves of a sound had been carried along a wire and changed back to sound at the farther end. It
was absurd. It was incredible. It was something which neither wire nor electricity had been known to do
before. But it was true
No discovery has ever been less accidental. It was the last link of a long chain of discoveries. It
was the result of a persistent and deliberate search. Already, for half a year or longer, Bell had known the
correct theory of the telephone; but he had not realized that the feeble undulatory current generated by a
magnet was strong enough for the transmission of speech. He had been taught to undervalue the
incredible efficiency of electricity.
Not only was Bell himself a teacher of the laws of speech, so highly skilled that he was an instructor
in Boston University. His father, also, his two brothers, his uncle, and his grandfather had taught the laws of
speech in the universities of Edinburgh, Dublin, and London. For three generations the Bells had been
professors of the science of talking. They had even helped to create that science by several inventions.
The first of them, Alexander Bell, had invented a system for the correction of stammering and similar defects
of speech. The second, Alexander Melville Bell, was the dean of British elocutionists, a man of creative
brain and a most impressive facility of rhetoric. He was the author of a dozen text-books on the art of
speaking correctly, and also of a most ingenious sign-language which he called "Visible Speech." Every
letter in the alphabet of this language represented a certain action of the lips and tongue; so that a new
method was provided for those who wished to learn foreign languages or to speak their own language more
correctly. And the third of these speech-improving Bells, the inventor of the telephone, inherited the
peculiar genius of his fathers, both inventive and rhetorical, to such a degree that as a boy he had
constructed an artificial skull, from gutta-percha and India rubber, which, when enlivened by a blast of air
from a hand-bellows, would actually pronounce several words in an almost human manner.
The third Bell, the only one of this remarkable family who concerns us at this time, was a young
man, barely twenty-eight, at the time when his ear caught the first cry of the telephone. But he was already
a man of some note on his own account. He had been educated in Edinburgh, the city of his birth, and in
London; and had in one way and another picked up a smattering of anatomy, music, electricity, and telegraphy. Until he was sixteen years of age, he had read nothing but novels and poetry and romantic
tales of Scottish heroes. Then he left home to become a teacher of elocution in various British schools, and
by the time he was of age he had made several slight discoveries as to the nature of vowel-sounds. Shortly
afterwards, he met in London two distinguished men, Alexander J. Ellis and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who
did far more than they ever knew to forward Bell in the direction of the telephone.
Ellis was the president of the London Philological Society. Also, he was the translator of the
famous book on "The Sensations of Tone," written by Helmholtz, who, in the period from 1871 to 1894 made
Berlin the world-centre for the study of the physical sciences. So it happened that when Bell ran to Ellis as
a young enthusiast and told his experiments, Ellis informed him that Helmholtz had done the same things
several years before and done them more completely. He brought Bell to his house and showed him what
Helmholtz had done--how he had kept tuning-forks in vibration by the power of electro-magnets, and
blended the tones of several tuning-forks together to produce the complex quality of the human voice
Now, Helmholtz had not been trying to invent a telephone, nor any sort of message-carrier. His aim
was to point out the physical basis of music, and nothing more. But this fact that an electro-magnet would
set a tuning-fork humming was new to Bell and very attractive. It appealed at once to him as a student of
speech. If a tuning-fork could be made to sing by a magnet or an electrified wire, why would it not be
possible to make a musical telegraph--a telegraph with a piano key-board, so that many messages could be
sent at once over a single wire? Unknown to Bell, there were several dozen inventors then at work upon this
problem, which proved in the end to be very elusive. But it gave him at least a starting-point, and he
forthwith commenced his quest of the telephone
As he was then in England, his first step was naturally to visit Sir Charles Wheatstone, the best
known English expert on telegraphy. Sir Charles had earned his title by many inventions. He was a
simple-natured scientist, and treated Bell with the utmost kindness. He showed him an ingenious talkingmachine
that had been made by Baron de Kempelin. At this time Bell was twenty-two and unknown;
Wheatstone was sixty-seven and famous. And the personality of the veteran scientist made so vivid a
picture upon the mind of the impressionable young Bell that the grand passion of science became
henceforth the master-motif of his life
From this summit of glorious ambition he was thrown, several months later, into the depths of grief
and despondency. The White Plague had come to the home in Edinburgh and taken away his two brothers.
More, it had put its mark upon the young inventor himself. Nothing but a change of climate, said his doctor,
would put him out of danger. And so, to save his life, he and his father and mother set sail from Glasgow
and came to the small Canadian town of Brantford, where for a year he fought down his tendency to
consumption, and satisfied his nervous energy by teaching "Visible Speech" to a tribe of Mohawk Indians.
By this time it had become evident, both to his parents and to his friends, that young Graham was
destined to become some sort of a creative genius. He was tall and supple, with a pale complexion, large
nose, full lips, jet-black eyes, and jet-black hair, brushed high and usually rumpled into a curly tangle. In
temperament he was a true scientific Bohemian, with the ideals of a savant and the disposition of an artist.
He was wholly a man of enthusiasms, more devoted to ideas than to people; and less likely to master his
own thoughts than to be mastered by them. He had no shrewdness, in any commercial sense, and very
little knowledge of the small practical details of ordinary living. He was always intense, always absorbed.
When he applied his mind to a problem, it became at once an enthralling arena, in which there went whirling
a chariotrace of ideas and inventive fancies.
we had been fascinated from boyhood by his father's system of "Visible Speech." He knew it so well
that he once astonished a professor of Oriental languages by repeating correctly a sentence of Sanscrit that
had been written in "Visible Speech" characters. While he was living in London his most absorbing
enthusiasm was the instruction of a class of deaf-mutes, who could be trained to talk, he believed, by means
of the "Visible Speech" alphabet. He was so deeply impressed by the progress made by these pupils, and
by the pathos of their dumbness, that when he arrived in Canada he was in doubt as to which of these two
tasks was the more important--the teaching of deaf-mutes or the invention of a musical telegraph.
At this point, and before Bell had begun to experiment with his telegraph, the scene of the story
shifts from Canada to Massachusetts. It appears that his father, while lecturing in Boston, had mentioned
Graham's exploits with a class of deaf-mutes; and soon afterward the Boston Board of Education wrote to
Graham, offering him five hundred dollars if he would come to Boston and introduce his system of teaching
in a school for deaf-mutes that had been opened recently. The young man joyfully agreed, and on the first
of April, 1871, crossed the line and became for the remainder of his life an American
For the next two years his telegraphic work was laid aside, if not forgotten. His success as a
teacher of deaf-mutes was sudden and overwhelming. It was the educational sensation of 1871. It won
him a professorship in Boston University; and brought so many pupils around him that he ventured to open
an ambitious "School of Vocal Physiology," which became at once a profitable enterprise. For a time there
seemed to be little hope of his escaping from the burden of this success and becoming an inventor, when,
by a most happy coincidence, two of his pupils brought to him exactly the sort of stimulation and practical
help that he needed and had not up to this time received.
to give him a series of private lessons for $350 a year; and as the child lived with his grandmother in
the city of Salem, sixteen miles from Boston, it was agreed that Bell should make his home with the Sanders
family. Here he not only found the keenest interest and sympathy in his air-castles of invention, but also
was given permission to use the cellar of the house as his workshop
For the next three years this cellar was his favorite retreat. He littered it with tuningforks, magnets,
batteries, coils of wire, tin trumpets, and cigar-boxes. No one outside of the Sanders family was allowed to
enter it, as Bell was nervously afraid of having his ideas stolen. He would even go to five or six stores to
buy his supplies, for fear that his intentions should be discovered. Almost with the secrecy of a conspirator,
he worked alone in this cellar, usually at night, and quite oblivious of the fact that sleep was a necessity to
him and to the Sanders family.
"Often in the middle of the night Bell would wake me up," said Thomas Sanders, the father of
Georgie. "His black eyes would be blazing with excitement. Leaving me to go down to the cellar, he would
rush wildly to the barn and begin to send me signals along his experimental wires. If I noticed any
improvement in his machine, he would be delighted. He would leap and whirl around in one of his `wardances'
and then go contentedly to bed. But if the experiment was a failure, he would go back to his
workbench and try some different plan."
kbench and try some different plan."
The second pupil who became a factor--a very considerable factor--in Bell's career was a fifteenyear-old
girl named Mabel Hubbard, who had lost her hearing, and consequently her speech, through an
attack of scarlet-fever when a baby. She was a gentle and lovable girl, and Bell, in his ardent and headlong
way, lost his heart to her completely; and four years later, he had the happiness of making her his wife.
Mabel Hubbard did much to encourage Bell. She followed each step of his progress with the keenest
interest. She wrote his letters and copied his patents. She cheered him on when he felt himself beaten.
And through her sympathy with Bell and his ambitions, she led her father--a widely known Boston lawyer
named Gardiner G. Hubbard--to become Bell's chief spokesman and defender, a true apostle of the
telephone.
Hubbard first became aware of Bell's inventive efforts one evening when Bell was visiting at his
home in Cambridge. Bell was illustrating some of the mysteries of acoustics by the aid of a piano. "Do you
know," he said to Hubbard, "that if I sing the note G close to the strings of the piano, that the G-string will
answer me?" "Well, what then?" asked Hubbard. "It is a fact of tremendous importance," replied Bell. "It is
an evidence that we may some day have a musical telegraph, which will send as many messages
simultaneously over one wire as there are notes on that piano."
Later, Bell ventured to confide to Hubbard his wild dream of sending speech over an electric wire,
but Hubbard laughed him to scorn. "Now you are talking nonsense," he said. "Such a thing never could be
more than a scientific toy. You had better throw that idea out of your mind and go ahead with your musical
telegraph, which if it is successful will make you a millionaire."
ph, which if it is successful will make you a millionaire."
But the longer Bell toiled at his musical telegraph, the more he dreamed of replacing the telegraph
and its cumbrous sign-language by a new machine that would carry, not dots and dashes, but the human
voice. "If I can make a deafmute talk," he said, "I can make iron talk." For months he wavered between the
two ideas. He had no more than the most hazy conception of what this voice-carrying machine would be
like. At first he conceived of having a harp at one end of the wire, and a speaking-trumpet at the other, so
that the tones of the voice would be reproduced by the strings of the harp.
Then, in the early Summer of 1874, while he was puzzling over this harp apparatus, the dim outline
of a new path suddenly glinted in front of him. He had not been forgetful of "Visible Speech" all this while,
but had been making experiments with two remarkable machines--the phonautograph and the manometric
capsule, by means of which the vibrations of sound were made plainly visible. If these could be improved,
he thought, then the deaf might be taught to speak by SIGHT--by learning an alphabet of vibrations. He
mentioned these experiments to a Boston friend, Dr. Clarence J. Blake, and he, being a surgeon and an
aurist, naturally said, "Why don't you use a REAL EAR?
Such an idea never had, and probably never could have, occurred to Bell; but he accepted it with
eagerness. Dr. Blake cut an ear from a dead man's head, together with the ear-drum and the associated
bones. Bell took this fragment of a skull and arranged it so that a straw touched the ear-drum at one end
and a piece of moving smoked glass at the other. Thus, when Bell spoke loudly into the ear, the vibrations
of the drum made tiny markings upon the glass.
t was one of the most extraordinary incidents in the whole history of the telephone. To an
uninitiated onlooker, nothing could have been more ghastly or absurd. How could any one have interpreted
the gruesome joy of this young professor with the pale face and the black eyes, who stood earnestly singing,
whispering, and shouting into a dead man's ear? What sort of a wizard must he be, or ghoul, or madman?
And in Salem, too, the home of the witchcraft superstition! Certainly it would not have gone well with Bell
had he lived two centuries earlier and been caught at such black magic.
What had this dead man's ear to do with the invention of the telephone? Much. Bell noticed how
small and thin was the ear-drum, and yet how effectively it could send thrills and vibrations through heavy
bones. "If this tiny disc can vibrate a bone," he thought, "then an iron disc might vibrate an iron rod, or at
least, an iron wire." In a flash the conception of a membrane telephone was pictured in his mind. He saw in
imagination two iron discs, or ear-drums, far apart and connected by an electrified wire, catching the
vibrations of sound at one end, and reproducing them at the other. At last he was on the right path, and
had a theoretical knowledge of what a speaking telephone ought to be. What remained to be done was to
construct such a machine and find out how the electric current could best be brought into harness
Then, as though Fortune suddenly felt that he was winning this stupendous success too easily, Bell
was flung back by an avalanche of troubles. Sanders and Hubbard, who had been paying the cost of his
experiments, abruptly announced that they would pay no more unless he confined his attention to the
musical telegraph, and stopped wasting his time on ear-toys that never could be of any financial value.
What these two men asked could scarcely be denied, as one of them was his best-paying patron and the
other was the father of the girl whom he hoped to marry. "If you wish my daughter," said Hubbard, "you
must abandon your foolish telephone." Bell's "School of Vocal Physiology," too, from which he had hoped so
much, had come to an inglorious end. He had been too much absorbed in his experiments to sustain it.
His professorship had been given up, and he had no pupils except Georgie Sanders and Mabel Hubbard.
He was poor, much poorer than his associates knew. And his mind was torn and distracted by the contrary
calls of science, poverty, business, and affection. Pouring out his sorrows in a letter to his mother, he said:
"I am now beginning to realize the cares and anxieties of being an inventor. I have had to put off all pupils
and classes, for flesh and blood could not stand much longer such a strain as I have had upon me.
asses, for flesh and blood could not stand much longer such a strain as I have had upon me."
While stumbling through this Slough of Despond, he was called to Washington by his patent lawyer.
Not having enough money to pay the cost of such a journey, h
e borrowed the price of a return ticket from
Sanders and arranged to stay with a friend in Washington, to save a hotel bill that he could not afford. At
that time Professor Joseph Henry, who knew more of the theory of electrical science than any other
American, was the Grand Old Man of Washington; and poor Bell, in his doubt and desperation, resolved to
run to him for advice.
Then came a meeting which deserves to be historic. For an entire afternoon the two men worked
together over the apparatus that Bell had brought from Boston, just as Henry had worked over the telegraph
before Bell was born. Henry was now a veteran of seventy-eight, with only three years remaining to his
credit in the bank of Time, while Bell was twenty-eight. There was a long half-century between them; but
the youth had discovered a New Fact that the sage, in all his wisdom, had never known.
"You are in possession of the germ of a great invention," said Henry, "and I would advise you to
work at it until you have made it complete."
"But," replied Bell, "I have not got the electrical knowledge that is necessary."
"Get it," responded the aged scientist.
I cannot tell you how much these two words have encouraged me," said Bell afterwards, in
describing this interview to his parents. "I live too much in an atmosphere of discouragement for scientific
pursuits; and such a chimerical idea as telegraphing VOCAL SOUNDS would indeed seem to most minds
scarcely feasible enough to spend time in working over."
By this time Bell had moved his workshop from the cellar in Salem to 109 Court Street, Boston,
where he had rented a room from Charles Williams, a manufacturer of electrical supplies. Thomas A.
Watson was his assistant, and both Bell and Watson lived nearby, in two cheap little bedrooms. The rent of
the workshop and bedrooms, and Watson's wages of nine dollars a week, were being paid by Sanders and
Hubbard. Consequently, when Bell returned from Washington, he was compelled by his agreement todevote himself mainly to the musical telegraph, although his heart was now with the telephone. For exactly
three months after his interview with Professor Henry, he continued to plod ahead, along both lines, until, on
that memorable hot afternoon in June, 1875, the full TWANG of the clock-spring came over the wire, and the
telephone was born.
