ed, 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 t

service, they presently found themselves battling with the most intricate and baffling engineering problem of m

out sixty patents for his own suggestions. It was Watson who took the telephone as Bell had made it, really a toy, with its diaphragm so delicate that a warm breath would put it out of order, and toughened it into a more rugged machine. Bell had used a disc of fragile gold-beaters' skin with a patch of

and-Judy squeal; and if it was too thin, the voice became a hollow and sepulchral groan, as if the speaker had his head in a barrel. Other months, too, were spent in finding out the proper size and shape for the air cavity i

r the shop. Orders fell five weeks behind. Agents stormed and fretted. Some action had to be taken quickly, so licenses were given to four other manufacturers to make bells, switchboards, and so forth. By this time

next step, if there was to be any degree of uniformity, was plainly to buy and consolidate these six companies; and by 1881 Vail had done this. It was the first merger in tele

as born, sooner or later it came knocking at the door of the Western Electric to receive a material body. Here were the skilled workmen who became the hand

cheaper equipment. He made the best of a most difficult situation. He was so handy, so resourceful, that he invariably found a way to unravel the mechanical tangles that perplexed the first telephone agents, and this, too, without compelling them to spend large sums of capital. He took the ideas and apparatus that were then in existence, and used them to carry the telephone business through the most critical period of i

reputations to lose; and who, partly for a living and mainly for a lark, plunged into the difficulties of this new business that had at that time little history and less prestige.

th interlocking centres, as would put any one telephone in touch with every other. There was no help for them in books or colleges. Watson, who had acquired a little knowledge, had become a shipbuilder. Electrical enginee

s as gentle as a touch of a baby sunbeam, and as swift as the lightning flash. It is so small that the electric current of a single incandescent lamp is greater 500,000,000 times. Cool a spoonful of hot water just one degr

triking at it with murderous blows. There were the telegraphic and light-and-power currents, its strong and malicious cousins, chasing and assaulting it whenever it ventured too near. There were rain and sleet and snow and every sort of moisture, lying in wait to

sensitive instrument that has ever been put to general use in any country. It opened up a new world of sound. It would echo the tramp of a fly that walked across a table, or repeat in New Orleans the prattle of a child in New York. This was

come a time when more than two persons wanted to be in the same conversational group. This was a larger use of the telephone; and while Bell himself had foreseen it, he had not worked out a plan whereby it could be ca

f wire highways along which he could run up and down safely; they had to do more. They had to make this system so simple and fool-proof that every one-every one except the deaf and dumb-coul

ce the telephone business was started, it had to be kept going; and as it grew, there came one after another a series of congestions. Two courses were open; either the business had to be kept down to suit the apparatus, or the apparatu

ch was precisely the stimulus needed by his creative brain. In 1876 he was fascinated by the telephone, and set out to construct one on a different plan. Several months later he had succeeded and was overjoyed to receive his first patent for a telephone transmitter. He had by this time climbed up from his bottle-washing to be a clerk in a drygoods store in Washington; but he was still poor and as unpractical as most inventors. Joseph Henry, the Sage of the American scientific world, was

ky professor, David E. Hughes, started a new line of development by adapting a Bell telephone into a "microphone," a fantastic little instrument that would detect the noise made by a fly in walking across a table. Francis Blake, of Boston, changed a microphone into a practical transmitter. The Rev. Henry Hunnings, an English clergyman, hit upon the happy idea of using carbon in the form of small granules. And one of th

the telephone had brought within hearing distance a new wonder-world of sound. All wires at that time were single, and ran into the earth at each end, making what was

res, scraps of talk from other telephones, and curious little squeals that were unlike any known sound. The lines running east and west were noisier than the lines running north and south. The night was noisier than the day, and at the ghostly hour of midnight, for what strange reason no one knows, the babel wa

ith a tin can tied to its tail. No matter where it went, it was pursued by this unearthly clatter. "We were ashamed to present our bills," said A. A. Adee,

at the only way was to pull up the ends of each wire from the tainted earth, and join them by a second wire. This was the "metallic circuit" idea. It meant an appalling increase in the use of wire. It would compel the rebuild-ing of the switchboards and the invention of new signal

t the creator of his profession. Three years earlier he had timidly asked for a job as operator in the Boston exchange, at five dollars a week, and had shown such

a boy in 1825. During the Civil War his father made guns in the city of Cambridge, where young John Joseph was born; and afterwards he made bells for church steeples. He was instinctively a me

xperiments of their own in the cellar of the Rolfe house. Here they had a "Tom Thumb" telegraph, a telephone which they had ventured to improve, and a hopeless tangle of wires. Whenever they could afford to buy more wires and batteries, they went to a near-by store which supplied electrical apparatus to the professors and students of Harvard. This store, with its workshop in the rear, seeme

ought down the flimsy, clumsy methods, which led from one snarl to another. He found out how to do with wires what Dickens did with words. "Let us do it right, boys, and then we won't

by disposition, with a special taste for the writings of Faraday, the forerunner; Tyndall, the expounder; and Spencer, the philosopher. And in 1890, he gathered around him

ecause it was the only possible way, so far as any one knew in that kindergarten period. A telephone wire required the daintiest of handling. To bury it was to smother it, to make it dull or perhaps entirely useless. But now that the number of wires had swollen from hundreds to thousands, the overhead method had been outgrown. Some

ed to the merest shred of rust. As if these troubles were not enough, there were the storms of winter, which might wipe out a year's revenue in a single day. The sleet storms were the worst. Wires were weighted down with ice, often three pounds of ice per foot of wire. And

nds. Evidently it had arrived on the scene in the nick of time-after the telegraph and before the trolleys and electric lights. Had it been born ten years later, it might not have been able to survive. So delicat

nager, "whenever a practicable method is found of accomplishing: it." All manner of theories were afloat but Theodore N. Vail, who was usually the man of constructive imagination in emer

ires with every known sort of covering. Most of them, naturally, were wrapped with rubber or gutta-percha, after the fashion of a submarine cable. When all were in place, the willing locomotive was harnessed to a huge wooden drag, which threw the

bombardment of explosions from leaky gas-pipes, and with a woeful lack of experts and standard materials. All manner of makeshifts had to be tried in place of tile ducts, which were not known in 1883. Iron pipe was used at first, then asphalt, concrete, boxes of sand a

elicate electric currents of the telephone. A young engineer named John A. Barrett, who had already made his mark as an expert, by finding a way to twist and transpose the wires, was set apart to tackle this problem. Being an economical Vermonter, Barrett went to work in a little wooden shed in the backyard of a Brooklyn foundry. In this foundry he had seen a u

the same purpose. One of his workmen, a Virginian, suggested the use of paper twine, which had been used in the South during the Civil War, when cotton was scarce and expensive. Barrett at once searched the South for paper twine and found it. He bought a barrel of it

, instead of winding it tightly. This was the finishing touch. For a time these paper-wound cables were soaked in oil, but in 1890 Engineer F. A. Pickernell dared to trust to the tightness of the lead sheathing, and laid a

e insulator. Not the paper, but the air in the paper, had improved the cable. More air was added by the omission of the oil. And presently Barrett p

now out of sight under the roadway, and twining into the basements of buildings like a new sort of metallic ivy. Some cables are so large that a single spool of cable will weigh twenty-six tons and require a giant truck and a sixteen-horse team to haul it to its resting-place. As many as twelve

sually, a telephone pole is made from a sixty-year-old tree, a cedar, chestnut, or juniper. It lasts twelve years only, so that the one item of poles is still costing the telephone companies several

-buildings has its telephone, there is not a pole in sight, not a cross-arm, not a wire. Nothing but the tip-ends of an immense system are visible. No sooner is a new skyscraper walled and roofed, than the telephones are in place, at once putting the tenants in touch with the rest of the city and the greater part of the United States. In a single

stem. The first telephone wire was of galvanized iron, which had at least the primitive virtue of being cheap. Then came steel wire, stronger but less durable. But these wires were noisy and not good cond

once set to work, and presently appeared the first hard-drawn copper wire, made tough-skinned by a fairly simple process. Vail bought thirty pounds of it and scattered it in various parts of the United States, to note the effect upon it of different climates. One length of it ma

ere it had to be as thick as a lead pencil, the expense seemed to be ruinously great. When the first pair of wires was strung between New York and Chicago, for instance, it was found to weigh 870,000 pounds-a full load for a twenty-two-car freigh

ies four million dollars or more, is known as the "phantom circuit." It enables three messages to run at the same time, where only two ran before. A double track of wires is made to carry three talk-trains running abreast, a feat made possi

nvention of this last device startled the telephone men like a flash of lightning out of a blue sky. It came from outside-from the quiet laboratory of a Columbia professor who had arrived in the United States as a young Hungarian immigrant not many years earlier. From this professor, Michael J. Pupin, came the idea of "loading

e beds of rivers and the slopes of mountains, massing them in cities and fluffing them out among farms and villages. To tell the doings of a wire chief, in the course of his ordinary week's work, would in itself make a lively book of adventures. Even a washerwoman, with one lone, non-electrical clothes-line of a hundred y

torm 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. It cannot be picked up and put

has necessitated several complete rebuildings. Little or nothing has ever been allowed to wear out. The New York system was rebuilt three times in sixteen years; and many a costly switchboard has gone to the scrap-heap at three or four years of

a mystery to those who have seen it as to those who have not. Explanations of it are futile. As well might any one expect to learn Sanscrit in half an hour as to understand a switchboard by making a tour of investigation around it. It is not like anything else that either man or Nature has ever made

ost as much as a thousand pianos or as much as three square miles of farms in Indiana. The ten thousand wire hairs of its head are not only numbered, but enswathed in silk, and combed out in so marvellous a way that any one of them can i

run to a switchboard; but without a switchboard there would have to be 12,497,500 wires-4,999 to every telephone. As well might there be a nerve-system without a brain, as a tele

dly inadequate as soon as the telephone business began to grow. Then there came adaptations by the dozen. Every telephone manager became by compulsion an inventor. There was no source of

Of the nine thousand switchboard patents, Scribner holds six hundred or more. Ever since 1878, when he devised the first "jackknife switch," Scribner has been the wizard of the switchboard. It was he

e in Toledo; but young Scribner showed no aptitude for the tangles of the law. He preferred the tangles of wire and system in miniature, which he and several other boys had built and learned to operate. These boys had a benefactor in an old bachelor named Tho

ook his advice and went to the Western Electric factory in Chicago. Here he accidentally met Enos M. Barton, the head of the factory. Barton noted that the boy was a genius and offere

885. They were well enough for five hundred wires but not for five thousand. In some exchanges as many as half a dozen operators were necessary to handle a single call; and the clamor and confusion were becoming unbearable. Some handier and q

y a sudden rush of business can be helped by her companions. Every wire that comes into the board is tasselled out into many ends, and by means of a "busy test," invented by Scribner, only one of these ends can be put into use at a time. The normal limit o

cked their brains to produce something cheaper to take its place, and they failed. The Multiple boards swallowed up capital as a desert swallow

he diaphragm with the finger-nail. Soon after-wards came a "buzzer," and then the magneto-electric bell. In 1887 Joseph O'Connell, of Chicago, conceived of the use of tiny electric lights as signals, a brilliant idea, as an electric light makes no noise and can be seen either

experts. It established uniformity. It introduced the federal idea into the mechanism of a telephone system. Best of all, it saved FOUR SECONDS ON EVERY CALL. The first of these centralizing switchboards was put in place at Philadelphia; and other cities followed suit as fast as they could afford the expense of

he 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

in Pittsburg, using printing-telegraph machines, which required little skill to operate. And William A. Childs had a third, for lawyers only, in New York, which used dials at first and afterwards printing machines. These little exchanges had set out to

to give him direct communication with his neighbors.... It is conceivable that cables of telephone wires could be laid underground, or suspended overhead, connecting by branch wires with private dwellings, shops, etc., and uniting them thro

offer telephone service for sale. He had obtained two telephones, numbers six and seven, the first five having gone to the junk-heap; and he attached these to a wire in his burglar-alarm office. For two weeks his business friends played with the telephones, like boys with a fascinating toy; then Holmes nai

s an off-shoot of some other wire-using business. It was a medley of makeshifts. Almost every part of its outfit had been made for other uses. In Chicago all calls came in to one boy, who bawled them up a speaking-tube to the operators. In another city a boy received the calls, wrote them on white alleys, and rolled them to the boys at the switchb

ng madly hither and thither, while others are putting in or taking out pegs from a central framework as if they were lunatics engaged in a game of fox and geese." In the same year E. J. Hall wrote from Buffalo that his exchange with twelve boys had become "a perfect Bedlam." By the clumsy me

the wires, and roaring on all occasions like young bulls of Bashan, the boys in the first exchanges did their full share in adding to the troubles of the business. Nothing could be done with them. They were imm

of the feminine touch. The quiet voice, pitched high, the deft fingers, the patient courtesy and attentiveness-these qualities were precisely what the gentle telephone required in its attend

often, the signal lamps flash too quickly for these expert phonists. During the panic of 1907 there was one mad hour when almost every telephone in Wall Street region was being rung up by some desperate speculator. The switchboards were ablaze with lights. A few girls lost their heads. One fainted and was carried to the rest-room. But the others flung th

le combinations there are with the five million telephones of the Bell System, or what unthinkable mileage of conversation, no one has ever dared to guess. But whoever

rs, but seventeen thousand girls discover it in the course of the year. It is a most particular and exclusive school. It accepts fewer than two thousand of these girls, and rejects ov

oise and alertness of manner. Presence of mind, which, in Herbert Spencer's opinion, ought to be taught in every university, is in various ways drilled into the temperament of the telephone girl. She is also taught the knack of concentration, so that she may car

s demanded from her than from any other servant of the public. Her clients refuse to stand in line and quietly wait their turn, as they are quite willing to do in stores and theatres and barber shops and railway stations and everywhere else. They do not see her at work and they do not know what her work is. They do not notice that she answers a call in an average time of three and a half seconds. The

ty. She has made big business to run more smoothly than little business did, half a century ago. She has shown us how to take the friction out of conversation, and taught us refinements of politeness which were rare even among the Beau Brummels of pre-telephonic days. Who, for instance, until the arrival of the telephone girl, appreciated the dif

ric. The mother factory of this globe-trotting business is the biggest thing in the spacious back-yard of Chicago, and there are eleven smaller factories-her children-scattered over the earth from New York to Tokio. To put its totals into a sentence,

en invented, so it made telegraphic apparatus, burglar-alarms, electric pens, and other such things. But in 1878, when the Western Union made its short-lived attempt to compete with the Bell Company, the Western Electri

e is the mad waltz of the spindles that whirl silk and cotton threads around the copper wires, very similar to what may be seen in any braid factory. Here electric

absurd sea-monsters, but which in reality are only the nerve systems of switchboards. And some is twisted into cables by means of a dozen whirling drums-a dizzying sight, as each pair of drums revolve in opposite directions. Because of the fact tha

nds a year in the making of telephone transmitters. This is imported from the Ural Mountains. The silk thread comes from Italy and Japan; the iron for magnets, from Norway; the paper ta

n. They test every telephone by actual talk, set up every switchboard, and try out every cable. A single transmitter, by the time it is completed, has had to pass three hundred examinations; and a single coin-box is obliged to count ten thousand nickels before it graduates into the outer world. Seven hundred i

, is Enos M. Barton. His career is the typical American story of self-help. He was a telegraph messenger boy in New York during the Civil War, then a telegraph operator in Cleveland. In 1869 his salary was cut down from one hundred dollars

one and at once became one of its apostles. By 1882 his plant had become the official workshop of the Bell Companies. It was the headquarters of invention and manufacturing. Here was gathered a notable group of youn

become bookkeepers, and bookkeepers could become engineers. Such a plan worked well in the earlier days, when the art of telephony was in the making, and when there was no source of authority on telephonic problems. Barton is the bishop emeritus of the Western Electric to-day; and the big industry is now being run by

a body had to be created; and no one knew how to make such a body. Had it been born in some less energetic country, it might have remained feeble and undeveloped; but not in the United States. Here in one year it had become famous, and in three years it

approached every problem from the wrong end. If we had been told to load a herd of cattle on a steamer, our method would have been to hire a Hagenbeck to train the cattle for a couple of years, so

any separate branches of study as medicine or law. There are few men, half a dozen at most, who can now be said to have a general knowledge of telephony. An

aw something new. I asked Mr. Carty to explain it. He is our chief engineer; but he did not understand it. We called the manager

f tele-phony-to present a bird's-eye vi

rities. Telephonic apparatus consisted of makeshifts and adaptations. It was the period of iron wire, impe

scovered, and was improved to a high point of efficiency. In this period came the multiple switchboard, cop

telephone men and the public began to reap the fruits of twenty years of investment and hard work. I

ed the waste and anarchy of duplication. It taught its older, but smaller brother, the telegraph, to cooperate. It put itself more closely in touch with the will of the public. And it is now pushing ahea