The History of the Telephone Part 7

But it was of tremendous value to the telephone business at that time to have at its head a man of Hudson's intellectual and moral calibre.

He gave it tone and prestige. He built up its credit. He kept it clean and clear above all suspicion of wrong-doing. He held fast whatever had been gained. And he prepared the way for the period of expansion by borrowing fifty millions for improvements, and by adding greatly to the strength and influence of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.

Hudson remained at the head of the telephone table until his death, in 1900, and thus lived to see the dawn of the era of big business. Under his regime great things were done in the development of the art. The business was pushed ahead at every point by its captains. Every man in his place, trying to give a little better service than yesterday--that was the keynote of the Hudson period. There was no one preeminent genius. Each important step forward was the result of the cooperation of many minds, and the prodding necessities of a growing traffic.

By 1896, when the Common Battery system created a new era, the telephone engineer had pretty well mastered his simpler troubles. He was able to handle his wires, no matter how many. By this time, too, the public was ready for the telephone. A new generation had grown up, without the prejudices of its fathers. People had grown away from the telegraphic habit of thought, which was that wire communications were expensive luxuries for the few. The telephone was, in fact, a new social nerve, so new and so novel that very nearly twenty years went by before it had fully grown into place, and before the social body developed the instinct of using it.

Not that the difficulties of the telephone engineers were over, for they were not. They have seemed to grow more numerous and complex every year.

But by 1896 enough had been done to warrant a forward movement. For the next ten-year period the keynote of telephone history was EXPANSION.

Under the prevailing flat-rate plan of payment, all customers paid the same yearly price and then used their telephones as often as they pleased. This was a simple method, and the most satisfactory for small towns and farming regions. But in a great city such a plan grew to be suicidal. In New York, for instance, the price had to be raised to $240, which lifted the telephone as high above the ma.s.s of the citizens as though it were a piano or a diamond sunburst. Such a plan was strangling the business. It was shutting out the small users. It was clogging the wires with deadhead calls. It was giving some people too little service and others too much. It was a very unsatisfactory situation.

How to extend the service and at the same time cheapen it to small users--that was the Gordian knot; and the man who unquestionably did most to untie it was Edward J. Hall. Mr. Hall founded the telephone business in Buffalo in 1878, and seven years afterwards became the chief of the long-distance traffic. He was then, and is to-day, one of the statesmen of the telephone. For more than thirty years he has been the "candid friend" of the business, incessantly suggesting, probing, and criticising. Keen and dispa.s.sionate, with a genius for mercilessly cutting to the marrow of a proposition, Hall has at the same time been a zealot for the improvement and extension of telephone service. It was he who set the agents free from the ball-and-chain of royalties, allowing them to pay instead a percentage of gross receipts. And it was he who "broke the jam," as a lumberman would say, by suggesting the MESSAGE RATE system.

By this plan, which U. N. Beth.e.l.l developed to its highest point in New York, a user of the telephone pays a fixed minimum price for a certain number of messages per year, and extra for all messages over this number. The large user pays more, and the little user pays less. It opened up the way to such an expansion of telephone business as Bell, in his rosiest dreams, had never imagined. In three years, after 1896, there were twice as many users; in six years there were four times as many; in ten years there were eight to one. What with the message rate and the pay station, the telephone was now on its way to be universal.

It was adapted to all kinds and conditions of men. A great corporation, nerved at every point with telephone wires, may now pay fifty thousand dollars to the Bell Company, while at the same time a young Irish immigrant boy, just arrived in New York City, may offer five coppers and find at his disposal a fifty million dollar telephone system.

When the message rate was fairly well established, Hudson died--fell suddenly to the ground as he was about to step into a railway carriage.

In his place came Frederick P. Fish, also a lawyer and a Bostonian. Fish was a popular, optimistic man, with a "full-speed-ahead" temperament.

He pushed the policy of expansion until he broke all the records. He borrowed money in stupendous amounts--$150,000,000 at one time--and flung it into a campaign of red-hot development. More business he demanded, and more, and more, until his captains, like a thirty-horse team of galloping horses, became very nearly uncontrollable.

It was a fast and furious period. The whole country was ablaze with a pa.s.sion of prosperity. After generations of conflict, the men with large ideas had at last put to rout the men of small ideas. The waste and folly of compet.i.tion had everywhere driven men to the policy of cooperation. Mills were linked to mills and factories to factories, in a vast mutualism of industry such as no other age, perhaps, has ever known. And as the telephone is essentially the instrument of co-working and interdependent people, it found itself suddenly welcomed as the most popular and indispensable of all the agencies that put men in touch with each other.

To describe this growth in a single sentence, we might say that the Bell telephone secured its first million of capital in 1879; its first million of earnings in 1882; its first million of dividends in 1884; its first million of surplus in 1885. It had paid out its first million for legal expenses by 1886; began first to send a million messages a day in 1888; had strung its first million miles of wire in 1900; and had installed its first million telephones in 1898. By 1897 it had spun as many cobwebs of wire as the mighty Western Union itself; by 1900 it had twice as many miles of wire as the Western Union, and in 1905 FIVE TIMES as many. Such was the plunging progress of the Bell Companies in this period of expansion, that by 1905 they had swept past all European countries combined, not only in the quality of the service but in the actual number of telephones in use. This, too, without a cent of public money, or the protection of a tariff, or the prestige of a governmental bureau.

By 1892 Boston and New York were talking to Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburg, and Was.h.i.+ngton. One-half of the people of the United States were within talking distance of each other. The THOUSAND-MILE TALK had ceased to be a fairy tale. Several years later the western end of the line was pushed over the plains to Nebraska, enabling the spoken word in Boston to be heard in Omaha. Slowly and with much effort the public were taught to subst.i.tute the telephone for travel. A special long-distance salon was fitted up in New York City to entice people into the habit of talking to other cities. Cabs were sent for customers; and when one arrived, he was escorted over Oriental rugs to a gilded booth, draped with silken curtains. This was the famous "Room Nine." By such and many other allurements a larger idea of telephone service was given to the public mind; until in 1909 at least eighteen thousand New York-Chicago conversations were held, and the revenue from strictly long-distance messages was twenty-two thousand dollars a day.

By 1906 even the Rocky Mountain Bell Company had grown to be a ten-million-dollar enterprise. It began at Salt Lake City with a hundred telephones, in 1880. Then it reached out to master an area of four hundred and thirteen thousand square miles--a great Lone Land of undeveloped resources. Its linemen groped through dense forests where their poles looked like toothpicks beside the towering pines and cedars.

They girdled the mountains and basted the prairies with wire, until the lonely places were brought together and made sociable. They drove off the Indians, who wanted the bright wire for ear-rings and bracelets; and the bears, which mistook the humming of the wires for the buzzing of bees, and persisted in gnawing the poles down. With the most heroic optimism, this Rocky Mountain Company persevered until, in 1906, it had created a seventy-thousand-mile nerve-system for the far West.

Chicago, in this year, had two hundred thou-sand telephones in use, in her two hundred square miles of area. The business had been built up by General Anson Stager, who was himself wealthy, and able to attract the support of such men as John Crerar, H. H. Porter, and Robert T. Lincoln.

Since 1882 it has paid dividends, and in one glorious year its stock soared to four hundred dollars a share. The old-timers--the men who clambered over roof-tops in 1878 and tacked iron wires wherever they could without being chased off--are still for the most part in control of the Chicago company.

But as might have been expected, it was New York City that was the record-breaker when the era of telephone expansion arrived. Here the flood of big business struck with the force of a tidal wave. The number of users leaped from 56,000 in 1900 up to 810,000 in 1908. In a single year of sweating and breathless activity, 65,000 new telephones were put on desks or hung on walls--an average of one new user for every two minutes of the business day.

Literally tons, and hundreds of tons, of telephones were hauled in drays from the factory and put in place in New York's homes and offices. More and more were demanded, until to-day there are more telephones in New York than there are in the four countries, France, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland combined. As a user of telephones New York has risen to be unapproachable. Ma.s.s together all the telephones of London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffleld, Bristol, and Belfast, and there will even then be barely as many as are carrying the conversations of this one American city.

In 1879 the New York telephone directory was a small card, showing two hundred and fifty-two names; but now it has grown to be an eight-hundred-page quarterly, with a circulation of half a million, and requiring twenty drays, forty horses, and four hundred men to do the work of distribution. There was one shabby little exchange thirty years ago; but now there are fifty-two exchanges, as the nerve-centres of a vast fifty-million-dollar system. Incredible as it may seem to foreigners, it is literally true that in a single building in New York, the Hudson Terminal, there are more telephones than in Odessa or Madrid, more than in the two kingdoms of Greece and Bulgaria combined.

Merely to operate this system requires an army of more than five thousand girls. Merely to keep their records requires two hundred and thirty-five million sheets of paper a year. Merely to do the writing of these records wears away five hundred and sixty thousand lead pencils.

And merely to give these girls a cup of tea or coffee at noon, compels the Bell Company to buy yearly six thousand pounds of tea, seventeen thousand pounds of coffee, forty-eight thousand cans of condensed milk, and one hundred and forty barrels of sugar.

The myriad wires of this New York system are tingling with talk every minute of the day and night. They are most at rest between three and four o'clock in the morning, although even then there are usually ten calls a minute. Between five and six o'clock, two thousand New Yorkers are awake and at the telephone. Half an hour later there are twice as many. Between seven and eight twenty-five thousand people have called up twenty-five thousand other people, so that there are as many people talking by wire as there were in the whole city of New York in the Revolutionary period. Even this is only the dawn of the day's business.

By half-past eight it is doubled; by nine it is trebled; by ten it is multiplied sixfold; and by eleven the roar has become an incredible babel of one hundred and eighty thousand conversations an hour, with fifty new voices clamoring at the exchanges every second.

This is "the peak of the load." It is the topmost pinnacle of talk. It is the utmost degree of service that the telephone has been required to give in any city. And it is as much a world's wonder, to men and women of imagination, as the steel mills of Homestead or the turbine leviathans that curve across the Atlantic Ocean in four and a half days.

As to the men who built it up: Charles F. Cutler died in 1907, but most of the others are still alive and busy. Union N. Beth.e.l.l, now in Cutler's place at the head of the New York Company, has been the operating chief for eighteen years. He is a man of shrewdness and sympathy, with a rare sagacity in solving knotty problems, a president of the new type, who regards his work as a sort of obligation he owes to the public. And just as foreigners go to Pittsburg to see the steel business at its best; just as they go to Iowa and Kansas to see the New Farmer, so they make pilgrimages to Beth.e.l.l's office to learn the profession of telephony.

This unparalleled telephone system of New York grew up without having at any time the rivalry of compet.i.tion. But in many other cities and especially in the Middle West, there sprang up in 1895 a medley of independent companies. The time of the original patents had expired, and the Bell Companies found themselves freed from the expense of litigation only to be snarled up in a tangle of duplication. In a few years there were six thousand of these little Robinson Crusoe companies. And by 1901 they had put in use more than a million telephones and were professing to have a capital of a hundred millions.

Most of these companies were necessary and did much to expand the telephone business into new territory. They were in fact small mutual a.s.sociations of a dozen or a hundred farmers, whose aim was to get telephone service at cost. But there were other companies, probably a thousand or more, which were organized by promoters who built their hopes on the fact that the Bell Companies were unpopular, and on the myth that they were fabulously rich. Instead of legitimately extending telephone lines into communities that had none, these promoters proceeded to inflict the messy snarl of an overlapping system upon whatever cities would give them permission to do so.

In this way, masked as compet.i.tion, the nuisance and waste of duplication began in most American cities. The telephone business was still so young, it was so little appreciated even by the telephone officials and engineers, that the public regarded a second or a third telephone system in one city as quite a possible and desirable innovation. "We have two ears," said one promoter; "why not therefore have two telephones?"

This duplication went merrily on for years before it was generally discovered that the telephone is not an ear, but a nerve system; and that such an experiment as a duplicate nerve system has never been attempted by Nature, even in her most frivolous moods. Most people fancied that a telephone system was practically the same as a gas or electric light system, which can often be duplicated with the result of cheaper rates and better service. They did not for years discover that two telephone companies in one city means either half service or double cost, just as two fire departments or two post offices would.

Some of these duplicate companies built up a complete plant, and gave good local service, while others proved to be mere stock bubbles. Most of them were over-capitalized, depending upon public sympathy to atone for deficiencies in equipment. One which had printed fifty million dollars of stock for sale was sold at auction in 1909 for four hundred thousand dollars. All told, there were twenty-three of these bubbles that burst in 1905, twenty-one in 1906, and twelve in 1907. So high has been the death-rate among these isolated companies that at a recent convention of telephone agents, the chairman's gavel was made of thirty-five pieces of wood, taken from thirty-five switchboards of thirty-five extinct companies.

A study of twelve single-system cities and twenty-seven double-system cities shows that there are about eleven per cent more telephones under the double-system, and that where the second system is put in, every fifth user is obliged to pay for two telephones. The rates are alike, whether a city has one or two systems. Duplicating companies raised their rates in sixteen cities out of the twenty-seven, and reduced them in one city. Taking the United States as a whole, there are to-day fully two hundred and fifty thousand people who are paying for two telephones instead of one, an economic waste of at least ten million dollars a year.

A fair-minded survey of the entire independent telephone movement would probably show that it was at first a stimulant, followed, as stimulants usually are, by a reaction. It was unquestionably for several years a spur to the Bell Companies. But it did not fulfil its promises of cheap rates, better service, and high dividends; it did little or nothing to improve telephonic apparatus, producing nothing new except the automatic switchboard--a brilliant invention, which is now in its experimental period. In the main, perhaps, it has been a reactionary and troublesome movement in the cities, and a progressive movement among the farmers.

By 1907 it was a wave that had spent its force. It was no longer rolling along easily on the broad ocean of hope, but broken and turned aside by the rocks of actual conditions. One by one the telephone promoters learned the limitations of an isolated company, and asked to be included as members of the Bell family. In 1907 four hundred and fifty-eight thousand independent telephones were linked by wire to the nearest Bell Company; and in 1908 these were followed by three hundred and fifty thousand more. After this landslide to the policy of consolidation, there still remained a fairly large a.s.sortment of independent companies; but they had lost their dreams and their illusions.

As might have been expected, the independent movement produced a number of competent local leaders, but none of national importance. The Bell Companies, on the other hand, were officered by men who had for a quarter of a century been surveying telephone problems from a national point of view. At their head, from 1907 onwards, was Theodore N. Vail, who had returned dramatically, at the precise moment when he was needed, to finish the work that he had begun in 1878. He had been absent for twenty years, developing water-power and building street-railways in South America. In the first act of the telephone drama, it was he who put the enterprise upon a business basis, and laid down the first principles of its policy. In the second and third acts he had no place; but when the curtain rose upon the fourth act, Vail was once more the central figure, standing white-haired among his captains, and pus.h.i.+ng forward the completion of the "grand telephonic system" that he had dreamed of when the telephone was three years old.

Thus it came about that the telephone business was created by Vail, conserved by Hudson, expanded by Fish, and is now in process of being consolidated by Vail. It is being knit together into a stupendous Bell System--a federation of self-governing companies, united by a central company that is the busiest of them all. It is no longer protected by any patent monopoly. Whoever is rich enough and rash enough may enter the field. But it has all the immeasurable advantages that come from long experience, immense bulk, the most highly skilled specialists, and an abundance of capital. "The Bell System is strong," says Vail, "because we are all tied up together; and the success of one is therefore the concern of all."

The Bell System! Here we have the motif of American telephone development. Here is the most comprehensive idea that has entered any telephone engineer's brain. Already this Bell System has grown to be so vast, so nearly akin to a national nerve system, that there is nothing else to which we can compare it. It is so wide-spread that few are aware of its greatness. It is strung out over fifty thousand cities and communities.

If it were all gathered together into one place, this Bell System, it would make a city of Telephonia as large as Baltimore. It would contain half of the telephone property of the world. Its actual wealth would be fully $760,000,000, and its revenue would be greater than the revenue of the city of New York.

Part of the property of the city of Telephonia consists of ten million poles, as many as would make a fence from New York to California, or put a stockade around Texas. If the Telephonians wished to use these poles at home, they might drive them in as piles along their water-front, and have a twenty-five thousand-acre dock; or if their city were a hundred square miles in extent, they might set up a seven-ply wall around it with these poles.

Wire, too! Eleven million miles of it! This city of Telephonia would be the capital of an empire of wire. Not all the men in New York State could shoulder this burden of wire and carry it. Throw all the people of Illinois in one end of the scale, and put on the other side the wire-wealth of Telephonia, and long before the last coil was in place, the Illinoisans would be in the air.

What would this city do for a living? It would make two-thirds of the telephones, cables, and switchboards of all countries. Nearly one-quarter of its citizens would work in factories, while the others would be busy in six thousand exchanges, making it possible for the people of the United States to talk to one another at the rate of SEVEN THOUSAND MILLION CONVERSATIONS A YEAR.

The pay-envelope army that moves to work every morning in Telephonia would be a host of one hundred and ten thousand men and girls, mostly girls,--as many girls as would fill Va.s.sar College a hundred times and more, or double the population of Nevada. Put these men and girls in line, march them ten abreast, and six hours would pa.s.s before the last company would arrive at the reviewing stand. In single file this throng of Telephonians would make a living wall from New York to New Haven.

Such is the extraordinary city of which Alexander Graham Bell was the only resident in 1875. It has been built up without the backing of any great bank or multi-millionaire. There have been no Vanderbilts in it, no Astors, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Harrimans. There are even now only four men who own as many as ten thousand shares of the stock of the central company. This Bell System stands as the life-work of unprivileged men, who are for the most part still alive and busy. With very few and trivial exceptions, every part of it was made in the United States. No other industrial organism of equal size owes foreign countries so little. Alike in its origin, its development, and its highest point of efficiency and expansion, the telephone is as essentially American as the Declaration of Independence or the monument on Bunker Hill.

CHAPTER VI. NOTABLE USERS OF THE TELEPHONE

What we might call the telephonization of city life, for lack of a simpler word, has remarkably altered our manner of living from what it was in the days of Abraham Lincoln. It has enabled us to be more social and cooperative. It has literally abolished the isolation of separate families, and has made us members of one great family. It has become so truly an organ of the social body that by telephone we now enter into contracts, give evidence, try lawsuits, make speeches, propose marriage, confer degrees, appeal to voters, and do almost everything else that is a matter of speech.

In stores and hotels this wire traffic has grown to an almost bewildering extent, as these are the places where many interests meet.

The hundred largest hotels in New York City have twenty-one thousand telephones--nearly as many as the continent of Africa and more than the kingdom of Spain. In an average year they send six million messages. The Waldorf-Astoria alone tops all residential buildings with eleven hundred and twenty telephones and five hundred thousand calls a year; while merely the Christmas Eve orders that flash into Marshall Field's store, or John Wanamaker's, have risen as high as the three thousand mark.

Whether the telephone does most to concentrate population, or to scatter it, is a question that has not yet been examined. It is certainly true that it has made the skysc.r.a.per possible, and thus helped to create an absolutely new type of city, such as was never imagined even in the fairy tales of ancient nations. The skysc.r.a.per is ten years younger than the telephone. It is now generally seen to be the ideal building for business offices. It is one of the few types of architecture that may fairly be called American. And its efficiency is largely, if not mainly, due to the fact that its inhabitants may run errands by telephone as well as by elevator.

There seems to be no sort of activity which is not being made more convenient by the telephone. It is used to call the duck-shooters in Western Canada when a flock of birds has arrived; and to direct the movements of the Dragon in Wagner's grand opera "Siegfried." At the last Yale-Harvard football game, it conveyed almost instantaneous news to fifty thousand people in various parts of New England. At the Vanderbilt Cup Race its wires girdled the track and reported every gain or mishap of the racing autos. And at such expensive pageants as that of the Quebec Tercentenary in 1908, where four thousand actors came and went upon a ten-acre stage, every order was given by telephone.

Public officials, even in the United States, have been slow to change from the old-fas.h.i.+oned and more dignified use of written doc.u.ments and uniformed messengers; but in the last ten years there has been a sweeping revolution in this respect. Government by telephone! This is a new idea that has already arrived in the more efficient departments of the Federal service. And as for the present Congress, that body has gone so far as to plan for a special system of its own, in both Houses, so that all official announcements may be heard by wire.

Garfield was the first among American Presidents to possess a telephone.