The History 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 machine-shop 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.

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."

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 deaf-mute 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.

When Sunday afternoon arrived, Bell was at his little table, nervous, yet confident. But hour after hour went by, and the judges did not arrive. The day was intensely hot, and they had many wonders to examine. There was the first electric light, and the first grain-binder, and the musical telegraph of Elisha Gray, and the marvellous exhibit of printing telegraphs shown by the Western Union Company. By the time they came to Bell's table, through a litter of school-desks and blackboards, the hour was seven o'clock, and every man in the party was hot, tired, and hungry. Several announced their intention of returning to their hotels. One took up a telephone receiver, looked at it blankly, and put it down again. He did not even place it to his ear. Another judge made a slighting remark which raised a laugh at Bell's expense. Then a most marvellous thing happened—such an incident as would make a chapter in "The Arabian Nights Entertainments."

Noises! Such a jangle of meaningless noises had never been heard by human ears. There were spluttering and bubbling, jerking and rasping, whistling and screaming. There were the rustling of leaves, the croaking of frogs, the hissing of steam, and the flapping of birds' wings. There were clicks from telegraph wires, 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 was at its height. Watson, who had a fanciful mind, suggested that perhaps these sounds were signals from the inhabitants of Mars or some other sociable planet. But the matter-of-fact young telephonists agreed to lay the blame on "induction"—a hazy word which usually meant the natural meddlesomeness of electricity.

Whatever else the mysterious noises were, they were a nuisance. The poor little telephone business was plagued almost out of its senses. It was like a dog with 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, one of the first agents; "for no matter how plainly a man talked into his telephone, his language was apt to sound like Choctaw at the other end of the line."