A WORLD-STIRRING ACCIDENT

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 210, 1 June 1926, Page 13

A WORLD-STIRRING ACCIDENT

TELEPHONE TRIAL It was on March 13, 1876, that the first Bell telephone patent was applied for in .U.S.A. The recent establishment of two-way wireless conversation between Rugby and America may thus be regarded as the beginning of an- important new era in speechcommunication over immense distances, exactly fifty years after the ■inception of the telephone, from which it is a natural development. The “moment” when the telephone was born, if such a “moment” there ever can be in any discovery which is the fruit of collective evolution, has been graphically fixed by Thomas A. Watson, who was assisting Graham Bell, the discoverer of the first practical instrument, at the time. The incident is recorded in the “Observer.” In a stuffy garret of Court Street. Boston, U.S.A., on June 2, 1875, they were experimenting with the receiving and transmitting springs of the harmonic telegraph. “One of the transmitter springs I was attending to,” Watson has declared, "stopped vibrating, and _ 1 plucked it to start it again. It did not start, and I kept on plucking it, when suddenly I heard a shout from Bell in the next room, and then out he came with a rush, demanding: ‘What did you do then ? Don’t change anything. Let me see.’ “I showed him. It was very simple. The make-and-break /points of tlie transmitter spring I was trying to start had become welded together—the right man had that mechanism at his ear during that fleeting moment, and instantly recognised the transcendent importance of that faint sound thus electrically transmitted. All the experiments' that followed that discovery, up to the time the telephone was put into practical use, was largely a matter of working out the details.” Bell applied to the American Patent Office for his patent, to be followed only an hour or two later by Elisha Gray, a Chicago man, who evolved an apparatus at the same time and subsequently contested priority. Patent rights in England were secured by Bell on December 9, 1876. On June 14, 1878, the first “Telephone Company, Limited (Bell’s Patent),” in England was registered. August, 1879, saw the establishment of the first exchange at 36 Coleman Street, E.C., with seven or eight subscribers. By 1881 the annual revenue in the metropolitan district had reached £23,017. In the first commercial box instrument of 1877 there was no calling device, attention being attracted by the striking of a diaphragm.. Later, in instruments employed for private lines in London, this was done by pressing a button, which worked a hammer. The subsequent development of the telephone system is summarised thus by Mr. F. G. C. Baldwin in his “History of the Telephone System in the United Kingdom”:— 1878- Parent companies and establishment of exchange systems. 1880- United Telephone Company in London. 1879- —lntroduction into provinces. 1881- —Early introduction of telephones bv British Post Office. 1883-90.—Introduction and early development of multiple switchboard. 1883- —Early underground cable systems for telegraph and telephone circuits. 1884- —National Telephone Co., Ltd., in London. 1890-1912.—Multiple switchboard in U.K. 1900-1912.—Municipal telephones. 1912.—System taken over by. Post Office. In 1890 the gross income of the National Telephone Company, Ltd., was £380,075; by 1910 it had climbed to £3,422,423. In the Estimates for 1925-20 the Government revenue alone from the telephone system is placed at £16,000,000. The total number ot telephones in use in Great Britain today is 1,260,242 or 2.7 per 100' population ; in America, 16,935,918 or 14.7 per 100. Last year the calls per working day in the London area alone numbered 1,667,000, the average night calls 61,000. Who could have foretold such developments from a relative accident in a stuffy garret of Court Street, Boston, U.S.A., on a hot day of June, 1875? The extent of ' the present and future developments of the telephone system was outlined to an "Observer” representative by an Official of the General Post Office.

“New telephones,” lie said, “are going in at the rate of 19,000 a month. A. year ago the rate was 17,000, so the number is always accelerating. Within fifteen to twenty years the whole of London should be wired with 138 automatic exchanges. In time, as the older exchanges need renewal, they will be replaced by automatic ones. Call-boxes will be. automatic, too, in most cases.” This change, he added, would not dispense entirely with the "Hello” girl for the automatic instrument was not practicable for trunk calls. A proportion of them—in London alone there were some 7000—would always have to be retained.

We are sinking money in tiie system at the rate of £1,000,000 a month, and are authorised to go on with new works at that rate for tlie next three years. '