The Future of the Telephone

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 18, 2 November 1910, Page 33

The Future of the Telephone

THE DAWN OF A NEW ERA OF EXPANSION — TELE= GRAPH WIRES TO BE USED FOR TALKING AND TELEPHONE WIRES FOR TELEGRAPHING.

By

Herbert N. Casson.

O one, certainly at the pres; nt I B time, regrets the passing of the I J independent teamster. He was / much more arbitrary and expensive than any railroad has ever dared to be; and, as the country grew, he became impossible. He was not the fittest to survive. For the general good, he was

held back from competing with the railroad, and taught to co-operate with it by hauling freight to and from the depots. This, to his surprise, he found much more profitable and pleasant. He had 'been “ squeezed out ” of a bad job into a good one. And, by a. similar process of evolution, the United States is rapidly outgrowing the small, independent telephone companies. These will eventually', one by’ one, rise as the teamster did to a higher social value, by clasping wires with the main system of telephony. Until 1881 the Bell system was in the hands of a family group. It was a strictly private enterprise. The public had been asked to help in its launching, and had refused. But after 1881 it passed into the control of the small stockholders, an! has remained there without a break. It is now one of the most “peopleised” businesses, scattering either wages or dividends into more than a hundred thousand homes. It has at times been exclusive, but never sordid. It has never been dollar-mad nor frenzied by the virus of stock-gambling. There has always been a vein of sentiment in it that has kept it in touch with human nature. Even at

the present time, every check of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company carries on it a picture of a pretty Cupid, sitting on a ehair upon which he has placed a thick book, and gaily prattling into a telephone. Several sweeping changes may be expected in the near futre, now that there is a team-play between the Bell System and the Western Union. Three telephone messages and eight telegrams may be sent at the same time over two pairs of wires —that is one of the recent miracles of science that is now to be tried out upon a gigantic scale. Most of the long-dis-tance telephone wires in the United States, of which there are fully 2,000,000 miles, can be used for telegraphic purposes; and a third of the Western Union wires, 500,000, may with n few changes be used for talking. The Western Union is paying rent for 22,500 offices, all of which help to make telegraphy a luxury of the few. It is employing as large an army of messengerboys as that army that marched with General Sherman from Atlanta to the sea. Both of these items of expense will

dwindle when a Bell wire and a Mors wire can be brought to a common terminal; and when a telegram can be received or delivered by telephone. There wi.l also be a gain, perhaps the largest of all, in removing the trudging little messenger boy from the streets and sending him either to school or to learn some useful trade. The faet is that the United States is the first country that has succeeded in putting both telephone and telegraph upon the proper basis. Elsewhere, either the two are widely apart, or the telephone is a mere adjunct of a telegraphic department. According to the new American plan, the two are not competitive, bujt complementary. The Post Office sends a package; the telegraph sends the eontents of the package; but the telephone sends nothing. It is an apparatus that makes conversation possible between two separated people. Each of the three has a distinct field of its own, so that there has never been any cause for jealousy between them. To make the telephone an annex of the Post Office or the telegraph has become absurd. There are now in the whole world very nearly as many messages sent by telephone as by letter; and there are thirty-two times as many telephone calls as telegrams. In the United States the telephone has grown to be the big brother

of the telegraph. It has six times the net earnings and eight times the wire; and it transmits as many messages as the combined total of telegrams, letters and railroad passengers. This universal trend towards consolidation has introduced a variety, of probit ms that will engage the ablest brains in the telephone for many years to come.

How to get the benefits of organisation without its losses, to bee >me str.mg with out losing quickness, to become systematic without losing the dash ami dare of earlier days, to develop the working force into an army of high-speed specialists without losing the bird’s-eye view of the whole situation- these are the riddles of a new type, for which the telephonists of the next generation must find answers. They illustrate the nature ot the big jobs that the telephone has to

offer to an ambitious and gifte 1 young man of to-day. “The problems were never so large or so complex as they are right now,’’ says Mr. J. J. Carty, the chief of the telephone engineers. The eternal struggle remains between the large and the little ideas—between the men who see what might be and th? men who see only

what is. There ie still the race to break time records. Already the girl at the switchboard can find the person wanted in thirty seconds. This is onetenth of the time that was taken in the early centrals, but it is still too long. It is one-half of a valuable minute. It must be cut to twenty-five seconds, or to twenty, or to fifteen. There is still the inventors’ battle to gain miles. The distance over which conversations can be held has been increased from 20 miles to 2,500. But

this is not far enough. There are some civilised human beings who are 12,000 miles apart, and who have interests in o million. During the Boxer Rebellion in China, for instance, there were Americans in Pekin who would gladly have given half of their fortunes for the use of a pair of wires to New York. In the earliest days of the telephone, Bell was fond of prophesying that “the time will come when we will talk across the Atlantic Ocean”; but this was re garded as a poetical fancy until Pupin invented his method of automatically propelling the electric current. Since then the most conservative engineer will discuss the problem of trans-Atlantic telephony. And as for the poets, they are now dreaming of the time when a man may speak and hear his own voice come back to him around the world. “I can see a universal system of telephony for the United States in the very near future,” says Carty. “There is a statue of Seward standing in one of the streets of Seattle. The inscription upon il is: ‘To a United Country.’ But as an Easterner stands there, he feels the isolation of that far-western State, and wo will always feel it until he can talk from one side of the United States to the other. For my part,” continued Carty, “I believe we will talk across continents and across oceans. Why not? Are there not more cells in one human body than there are people in the whole earth?”

Some future Carty may solve the abandoned problem of the single wire and cut the copper bill in two by restoring the grounded circuit. He may transmit vision as well as speech. He may perfect a third-rail system for use

on moving trains. He may conceive of an ideal insulating material to supersede glass, mica, paper, and enamel. He may establish a Universal Code, so that all persons of importance in the United States shall have call-numbers by which they may be instantly located, as books are found in a library. Some other young man may create a Commercial Department on wide lines, a work which telephone men have as yet been too specialised to do. Who ever does this will be a man of comprehensive brain. He will be as closely in touch with the average man as with the art of telephony. He will know the gossip of the street, the demands of the labour unions, and the policies of Governors and Presidents. The psychology of

the Western farmer will concern him, and the tone of the daily Press, and the methods of department stores. It will be his aim to know the subtle chemistry of public opinion, and to adapt the telephone service to the shifting moods and necessities of the times. He will fit telephony like a garment around the habits of the people. Also, now that the telephone business

has become strong, its next anxiety must naturally be to develop the virtues, and not the defects, of strength. Its motto must be “Ich Dien”—“l serve”; and it will be the work of the future statesman of the telephone to illustrate this motto in all its practical variations. They will cater and explain, and explain and cater. They will educate and educate, until they have created an expert public. They will teach by pictures and lectures and exhibitions. They will have charts and diagrams hung in the telephone booths, so that the person who is waiting for a call may learn a little and pass the time more rleasantly. They will, in a word, attend to those innumerable trifles that make the per fection of public service.

There are many reasons to believe that for the practical idealists of the future the supreme study will be the force that makes such miracles possible. Six thousand million dollars —onetwentieth of the national wealth of the United States—is at the present time invested in electrical development. The Electrical Age has not yet arrived, but it is at hand; and no one can tell how brilliant the result may be when the creative minds of a nation are focussed upon the subjugation of this mysterious force, which has more power and more delicacy than any other force that man has been able to harness. As a tame and tractable energy, electricity is new. Among the wise men of Greece and Rome, few’ knew of its existence, and none put it to any practical use. The wisest knew that a piece of amber, when rubbed, will attract feathery substances; but they regarded this as poetry rather than science. There was a pretty legend among the Phoenicians that the pieces of amber w’ere the petrified tears of maidens who had thrown themselves into the sea because of unrequited love, and each bead of amber was highly prized. It was worn as an amulet and a symbol of purity. Not for two thousand years did anyone dream that within its golden heart lay bidden the secret of a new electrical civilisation. Not even in 1752, when Benjamin Franklin flew’ his famous kite on the banks of the Schuylkill River and captured the first “canned lightning,” was

there any definite knowledge of electrical energy. His lightning-rod was regarded as an insult to the deity of Heaven. It was blamed for the earthquake of 1755, and not until the telegraph of Morse came into general use did men dare to think of the thunder-bolt of Jove as a possible servant of the human race.

Thus it happened that when Bell invented the telephone he surprised the world with a new idea. He had to make the thought as well as the thing. No Jules Verne nor H. G. Wells had foreseen it. The author of the “Arabian Nights” fantasies had conceived of a fly-ing-carpet, but neither he nor anyone else had conceived of flying conversation. In all the literature of ancient days, there is not a line that will apply to the telephone, except possibly that expressive phrase in the Bibif—“And behold, there came a Voice.” In these more privileged days, the telphene has come to be regarded as a commonplace fact of everyday life; and we are apt to forget that the wonder of it has become greater and no less; and that there are still honour and profit, plenty of both, to be won by the inventor and the scientist. The flood of electrical patents was never higher than now. There are literally more in a single month than the total number issued by the Patent Office up to 1859. The Bell System has three hundred experts who are paid to do nothing else but try out all new ideas and inventions. There is, therefore, no immediate danger that the art of telephony will be less fascinating in the future than it has been in the past. It

will still be the most alluring and elusive sprite that ever led the way through a Dark Continent of mysterious phenomena. And so, notwithstanding all that has been done since Bell opened up the way, the telephone remains the acme of electrical marvels. No other thing does so much with so little energy. No other thing is more enswathed in the unknown. Not even the grey-haired pioneers who have lived with the telephone since its birth can understand their protege. As to the why and the

how, there is as yet no answer. It is as true of telephony to-day as it was in 1876 that a child can use what the wisest sages cannot comprehend. Here is a tiny disc of sheet-iron. I speak. It shudders. It has a different shudder for every sound. It has thousands of millions of different shudders. There is a second disc many miles away, perhaps 2,500 miles away. Between the two discs runs a copper wire. As 1 speak, a thrill of electricity flits along the wire. The thrill is moulded hy the shudder of the disc. It makes the second disc shudder. And the shudder of the second disc reproduces my. voice. That is what happens. But how—not all the scientists of the world can tell. The telephone current is a phenomenon of the ether, say, the theorists. But what is ether? No one knows. Sir Oliver Lodge has guessed that it is “perhaps the only substantial thing in the material universe,” but no one knows. There is nothing to guide us in that unknown country, except a signpost that points upward, and bears the one word—“ Perhaps.” The Ether of Space! Here is an Eldorado for the scientists of the future, and whoever can first map it out will go far toward discovering the secret of telephony. Some day, who knowp, there may come the poetry and grand opera of the telephone. Artists may come who will portray the marvel of the wires that quiver with electrified words, and the romance of the switchboards that tremble with the secrets of a great city. Already Puvis de Chavannes, by one of his superb panels in the Boston Library, has admitted the telephone and telegraph to the world of art. He has embodied them as two flying figures, poised above the electric wires, and with the following inscription underneath:—“By the wondrous agency of electricity, speech flashes through space, and swift as lightning bears tidings of good and evil.”