by Bill Bryson
With his share of the funds, Morse strung a wire between Washington and Baltimore and on 11 May 1844 sent the first telegraphic message (it would not be called a telegram for another twelve years). Every schoolchild knows that this first message was ‘What hath God wrought?’ In fact, it was not. The first message was ‘Everything worked well.’ The more famous and ringing words, chosen not by Morse but by the daughter of the Commissioner of Patents, came at a later public demonstration. Morse’s only real invention was the simple code that bears his name.*18 Much of the rest was utterly beyond him. To build a working telegraph, Morse not only stole lavishly from Henry’s original papers, but when stuck would call on the eminent scientist for guidance. For years, Henry encouraged and assisted his efforts. Yet later, when Morse had grown immensely famous and rich, he refused to acknowledge even the slightest degree of debt to his mentor.
Throughout his career Morse was the lucky beneficiary of men more generous and gifted than he. In Paris he persuaded Louis Daguerre to show him how his newly invented photographic process worked. He then took it home with him to America and handsomely supplemented his fortune by making pictures and selling them (becoming in the process the first to photograph a living person). On the same trip, he actually stole a magnet crucial to long-distance telegraphy invented by Louis Breguet, and took it home with him to study at leisure.
It is almost impossible to conceive at this remove how the telegraph astonished and captivated the world. That news from remote places could be conveyed instantaneously to locations hundreds of miles away was as miraculous to Americans as it would be today if someone announced a way to teleport humans between continents. It was too miraculous for words. Within just four years of Morse’s first public demonstration, America had five thousand miles of telegraph wire and Morse was widely regarded as the greatest man of his age.25
Morse was knocked from the pantheon by an invention more useful and lasting, and far more ingenious, than the telegraph. I refer to the telephone, invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 (and not strictly an American invention since Bell, a native of Edinburgh, Scotland, didn’t become a US citizen until six years later). Bell did not coin the term telephone. The word had been around since the 1830s, and had been applied to a number of devices designed to produce noise, from a kind of musical instrument to a particularly loud foghorn. Bell described his appliance on the patent application as a new kind of ‘telegraphy’ and soon afterwards began referring to it as an ‘electrical speaking telephone’. Others commonly referred to it in its early days as a ‘speaking telegraph’.
Bell had become interested in the possibility of long-distance speech through his work with the deaf (a misfortune that extended to both his wife and mother). He was just twenty-eight and his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, just twenty-one, when they made their breakthrough on 10 March 1876. Despite their long and close association, there was a formality in their relationship that was somehow touching. It is notable that Bell’s first telephonic communication was not Tom, come here, I want you,’ but ‘Mr Watson, come here, I want you.’
Flushed with excitement, Bell and Watson demonstrated their new device to Western Union, but the company’s executives – why does this seem so inevitable? – failed to see its potential. ‘Mr Bell,’ they wrote to him, ‘after careful consideration of your invention, while it is a very interesting novelty, we have come to the conclusion that it has no commercial possibilities,’ adding that they saw no future for ‘an electrical toy’.26 Fortunately for Bell, others were not so short-sighted. Within just four years of its invention, America had 60,000 telephones. In the next twenty years that figure would increase to over six million, and Bell’s telephone company, renamed American Telephone and Telegraph, would become the largest corporation in America, with stock worth $1,000 a share. The Bell patent (No. 174,465) became the single most valuable patent in history.27 The speed with which the telephone insinuated itself into American life is indicated by the fact that by the early 1880s when a person said ‘I’ll call you’ it was taken to mean by telephone – or phone, as it was already familiarly known.
Bell sold his interests in the telephone in 1881 and devoted himself to other scientific pursuits. He invented ailerons for airplanes, and made significant contributions to the phonograph, the iron lung, the photoelectric cell and water desalination.28 When President Garfield lay dying from bullet wounds, Bell was the natural candidate to try to save him.
The telephone not only brought instant communication to millions, but enriched American English in a way the telegraph never had. Scores of new words entered the language or were given new meaning. Operator was current by the late 1870s, as was ‘Hello, central’, the phrase universally used before the introduction of dial phones. ‘Number, please?’ dates from 1895, as does telephone booth. Yellow pages and information first appeared in 1906, telephone directory in 1907 (the first, listing fifty subscribers, appeared in New Haven, Connecticut), and telephone book in 1915.29 That year also saw the introduction of coast-to-coast service. It took almost half an hour to make all the connections and the minimum charge was $20.70.
At first people were not sure what to say in response to a ringing phone. Edison thought callers should answer with a jaunty ‘Ahoy!’ and that was the word habitually used by the first telephone operator, one George Coy of New Haven. (Only male operators were employed at first. As so often happens with new technologies, women weren’t allowed anywhere near it until the novelty had worn off.) Others said, ‘Yes!’ or ‘What?’ and many merely picked up the receiver and listened hopefully. The problem was such that magazines ran long articles explaining the etiquette of phone use.
Today, America is the most phone-dependent nation on earth. Ninety-three per cent of American homes have a phone and almost 70 per cent have two phones, a level of penetration no other nation but Canada comes anywhere near equalling, and each household makes or receives on average 3,516 calls per year,30 a figure astonishing to almost all other people in the world.
Such was the outpouring of inventions in the late nineteenth century that in 1899 Charles Duell resigned as head of the US Patent Office declaring that ‘everything that can be invented has been invented’.31 As patent applications proliferated and grew ever more arcane, the definition of what constitutes a patentable invention had to be revised. In the early years a product or device had not only to be new but also demonstrably useful. From 1880 to 1952 the law was refined to require that an invention constitute a genuine breakthrough rather than a mere modification. By 1952 that definition was held to be too ambiguous and a new standard was adopted. Since then, an invention must merely be ‘nonobvious’.32
From the linguistic point of view, it is interesting to note how seldom inventions were patented under the names by which we now know them. Bell, as we have seen, described his most famous invention as ‘telegraphy’. Hiram Maxim didn’t use the word machine-gun – and quite rightly since all guns were machines – but the more precise ‘automatic gun’. Edison called his light-bulb an ‘electric lamp’. Joseph Glidden showed a small stroke of genius in inventing barbed wire, a material that transformed the West, but rather less in naming it; he described it on the patent application as ‘wire-fences’. The cash register began life as the ‘Incorruptible Cashier’ – so called because every dip into the till was announced with a noisy bell, thus making it harder for cashiers to engage in illicit delvings among the takings. (For much the same reason, early owners discovered that if they charged odd amounts like forty-nine cents or ninety-nine cents the cashier would very probably have to open the drawer to extract a penny change, thus obviating the possibility of the dreaded unrecorded transaction. It was only later that it dawned on merchants that a sum like $1.99 had the odd subliminal quality of seeming markedly cheaper than $2.) The escalator began life as the ‘Reno Inclined Elevator’, named for its inventor, Jesse Reno, who installed the first one at the Old Iron Pier on Coney Island in 1896. Escalator was the trade name used by the Otis
Elevator Company when it joined the market with a version of its own in 1900, but for years afterwards most people called it a movable stairway. (The modern word escalate, incidentally, is a back-formation from escalator.)33
Among such company, the typewriter, patented in 1868 by Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee as the Type-Writer, was unusual for preserving its original designation, though earlier models went by a variety of names, from pterotype to mechanical chirographer, and Sholes himself considered calling it a writing machine or printing machine. Sholes’s earliest models had some notable drawbacks. They printed only capital letters and the keys tended to jam. At first, the letters were arrayed in alphabetical order, an arrangement hinted at on modern keyboards by the sequences F-G-H, J-K-L and O-P, but the fact that no two other letters are alphabetical, that the most popular letters are not only banished to the periphery but given mostly to the left hand while the right is left with a sprinkling of secondary letters, punctuation marks and little-used symbols, are vivid reminders of the extent to which Sholes had to abandon common sense and order just to make the damn thing work. There is a certain piquant irony in the thought that every time you stab ineptly at the letter a with the little finger of your left hand, you are commemorating the engineering inadequacies of a nineteenth-century inventor.
To test the machines, a mechanic at Sholes’s Milwaukee factory reportedly took to typing ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party’ – no one knows why – which is apparently how this rousing sentiment became indelibly associated with testing a keyboard or limbering up the fingers.34 Mark Twain, incidentally, was the first person to write a book on a typewriter, or typemachine as he insisted on calling it. He claimed in an autobiographical note that it was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but his memory was faulty. It was in fact Life on the Mississippi.35
As the twentieth century dawned, still more terms designating wealth entered the language: to be on easy street (1901), high flier (1904), sitting pretty (1910). And inventors continued giving names to their processes that the world ignored. When a twenty-year-old recent graduate of Cornell named Willis Carrier developed the first modern air-conditioner in 1902, he didn’t call it that, but an ‘Apparatus for Treating Air’. The first electric stove was called a ‘fireless cooker’. The first ball-point pen was patented as a ‘non-leaking, high altitude writing stick’. Radio and television, as we shall see elsewhere, went by any number of names before settling into their present, seemingly inevitable forms. Chester Carlson invented xerography in 1942, but called it ‘electrophotography’. And the transistor, invented by three researchers at AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1950, was described on the patent application as a ‘three-electrode circuit element utilizing semi-conductive materials’.36
Although America was unsurpassed at devising new conveniences, its constant bent towards practicality – or pragmatism, a term coined by William James in 1863 – meant that it wasn’t always so good at dealing with more complicated systems. Many of the great technological breakthroughs of the nineteenth century didn’t occur in America but in Europe. The car was invented in Germany and the radio in Italy, just as radar, the computer and the jet engine would later be invented in Britain. But where America couldn’t be touched was in its capacity to exploit new technologies, and no one was better at this than Thomas Alva Edison.
Edison was the archetypal American pragmatist. Latin, philosophy and other such esoteric pursuits he dismissed as ‘ninny stuff’.37 What he wanted were useful inventions that would make life more agreeable for the user and bring untold wealth to him. With 1,093 patents to his name (though many of these were in fact invented by his employees) Edison has almost twice as many patents as his nearest rival, Edwin Land (inventor of the Polaroid camera), and no one gave the world a greater range of products that have become central to modern life.
Edison’s character was not, to put it charitably, altogether unflawed. He connived against competitors, took personal credit for inventions that were not his, drove his assistants to breaking point (they were known as the Insomnia Squad)38 and when all else failed did not hesitate to resort to bribery, slipping New Jersey legislators $1,000 each to produce laws favourable to his interests.39 If not an outright liar, he was certainly often economical with the truth. The popular story, which he did nothing to dispel, was that a width of 35 mm was chosen for movie film because when one of his minions asked how wide the film should be he crooked a finger and thumb and said, ‘Oh, about this wide.’ In fact, as Douglas Collins points out, it is far more probable that rather than devise his own film, he used Kodak film, which was not only 70 mm wide but 50 feet long. When cut down the middle it would conveniently yield 100 feet of 35 mm film – curiously, the precise dimensions of Edison’s first reels.40
When George Westinghouse’s novel and, in retrospect, superior alternating current electrical system began to challenge the direct current system in which Edison had invested much effort and money, Edison produced an eighty-three-page booklet entitled A Warning! From The Edison Electric Light Co. filled with alarming (and possibly fictitious) tales of innocent people who had been killed by coming in contact with Westinghouse’s dangerously unreliable AC cables.*19 To drive home his point, he paid neighbourhood children twenty-five cents each to bring him stray dogs, then staged elaborate demonstrations for the press at which the animals were dampened to improve their conductivity, strapped to tin sheets and slowly dispatched with increasing doses of alternating current.41
But his boldest – and certainly tackiest – public relations exercise was to engineer the world’s first electrical execution using his rival’s alternating current in the hope of proving once and for all its inherent dangers. The victim selected for the exercise was one William Kemmler, an inmate at Auburn State Prison in New York, who had got himself into this unfortunate fix by bludgeoning to death his girlfriend. The experiment was not a success. Strapped into an electric chair with his hands immersed in buckets of salt water, Kemmler was subjected to 1,600 volts of alternating current for fifty seconds. He gasped a great deal, lost consciousness and even began to smoulder a little, but conspicuously he failed to die. Not until a second, more forceful charge was applied did he finally expire. It was a messy, ugly death and wholly undermined Edison’s intentions. Alternating current was soon the norm.
Of linguistic interest is the small, forgotten argument over what to call the business of depriving a person of his life by means of a severe electrical discharge. Edison, always an enthusiast for novel nomenclature, variously suggested electromort, dynamort and ampermort before seizing with telling enthusiasm on to westinghouse, but none of these caught on. Many newspapers at first wrote that Kemmler was to be electrized, but soon changed that to electrocuted and before long electrocution was a word familiar to everyone, not least those on death row.
Edison was to be sure a brilliant inventor, with a rare gift for coaxing genius from his employees, but where he truly excelled was as an organizer of systems. The invention of the light-bulb*20 was a wondrous thing, but of not much practical use when no one had a socket to plug it into. Edison and his tireless workers had to design and build the entire system from scratch, from power stations to cheap and reliable wiring, to lamp-stands and switches. In this he left Westinghouse and all other competitors standing.
The first experimental power plant was built in two semi-derelict buildings on Pearl Street, lower Manhattan, and on 4 September 1882 Edison threw a switch that illuminated, if but faintly, 800 flickering bulbs all over southern Manhattan. With incredible speed electric lighting became the wonder of the age.42 Within months Edison had set up no fewer than 334 small electrical plants all over the world. Cannily he put them in places where they would be sure to achieve maximum impact: on the New York Stock Exchange, in the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, La Scala opera house in Milan, the dining-room of the House of Commons in London. All this made Edison, and America, immensely rich. By 1920 it was estimated that the industries spawned
by his inventions and business pursuits – from electric lighting to motion pictures – were worth an aggregate $21.6 billion. No other person did more to make America an economic power.43
Edison’s other great innovation was the setting up of a laboratory with the express purpose of making technological breakthroughs with commercial potential. Before long many leading corporations, notably AT&T, General Electric and DuPont, were doing the same. Practical science, elsewhere the preserve of academics, had become in America the work of capitalists.
As the nineteenth century progressed and small companies grew into mighty corporations, the new breed of magnates required increasingly grand and imposing headquarters. Fortunately, their need for office space coincided with the development of a radical type of building: the skyscraper. Before the 1880s, buildings of more than eight or nine storeys were impracticable. Such a structure, made of brick, would require so much support as to preclude openings for windows and doors on the lower floors. However, a number of small innovations and one large one suddenly made skyscrapers a practical proposition. The large innovation was curtain walling, a cladding of non-weight-bearing materials hung on a steel skeleton, which made tall buildings much easier to build.
Skyscraper had existed in English since 1794, but had been applied to any number of other things: a top hat, a high popup in early baseball, the loftiest sail on a merchant ship. It was first applied to a building in 1888 (though skyscraping building was used four years earlier), and not in New York, as one might expect, but in Chicago. Throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century Chicago led the world in the engineering of large structures, and for one very good reason: it had burned down in 1871. The first skyscraper was the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, built in 1883-5, and soon followed by the Leiter Building (1889), the Reliance Building (1894), and the Carson, Pirie, Scott Building (1899). Soon skyscrapers were transforming cityscapes (an Americanism of 1850) all across the nation and so altering people’s way of looking at cities as to give new meaning to the word skyline, which originally was a synonym for horizon but took on its modern sense in 1896.