Then the electrical telegraph arrived. It was from the future and, like many things from the future, it made things from the present—things like the optical telegraph—look like they were from the past.
It was amazing. With a battery and a switch and miles of wire and a sounder—a thing that clicked when you ran electrical current through it—you could communicate over a distance. Instantly. Not half an hour to send a message but half a minute. Of course, it wasn’t quite as easy as whipping out your cell phone and texting your friend, but you could write out a message—a telegram—and take it down to your local telegraph office, pay some money, and have it sent.
It was patented in both England and America in the same year, 1837. In America the inventor was Samuel Morse, whose his first functioning telegraph line went live between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland, in 1844. Washington to New York followed two years later.
It seems incredibly primitive today. So primitive, in fact, that it is difficult to appreciate just how stunning this was at the time. It let loose a communications revolution that the writer Tom Standage dubbed the “Victorian Internet.” Americans took to the telegraph like teenagers to text messages. By 1850 America had twelve thousand miles of telegraph lines served by some twenty companies. Only two years later this had just about doubled to twenty-three thousand miles, with another ten thousand miles under construction. A writer chronicling the telegraph’s rapid growth at the time reported: “It is anticipated that the whole of the populous parts of the United States will, within two or three years, be covered with a net-work like a spider’s web.”
The prediction was right. The tendrils of the telegraph’s spiderweb spread rapidly, its threads vibrating with the dots and dashes of Mr. Morse’s code. The web—the telegraph web, like its Internet great-grandchild a century and a half later—conveyed news, facilitated commerce, and whispered gossip. Romance blossomed over the telegraph; even weddings took place telegraphically. It reported stock prices and winning lottery numbers. Gamblers and scam artists used the telegraphic web as well, passing news of sporting events and devising schemes to cheat and defraud.
The spider that owned the web was the Western Union Telegraph Company. Formed by the merger of several competing telegraph companies in 1855, it controlled 90 percent of all telegraph traffic in the United States within just over ten years. But the telegraph’s astonishing growth was just getting started. In 1867 the telegraph network carried 5.8 million telegraph messages and Western Union reported revenues of some $6.6 million—almost $700 million in today’s dollars. By 1875 the number of messages had grown to about 20 million. So many messages, in fact, that the lines were becoming clogged. Expanding capacity by adding more telegraph wires was an expensive proposition. The network cried out for a way to transmit multiple telegraph messages over the same pair of wires, and riches awaited the man who invented the “multiple telegraph.”
As a later observer put it, “Nothing, save the hangman’s noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash.” Of the many minds that concentrated on solving this problem, one belonged to a Boston professor, amateur inventor, and teacher of the deaf named Alexander Graham Bell. Bell’s take on the multiple telegraph came from his studies of hearing, sound, music, and human physiology. Bell knew that sounds, like music and speech, were made up of harmonics, that is, of different simultaneous frequencies. Perhaps it was possible to send multiple telegraph signals over the same wire using multiple tones of different pitch? Bell called his idea the “harmonic telegraph.”
Bell worked intensely on the harmonic telegraph, even going so far as to accept an investment from Gardiner Hubbard, a Boston lawyer who would eventually become his father-in-law. But Bell’s mind kept gravitating toward a slightly different—and slightly crazy—idea: if you could send several notes simultaneously down a telegraph line for a multiple telegraph then maybe . . . just maybe . . . you could send a human voice down the wires.
He became obsessed with this new idea, despite his investors’ attempts to keep him focused on the piles of cash the harmonic telegraph was going to generate for them. The telephone “could never be more than a scientific toy,” Hubbard told Bell. “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 he couldn’t. Bell was consumed by a puzzle that was stuck in his head, a puzzle that wasn’t going anywhere until he figured it out. As the historian Tim Wu writes, “For him the thrill of the new was unbeatably compelling, and Bell knew that in his lab he was closing in on something miraculous. He, nearly alone in the world, was playing with magical powers never seen before.” He was also the right man for the job, the key that fit the lock. Bell himself recalled later, “I now realize that I should never have invented the telephone if I had been an electrician. What electrician would have been so foolish as to try any such thing? The advantage I had was that sound had been the study of my life—the study of vibrations.”
It took three years but on March 10, 1876, Bell finally succeeded: he managed to send speech through a wire and into the next room. His prototype telephone was an unlikely contraption. To use it, Bell spoke into the transmitter, a funnel-shaped mouthpiece that focused his voice upon a flexible diaphragm. Suspended from the diaphragm was a short length of platinum wire, half immersed in a jar of sulfuric acid, the same sort of corrosive acid you’d find in a car battery. A wire ran from the platinum to the receiver—a primitive speaker, basically—in the next room. From the speaker, a wire ran to a battery and then back to a brass pipe that was also immersed in the transmitter’s acid bath. The acid was conductive and completed the circuit between the transmitter and the receiver. Here was the key innovation, the thing that made it all work: the louder Bell spoke into the mouthpiece, the more the diaphragm deflected and the deeper the platinum wire was plunged into the acid. The more wire dipped into the acid, the less electrical resistance there was in the circuit and the more current flowed to the receiver, causing the speaker to move proportionately. Using a jar of sulfuric acid Bell had created what would become known as a variable resistance transmitter. It was this that allowed his system to accurately mimic the volume fluctuations of speech over a pair of wires.
Bell, Hubbard, investor Thomas Sanders, and Bell’s assistant Thomas Watson turned their attention to commercializing the new invention. Western Union, with its telegraph monopoly and millions of messages and hundreds of thousands of miles of wire, was the undisputed telecommunications giant of the day. It would seem to have been the natural home of telephony, an established company with a closely related business, technology, and relevant assets. Bell is said to have offered Western Union the rights to his telephone patent in 1876 for $100,000. Western Union’s president is alleged to have responded, “What use could this company make of an electrical toy?” Well, then.
Bell and his associates pressed on with the telephone’s commercial rollout. This often took Bell and Watson on the public lecture circuit in Boston and its surrounds, demonstrating their new invention to crowds that were usually enthusiastic but sometimes skeptical. As one newspaper wrote at the time, “It is indeed difficult, hearing the sounds out of the mysterious box, to wholly resist the notion that the powers of darkness are somehow in league with it.” Despite such occasional press commentary they persevered. By 1877 the first permanent telephone wires were strung in a suburb of Boston, the first ads for telephone service appeared, and the first telephone rentals took place. The Bell Telephone Company itself was founded in July of that year.
If you wanted telephone service between your office in Boston and, say, your home outside of town, Bell would be glad to set you up. You would be able to call your office from the comfort of your home, and your coworkers could call you. But it wasn’t much like telephone service today. Bell’s offering was point-to-point: a telephone at your home, a telephone at your office, and a telephone line r
un directly between them. In fact, it was your responsibility to hire telegraph contractors to run the line between your home and office. If you wanted to talk to multiple shops or suppliers, you had set up multiple pairs of telephones—and wires—between them and you.
This was high-tech wizardry back in the day. But it suffered from some obvious drawbacks. The maximum distance you could cover was about twenty miles. Basic service was $20 per year for a pair of telephones for residences, $40 per year for businesses—equivalent to about $400 and $800 per year today. But the killer expense was telegraph line installation, which cost between $100 and $150 per mile, that is, between $2,000 and $3,000 per mile in present dollars. Note that telephones were rented, never owned outright; this was a key part of the Bell plan to maintain ownership over the entire telephone system.
Forget about all that, though, because these are all small potatoes compared to this: you couldn’t call anyone you didn’t have a connection to. Want to talk to Aunt Mabel? Better get the telegraph installers busy running wires between your house and hers.
Bell and others were aware of this problem and knew how to fix it. Instead of running wires directly from one place to another, why not run them all to a central place? When you wanted to make a call you’d pick up the phone and do something—push a button, turn a crank—to get the attention of someone at “central.” There a person—an operator—would answer the phone. You’d ask to be connected to Mr. Smith (who needed telephone numbers when only a few people had telephones?). Central would ring Mr. Smith’s telephone line. When Mr. Smith answered, the operator would connect the wires together, switching your call from central to your party.
As Bell himself put it in a memo from early 1878, “Instead of erecting a line directly from one to another, I would advise you to bring the wires from the two points to the office of the Company and there connect them together . . . the company should employ a man in each central office for the purpose of connecting wires as desired. A fixed annual rental could be charged for the use of the wires, or a toll could be levied. As all connections would necessarily be made at the central office, it would be easy to note the time during which any wires were connected and to make a charge accordingly—bills could be sent in periodically.” He added, prophetically, “However small the rate of charges might be, the revenue would probably be something enormous.” The switchboard, and with it the concepts of a telephone central office or exchange—to say nothing of your monthly telephone bill and its per-minute charges—was born.
The first commercial switchboard debuted in January 1878 in New Haven, Connecticut, connecting twenty-one subscribers over eight telephone lines to a single operator, all under license from Bell Telephone. The first switchboards were primitive affairs: pieces of wood with a handful of metal bits, something that a fourth-grade science fair participant would scoff at today. But they worked, quickly establishing their superiority over point-to-point connections.
Switchboards rapidly grew in size and complexity. The first switchboard operators? Teenage boys. As John Murphy writes in his book The Telephone, “It was believed that they would have the energy, dexterity, quicksilver reflexes, and mechanical know-how to connect hundreds of calls an hour on a switchboard composed of a bewildering maze of thousands of cords and jacks. It turned out, however, that they were often impatient, rude, and foulmouthed to callers.” Goodness, who could have predicted? The teenage boys soon found themselves out of their jobs, replaced by women. The ladies, Murphy says, provided a “warmer human voice for the phone company” and also injected some sex appeal for the telephone’s primary user base: businessmen.
By now Western Union recognized its mistake in dismissing the telephone as a toy. Sure, Bell had three thousand installed telephones and Western Union had none. But Western Union was the largest company on earth at the time, with financing, engineering and operations skills, and 250,000 miles of installed telegraph wire. In December of 1877 it went head to head with Bell Telephone, launching the American Speaking Telephone company, with inventor Thomas Edison as one of its technical wizards. Within the year Western Union had surpassed Bell Telephone in several markets and looked poised to crush Bell entirely; it didn’t even resemble a fair fight.
But Bell had something that Western Union didn’t: the fundamental patent on the telephone. Bell sued Western Union for patent infringement in September 1878. It took more than a year but in the end Bell won. In November 1879 Western Union settled the lawsuit, agreeing to exit the telephone business and transfer its telephone exchanges and thousands of telephone subscribers to Bell. In exchange, Bell Telephone agreed to limit its involvement in the telegraph business and to share a portion of its telephone revenues with Western Union for seventeen years. By the 1880s Bell Telephone’s publicly traded stock had become the belle of the Boston Stock Exchange, where it traded under the ticker symbol “T”—for “telephone.”
The legal victory also helped Bell go after a smaller but still vexing problem: people who had illegally connected telephones—some stolen, some leftovers from independent telephone companies—to Bell Telephone lines. “During the past few months the American Bell Telephone Co., of Boston, has had detectives at work in this city endeavoring to ascertain how many ‘bogus’ or outlawed telephones were in use here,” an 1890 trade journal reported. “Over 200 have been discovered, and last Thursday the first batch of fifteen or twenty liverymen, doctors, dentists, druggists, and fuel dealers who have been using these infringing telephones were summoned to appear in the United States Circuit Court.” As a Bell agent in Philadelphia said, “I cannot understand how many good business men can permit themselves to use what they know it is against the law to use.”
Despite having to deal with the occasional pirate telephone user, Bell was now positioned to own the majority of the telephone network in the United States for the next one hundred years—but there was one problem. Bell Telephone’s sacred patents would start expiring in 1894, opening the field for competition. To prepare for this coming onslaught, Bell Telephone formed a new subsidiary: American Telephone and Telegraph. AT&T’s mission was to build long-distance telephone lines—“long lines,” as they were called. The idea was to use the time remaining before its patents expired to develop the nation’s long-distance telephone network. Then, when the patents ran out, the company would have a formidable barrier to would-be competitors. AT&T would be the only company with long-distance telephone service and it could either charge other companies for access to its long-distance network or simply refuse to let other companies use it.
AT&T’s first long-distance line, between New York and Philadelphia (capacity: one call), went live in 1885. AT&T reached Chicago in 1892, St. Louis in 1896, Minneapolis in 1897, and Kansas City in 1898. The far west took longer, as telephone engineers struggled with the challenge of sending voice over greater and greater distances. But the engineers persevered; Denver was reached in 1911 and San Francisco in 1915.
Switchboards, meanwhile, still based on the same fundamentals as the piece of wood with connectors, became larger and more sophisticated. Electrical cords insulated in woven cloth were used to connect incoming calls to destination telephone lines; these are the “cordboards” you see in old movies, the ones where dozens of operators sit next to one another, arm by arm, plugging and unplugging wires into the large connector panels in front of them.
By 1888 a switchboard had been designed that could serve more than ten thousand subscribers in New York City. In the cordboard’s eventual form, an operator would sit in front of about two hundred answering jacks and roughly three thousand calling jacks, that is, she could answer calls from about two hundred customers and connect them to about three thousand others. Multiple individual switchboards could be placed next to each other and ganged together, allowing one operator (with a certain amount of standing and stretching) to connect calls on the boards to her left or right, tripling her capacity. The result was that her two
hundred subscribers could be connected to about nine thousand others. Put fifty of these switchboards and operators in the room and you had a complete telephone exchange: almost ten thousand people could be connected to one another.
But what if you want to talk to somebody served by an entirely different switchboard? To do this you need a way of connecting switchboards in different locations. Wires called trunk lines were installed between central offices for this purpose. The central offices are the branches on the tree and the wires connecting them form the tree’s trunk. But Bell Telephone quickly ran into the same problem it had with the original telephone system: trunk lines are point to point. If you have ten central offices in a given city, and they all need trunk lines between them, you find yourself having to run forty-five lines due to all the possible combinations of central offices that need connections with each other—a big, expensive mess, and one that gets worse with each central office you add.
The tandem switchboard solved this problem. You can think of a tandem switchboard as a switchboard of other switchboards, a special switchboard in a special central office that was used only for connecting other switchboards together. Just like the original central offices had all the telephone wires for a given exchange brought to a central place, a tandem central office had the trunk lines from other offices brought to a central place. There an operator on a tandem switchboard could connect trunk lines from one central office to another. The network was starting to become hierarchical.
By 1903 there were about 3 million switchboard connected phones. The interesting thing about these millions of lines is that, in every case, a human being was the switch. It was the operator’s hand, arm, and reach that switched an incoming call to its destination, and the operator’s brain that told the hand and arm where to reach and what to do. Telephone switching was an intensely manual process, requiring warehouses full of people. By 1902 the Bell System employed some thirty thousand operators; by 1914 it was about a hundred thousand.
Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759) Page 3