by Bill Bryson
After his costly failures with cement, Edison moved on to other ideas that mostly proved to be impractical or demonstrably harebrained. He developed an interest in warfare and predicted that soon he would be able to induce mass comas in enemy troops through “electrically charged atomizers.” He also concocted a plan to build giant electromagnets that would catch enemy bullets in flight and send them back the way they had come. He invested heavily in an automated general store in which customers would put a coin in a slot and a moment later a bag of coal, potatoes, onions, nails, hairpins, or other desired commodity would come sliding down a chute to them. The system never worked. It never came close to working.
Which brings us at last to the niche in the wall and the world-changing object it contained: the telephone. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, no one anywhere, Bell included, saw its full potential. Many didn’t see any potential for it at all. Executives from Western Union famously dismissed the phone as “an electrical toy.” So Bell proceeded independently and did rather well out of it, to say the least. The Bell patent (No. 174,465) became the single most valuable patent ever granted. All Bell did really was put together existing technologies. The components necessary to make telephones had existed for thirty years, and the principles were understood. The problem wasn’t so much with getting a voice to travel along a wire—children had long been doing that with two tin cans and a length of string—as with amplifying it so that it could be heard at a distance.
In 1861, a German schoolteacher named Johann Philipp Reis built a prototype device, and even called it a “Telephon,” for which reasons Germans naturally tend to credit him with the invention. The one thing Reis’s phone didn’t do, however, was actually work, at least as far as could be told at the time. It could send only simple signals—primarily clicks and a small range of musical tones—and not effectively enough to let it challenge the preeminence of the telegraph. Ironically, it was later discovered that when the contact points on Reis’s device became fouled with dust or dirt, they were able to transmit speech with startling fidelity. Unfortunately, Reis, with Teutonic punctiliousness, had always kept his equipment impeccably shiny and clean, and so went to his grave never knowing how close he had come to producing a working instrument. At least three other men, including the American Elisha Gray, were well on the road to building working phones when Bell had his breakthrough moment in Boston in 1876. Gray actually filed something called a patent caveat—a sort of holding claim that allowed one to protect an invention that wasn’t quite yet perfected—on the very day that Bell filed his own, more formal patent. Unfortunately for Gray, Bell beat him by a few hours.
Bell was born in 1847, the same year as Thomas Edison, and grew up in Edinburgh, but emigrated to Canada* with his parents in 1870 partly in response to a family tragedy after his two brothers died just three years apart from tuberculosis. While his parents settled on a farm in Ontario, Bell took up the post of professor of vocal physiology at the recently founded Boston University—a rather surprising appointment, for he had no training in vocal physiology and no university degree of his own. All he had, really, was a sympathetic interest in communications and a long-standing family attachment to the field. His mother was deaf and his father was a world expert on speech and elocution at a time when elocution was regarded with something close to awe. The senior Bell’s book The Standard Elocutionist had recently sold 250,000 copies in the United States alone. In any case, Bell’s position at BU was not quite as grand as it sounds. He was employed to give just five hours of lectures a week at a salary of $25. Luckily, this suited Bell because it gave him time to get on with his experimental work.
Bell sought ways to amplify sounds electrically as an aid to the hard of hearing. Soon it occurred to him that this work could equally be used to send voices across distances to make “speaking telegraphs,” as he termed them. To assist in this new line of development, he hired a young man named Thomas A. Watson. Together the two threw themselves at the problem in early 1875. Just over a year later, on March 10, 1876, a week to the day after Bell’s twenty-ninth birthday, the most famous moment in telecommunications history occurred in a small lab at 5 Exeter Place in Boston, when Bell spilled some acid on his lap and sputtered, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,” and an astonished Watson in a separate room heard the message clearly. At least that was the story Watson related fifty years later in a series of anniversary advertisements commemorating the telephone’s invention. Bell, who had died four years before the anniversary, had never actually mentioned spilled acid in any of his own recollections, and it would be odd, when you think about it, for a person startled by a searing pain in his lap to voice such a calm request, at normal volume, to someone who was not in fact present. Moreover, because of the prototype phone’s primitiveness, Watson could hear a message only when his ear was pressed to a vibrating reed, and it seems a touch unlikely that he would have had an ear cocked to a listening device on the off chance that Bell, seized by acidic pain, would call out to him. Whatever the precise circumstances, Bell’s notes confirmed that he did ask Watson to come to him and that Watson, in a separate room, heard the request clearly. History’s first telephone call had been made.
Watson deserves more attention than history has given him. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1854, seven years after Bell was born in Scotland, Watson left school at fourteen and worked in various undistinguished jobs before hooking up with Bell. The two men were bound by the deepest feelings of respect and even affection, yet they never progressed to first-name terms, despite half a century’s friendship. It is impossible to say exactly how vital Watson’s role was in the invention of the phone, but he was certainly far more than a mere assistant. During the seven years he worked for Bell, he secured sixty patents in his own name, including one for the distinctive ringing bell that was for decades an invariable part of every phone call made. Remarkably, before this, the only way to know if someone was trying to get through to you was to pick up the phone from time to time and see if anyone was there.
For most people the telephone was such an incomprehensible novelty that Bell had to explain exactly what it did. “The telephone,” he wrote, “may be briefly described as an electrical contrivance for reproducing in different places the tones and articulations of a speaker’s voice so that Conversations can be carried on by word of mouth between persons in different rooms, in different streets or in different Towns.… The great advantage it possesses over every other form of electrical apparatus is that it requires no skill to operate the instrument.”
Displayed at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in the summer of 1876, it attracted little attention. Most visitors were far more impressed by an electric pen invented by Thomas Edison. The pen worked by rapidly punching holes in a sheet of paper to form an outline of letters in a stencil fashion, permitting ink to be injected onto pages below, which allowed multiple copies of a document to be made quickly. Edison, ever misguided, was confident that the invention would be “bigger than telegraphy.” Of course it wasn’t, but someone else was taken with the idea of the rapidly punching pen and redeveloped it to inject ink under skin. The modern tattoo gun was born.
As for the telephone, Bell persevered and gradually built up a following. The first telephone installation began functioning in Boston in 1877. It allowed three-way communications between two banks (one of them the interestingly named Shoe and Leather Bank) and a private company. By July of that year Bell had two hundred phones in operation in the city, and by August the number had leaped to thirteen hundred, though mostly these were two-way connections within offices—more like intercoms than telephones. The real breakthrough was the invention of the switchboard the following year. This allowed any phone user to talk to any other phone user in his district—and soon there were lots of those. By the early 1880s, America had sixty thousand telephones in operation. In the next twenty years that figure would increase to over six million.
Phones were
originally seen as providing services—weather reports, stock market news, fire alarms, musical entertainment, even lullabies to soothe restless babies. Nobody saw them as being used primarily for gossip, social intercourse, or keeping in touch with friends and family. The idea that you would chat by phone to someone you saw regularly anyway would have struck most people as absurd.
Because it was based on so many existing technologies, and because it proved so swiftly lucrative, a stream of people and companies challenged Bell’s patents or simply ignored them. Luckily for Bell, his father-in-law, Gardiner Hubbard, was a brilliant and tireless lawyer. He launched or defended six hundred legal actions and won every one. The biggest was against the great and monolithic Western Union, which teamed up with Edison and Elisha Gray to try to get control of the phone business by whatever means it could. Western Union was by now a central component of the Vanderbilt empire, and the Vanderbilts just hated not to come first. They had every advantage—financial resources, an existing network of wires, technicians and engineers of the highest caliber—whereas Bell had only two things: a patent and Gardiner Hubbard. Hubbard sued for patent infringement and won the case in less than a year.
By the early twentieth century Bell’s telephone company, renamed American Telephone & Telegraph, was the largest corporation in America, with stock worth $1,000 a share. (When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and employed a million people.) Bell moved to Washington, D.C., became a U.S. citizen, and devoted himself to worthwhile pursuits. Among other things, he invented the iron lung and experimented with telepathy. When President James A. Garfield was shot by a disgruntled lunatic in 1881, Bell was called in to see if he could help locate the bullet. He invented a metal detector, which worked beautifully in the laboratory but gave confused results at Garfield’s bedside. Not until much later was it realized that the device had been reading the presidential bedsprings. In between these pursuits Bell helped found the journal Science and the National Geographic Society, for whose magazine he wrote under the memorable nom de plume of H. A. Largelamb (an anagram of “A. Graham Bell”).
Bell treated his friend and colleague Watson generously. Though he had no legal obligations to do so, he awarded Watson 10 percent of the company, allowing Watson to retire rich at the age of just twenty-seven. Able to do anything he wanted, Watson devoted the rest of his life to just that. He traveled the world, read widely, and took a degree in geology at MIT for the simple satisfaction of improving his brain. He then started a shipyard, which quickly grew to employ four thousand men, producing a scale of stress and obligation way beyond anything he wished for, so he sold the business, converted to Islam, and became a follower of Edward Bellamy, a radical philosopher and quasi communist who for a short period in the 1880s enjoyed phenomenal esteem and popularity. Tiring of Bellamy, Watson moved to England in early middle age and took up acting, for which he showed an unexpected talent. He proved particularly adept at Shakespearean roles and performed many times at Stratford-upon-Avon before returning to America and a life of quiet retirement. He died, contented and rich, at his winter home on Pass-Grille Key, Florida, just shy of his eighty-first birthday in 1934.
Two other names deserve passing mentions with respect to the telephone. The first is Henry Dreyfuss. A young theatrical designer whose previous experience had been with designing stage sets and the interiors of movie theaters, Dreyfuss was commissioned by the new AT&T in the early 1920s to design a new type of phone to replace the upright “candlestick” design. Dreyfuss came up with a startlingly squat, slightly boxy, sleekly modern design in which the handset rested laterally in a cradle slightly above and behind a large dial. This of course became the standard model throughout most of the world for much of the twentieth century. It was one of those things—rather like the Eiffel Tower—that did its job so well and seemed so inevitable that it takes some effort to remember that someone had to imagine it, but in fact nearly everything about it—the amount of resistance built into the dial, the low center of gravity that made it next to impossible to knock over, the brilliant notion of having the hearing and speaking functions contained in a single handset—was the result of conscious and inspired thinking by a man who would normally never have been allowed anywhere near industrial design. Why AT&T engineers chose the youthful Dreyfuss for the project is forgotten, but they could not have made a better choice.
Dreyfuss didn’t design the dial itself. That had already been designed in-house, in 1917, by a Bell employee, William G. Blauvelt. It was Blauvelt who decided to put three letters with most, but not all, of the numbers. He assigned no letters to the first hole because in those early days the telephone dial needed to be rotated slightly beyond the first hole to generate a signal initiating a call. So the sequence ran 2 (ABC), 3 (DEF), 4 (GHI), and so on. Blauvelt left out Q from the outset, because it would always have to be followed by a U, limiting its utility, and eventually dropped Z as well because it didn’t feature enough in English to be useful. Every exchange was given a name, usually derived from the street or district in which it stood—Bensonhurst, Hollywood, Pennsylvania Avenue, for instance, though some exchanges used the names of trees or other objects—and the caller would ask the operator to be connected to “Pennsylvania 6–5000” (as in the Glenn Miller tune) or “Bensonhurst 5342.” When direct dialing was introduced in 1921, the names were reduced to two-letter prefixes and the convention became to capitalize those letters, as in HOllywood and BEnsonhurst. The system had a certain charm, but became increasingly impractical. A lot of names—RHinelander or SYcamore, say—were susceptible to confusion among those whose spelling was not of the first order. Letters also made it difficult to introduce direct dialing from abroad since foreign phones didn’t always come with letters, or had letters and numbers placed in different arrays. So the old system was slowly phased out in America beginning in 1962. Today the letters serve only as a mnemonic device, enabling users to remember to dial 1-800-FLOWERS or whatever.
As for the rectory, it is impossible to say when the telephone first came to the house, but its installation was almost certainly an event of great excitement for some early-twentieth-century rector and his family. The niche today is empty, however. The days when houses had a single phone at the foot of the stairs are long gone, and no one now wants to talk in such an exposed and comfortless place.
III
For many people, the new age of enormous wealth in America meant being able to indulge slightly peculiar whims. George Eastman of Kodak film and camera fame never married. He lived in an enormous house in Rochester, New York, with his mother, but kept many servants, including a house organist, who woke him—and presumably quite a lot of the rest of Rochester—with a dawn recital on a giant Aeolian organ. Eastman’s other endearing quirk was that he had a private kitchen in the upstairs of the house where he liked to go and put on an apron and bake pies. Rather more extreme was John M. Longyear, of Marquette, Michigan, who, upon discovering that the Duluth, Mesabi & Iron Range Railroad had won the right to lay tracks to carry iron ore right past his house, had the entire property dismantled and packed up—“house, shrubs, trees, fountains, ornamental waters, hedges and drives, gatekeeper’s lodge, porte-cochere, greenhouses, and stables,” in the words of one admiring biographer—and had the whole transferred to Brookline, Massachusetts, where he replicated his previous tranquil existence down to the last flower bulb, but without trains running past his windows. By comparison, the practice of one Frank Huntington Beebe of keeping two mansions side by side—one to live in, one to decorate over and over—seems admirably restrained.
For pure commitment to spending, it would be hard to beat Mrs. E. T. Stotesbury—Queen Eva, as she was known. As an economic entity she was a wonder. She once spent half a million dollars taking a party of friends on a hunting trip simply to kill enough alligators to make a set of suitcases and hatboxes.
On another occasion, she had the whole of the ground floor of El Mirasol, her Florida home, redecorated overnight, but neglected to inform her long-suffering husband, who, when he awoke the next morning and came downstairs, was for some time not at all certain where he was.
The husband in question, Edward Townsend Stotesbury, made his fortune as an executive in the banking empire of J. P. Morgan. Though a distinguished banker, he didn’t have a lot of presence: he was, in the words of one chronicler, “a dignified hole in the atmosphere, the invisible hand that wrote the checks.” Mr. Stotesbury was worth $75 million when he met Mrs. Stotesbury in 1912—she had recently exhausted the goodwill and bank balance of her first husband, Mr. Oliver Eaton Cromwell—and with dizzying efficiency she helped him spend $50 million of his fortune on new houses. She began with Whitemarsh Hall in Philadelphia, a house so big that no two accounts ever describe it in quite the same way. Depending on whose figures you credit, it had 154, 172, or 272 rooms. All agree that it had fourteen elevators, considerably more than most hotels. It cost Mr. Stotesbury nearly $1 million a year just to maintain. He employed forty gardeners and ninety other staff there. The Stotesburys also had a summer cottage at Bar Harbor in Maine (with a mere eighty rooms and twenty-eight baths) and an even more palatial Florida home, El Mirasol.
The architect of this last-named extravaganza was Addison Mizner, who is now almost entirely forgotten but was for a brief and glittering period perhaps the most sought-after, and certainly the most extraordinary, architect in America.