Electric Universe

by David Bodanis

  One more consequence: Ever more jobs were available in America, and with this telegraph-aided globalization, increasing numbers of Europeans were able to make the arrangements to move there. New steamship lines appeared to bring the workers over, first by the thousands, then by the tens of thousands. There were Jews and Protestants, but there were also Catholics, lots of them, bursting with energy. The result was a dynamic, immigrant-rich America. It was everything Joseph Henry loved.

  It was everything Samuel Morse hated.

  2

  Aleck and Mabel

  BOSTON, 1875

  For several decades the steady transformation of the world continued as the consequences of the telegraph spread around the globe. But then, starting in the 1860s, a long pause began. Partly it was because one of the main centers of innovation, the United States, was consumed by an awful Civil War and its repercussions. But even into the 1870s, there was still no fundamentally new technology.

  Wall Street and the City of London had plenty of money to fund new ideas, but only if they were easily understandable ideas, ones that merely modified what could already be done. Yet electricity’s greater effects—the next power tapped from the vast number of charged particles hidden inside us—would come through creations that were hitherto unimagined. Only in the hot summer of 1875 did the first of such fundamentally new inventions appear, and it was the work of the most innocent of young men, a twenty-eight-year-old teacher who’d set up his own tutoring business in Boston. He was driven neither by avarice nor by the urge for power.

  His invention came because he was in love.

  Unfortunately, the object of his affections, Mabel Hubbard (“You do not know,” he desperately wrote, “you cannot guess—how much I love you”) was one of his students, and this meant he felt obliged to declare his interests to her parents first. But although he emphasized his fine prospects, and even made sure her parents had seen his flourishing signature, where an added k made his name Aleck and not the humdrum Alec, they were unimpressed. For Mabel was from a very rich family—her father owned much of downtown Boston—she was also barely seventeen, and, most important, she’d had scarlet fever when she was a child. The infection had spread to her ears, destroying her hearing. Aleck was a teacher of the deaf, and Mabel had been able to hear no sound or music or voice for more than ten years. She’d learned some signing and lip-reading, but lived a protected life. Aleck was firmly forbidden to declare himself.

  Their first attempt to keep their courtship secret lasted about twenty-four hours, for Mabel’s older sister decided to help things along by inviting this intriguing older teacher to the family house. She even left Aleck alone with Mabel in the garden for at least ten minutes before interrupting them to present a handful of flowers to play “he loves me, he loves me not.”

  After that episode, Mabel’s parents gave Aleck another talking-to, and a few weeks later her mother read him a letter that, she explained, would finally prove that it was over. In it Mabel seemed to be saying that she was not in love with her teacher, and that was that.

  Aleck vowed he would respect the wishes of Mabel’s parents, and his vow this time actually lasted all the way till August, when he tracked the family down at their summer home in Nantucket. On his first day at the Ocean House hotel on the island, there was a tremendous thunderstorm, and he stayed inside, pouring out his heart in a letter: “I have loved you with a passionate attachment that you cannot understand…it is for you to say whether you will see me or not.” The next day he went to her house to deliver it, was met at the door by Mabel’s cousin, and was told again that Mabel was not going to see him, that she didn’t love him, that it was over.

  It’s said that blindness separates you from things, but deafness separates you from people. Aleck had been determined to bridge this separation—not just through words, for he could already communicate with Mabel, but in the contact of real love. He was disconsolate all the way back to Boston. But he was also bursting with ideas, and he had spent almost a year now coming close to a very good one indeed. For his full name was Alexander Graham Bell, and he was about to create the telephone.

  By the early 1870s, when Aleck had arrived in America from Britain, it had seemed possible to send more than one signal over a standard telegraph line. (Think of someone drumming a fast pattern with his right hand, and a separate, slower pattern with his left hand. Each hand is sending a sequence of taps, and they overlap in time, but if you listen carefully you can distinguish the two patterns.) Aleck had been one of the inventors working on that, in fits and starts, but then he’d become distracted by the far stronger idea that he might be able to shunt entire sounds rather than mere clicks down a telegraph line. He built a prototype to try out that idea.

  In March 1875—a half-year before the declaration to Mabel’s family—he’d taken his apparatus to someone he’d heard had once been important in science, the now aged Joseph Henry, retired Princeton professor. It was an electric wire stretching out from a battery and connected to a single tuning fork. By switching the battery on and off, he could make the tuning fork hum in various ways. Aleck asked if he should develop this himself, or just let others go ahead. As he remembered years later: “I felt that I had not the electrical knowledge necessary to overcome the difficulties. [Henry’s] laconic answer was—’GET IT.’ I cannot tell you how much these two words have encouraged me.”

  Now, back in Boston, Aleck realized that he did have a chance to win Mabel’s hand after all. What if he went ahead and finished his invention? There would be money and fame, respect from her parents, and—could they be so lucky?—a grand wedding bursting with flowers.

  A handful of other inventors had reached this point, but none that Bell was aware of had been able to go further. Aleck’s love, however, extended not just to Mabel but to the whole community of the deaf. It was a powerful motivation. His own mother had been unable to hear; that was what had led him to start his tutoring business in the first place. He had grown up in a family where understanding how a sound could be communicated was central to every daily task.

  His grandfather had been an actor and elocution expert; George Bernard Shaw modeled Professor Henry Higgins in Pygmalion partly on his example. Indeed, Aleck’s father had spent so much time helping his wife communicate that he’d realized that the usual way of classifying speech—simply making long lists of all possible sounds—was never going to help a deaf person.

  Instead, Aleck’s father had focused not on the final sounds but on the process of creating them. He drew a series of little diagrams showing different positions of the tongue and lips, which he called his Visible Speech kit. The diagrams were simple enough for even a child to read. To demonstrate this, Aleck’s father had guests come over and challenged them to make sounds that were exotic or unexpected—a click from the Southern African Xhosa language; a rolled Spanish r; even a sneeze. Then he’d pull out the appropriate cards showing how to produce the sounds and pass them to his sons, who’d been kept out of the room. Relying only on the cards, Aleck and his brother would move their tongues and widen or narrow their throats to produce exactly the targeted sound.

  This creation of sounds had always been Aleck’s real interest, and at the school in Boston he now perfected all the ideas he needed to make a telephone that worked. One of his favorite pupils was Georgie Sanders, only five years old when Aleck began tutoring him. Aleck spent time just playing with him, and then began pasting little word labels on all Georgie’s toys, showing him the word each time they played with that toy. Then, after a while: “I remember one morning [Georgie] came down stairs in high spirits, very anxious to play with his doll….I produced a toy-horse; but that was not what he wanted. A table; still he was disappointed. He seemed quite perplexed to know what to do, and evidently considered me very stupid. At last, in desperation, he went to the card-rack and after a moment’s consideration, pulled out the word ‘doll’ and presented it to me.” With that, the teaching took off: Aleck was making the boy c
onnect the idea of playing with a doll, to the strange squiggle of letters D O L L on a piece of cardboard. Every afternoon after that, when it was time for Aleck to appear at the house, five-year-old Georgie would be at the window, eagerly awaiting his older friend.

  What Aleck understood, through the time with Georgie, was something that most other researchers into possible telephones were missing. Typically those researchers linked a telegraph to dozens of tuning forks at the receiving end, sending a combination of clicks to try to make the right tuning forks vibrate and produce a word.

  It never worked well. Aleck knew, from his patient hours with Georgie Sanders, that in communication you start with a thought, such as a five-year-old really wanting to play with a doll. Then from that thought you select the appropriate word—the carefully inked D O L L in Georgie’s card rack—and only then do you break the word into sounds. Aleck knew that any telephone would have to follow this sequence. But who knew how hidden thoughts could be turned into audible vibrations?

  Mabel did. She was in love with Aleck beyond measure. Her mother hadn’t been telling the truth when she’d pretended to read from the “rejection” letter earlier in the summer.

  “I think I am old enough now,” Mabel wrote to her parents that year, “to have a right to know if [Aleck] spoke about [his feelings] to you or Papa. I know I am not much of a woman yet, but…it comes to me more and more that I am a woman such as I did not know before.” And then, emphatically: “You need not write about my accepting or declining [his] offer.”

  She and Aleck had fallen in love, with neither admitting it, over a year before. They’d developed an intimacy during the months of teaching: she had found someone who would see through her deafness; he had found a woman who was confident enough to match all his interests. When she was late he’d meet her carriage and they’d run together through the snow to his schoolroom; they had talked about politics and families, and sometimes just gossiped. And time after time, as she tried different sounds, he had touched her throat, and she had touched his, quite properly, with other students around, ostensibly just for the sake of identifying how different words produced different vibrations. But each had suspected what the other was thinking.

  “Your voice has a beautiful quality,” he had whispered to her after one session, using hand gestures and careful enunciation so she could read his lips. She was startled and wrote about it to her family. She had almost no memory of what her voice was like, and she knew she’d never hear it again. No one had ever thought to tell her it was beautiful.

  When her cousin had sent their visitor away that morning in Nantucket, Mabel was furious, and when she later got a letter through to Aleck, she felt her chances had been ruined. “Perhaps it is best we should not meet awhile now,” she wrote, “and that when we do meet we should not speak of love.” The resolution collapsed almost instantly, of course, and defeat for the parents was inevitable. Mabel’s mother had already experienced life with one strong-willed daughter—Mabel’s sister—and knew it was a losing proposition to try to put obstacles in the way of young love. She invited Aleck to the house to talk about his new ideas—they did seem so promising—and then she invited him again. There was at least one tempestuous meeting with Mabel’s father, and the necessary intervals when the lovers sulked and then made up, until finally, on Thanksgiving Day 1875—Mabel’s eighteenth birthday—she told Aleck that she loved him, and she kissed him, and she even agreed that she would marry him—so long as he was willing to make just one little change. It was simply to drop the final k from his name, and for the rest of his seventy years, that was what he did.

  The understanding of how vibrations produced sounds had dominated his unspoken courtship with Mabel. It was a motif throughout his teaching. When some of the younger children at the Boston school were endangered by fast-racing horse-drawn wagons—which they couldn’t hear coming—Alec had them try holding balloons in their bare hands when they walked outside. Vibrations from the unheard wagons would travel along Boston’s cobblestones and make the balloons shudder, alerting the children to hurry aside.

  In 1875, his love and his invention came together. Why not create a device with an artificial voice-box that mimicked a human one? He knew it could be done, for as a teenager he and his brother had created an artificial throat and lips: the tongue was made of several small coated paddles, and behind it they’d put the larynx from a dissected sheep, and below it they’d attached a bellows to serve as the lungs powering it all. By pumping the bellows and carefully moving the larynx and the homemade tongue and lips, they’d made it yelp “Mama!” so clearly that an upstairs neighbor called down that someone should feed the baby.

  A little later they practiced on the family dog, a long-suffering Skye terrier. First they got the dog to produce a steady growling hum, and then—with copious biscuits as inducement—Aleck gently manipulated the Skye’s larynx while his brother worked its lips. To their friends’ amazement, several distinct simple “words” came out.

  Now in Boston Mabel’s father had also become resigned to his daughter’s match, and decided to help Alec so he could support his daughter. He began paying for an assistant for Alec, a young machinist named Tom Watson, and together the two twenty-something hopefuls began by preparing a hand-sized sheet of stiff parchment. Hold it in front of your mouth, and as you poured out words, the parchment rippled back and forth in time with the sound vibrations from your throat—like the balloons that Alec’s young charges had held, like the skin on Mabel’s throat in those tremulous days of teaching months before.

  To create a working telephone, Alec needed a way to turn the patterns that words made in the shaking parchment into electricity. He’d learned a lot in the tedious months he’d spent working to improve the telegraph, and he remembered one key observation. If the electric charges pouring out from a battery are poured into a wire, a current rolls along at a steady rate. But if you bend or twist the wire, the electric current can’t pour through so easily. You’ve increased the resistance inside the wire.

  Alec brought the parchment close to his mouth and placed a wire along the other side of it, almost touching the paper. Each time he spoke, the puff of air from his mouth pushed the parchment against the wire. It didn’t bend it very much—the air vibrations when we speak are tiny—but for the even smaller streams of electric current pouring along inside the wire, it was enough. He imagined the sides of the wire starting to bend in; the electrical sparks or fluid that he pictured flowing inside it—he too didn’t have a clear idea of what was inside a wire—was being squeezed so that less got through. The resistance was high. Then, when the giant Gulliver outside stopped speaking, the awful windblasts and earthquake ended. The wire straightened out; the full stream of electric current sped through it. The resistance was back to being low.

  There would be many modifications in later years, but that’s basically how a telephone works. You speak into a microphone that’s a bit like a human larynx or voice-box. The microphone quivers from your voice’s uneven air blasts—shaking rapidly with exuberant high sounds, but barely at all with silences or quiet umms. The quivering microphone leads a wire to send an electric current surging along in an exact copy of that uneven pattern.

  When the current arrives in the listener’s receiver, everything happens in reverse. All the up-and-down patterns your voice has produced in the microphone are now in the receiver. When a lot of current arrives, it makes a surface—in this case plastic—vibrate quickly, and the listener hears a loud, clear voice. If the electric current is weak, the membrane inside the earpiece vibrates slowly and the listener hears only a quiet whisper. With Bell’s invention, even a whisper could be carried, undimmed, through thousands of feet of wire.

  With some encouragement from Mabel’s anxious parents, Alec applied for a patent, and then an improvement on the patent, and soon after there was the wedding, which, to Mabel’s delight, had lilies, lots of them. Alec gave her pearls, a silver pendant in the shape of a telephone, and
1,497 shares of stock in the fledgling Bell Telephone company—which would be worth, if kept in the family, several billion dollars today. Less than a year later their first child was born; their marriage lasted till the end of their lives.

  3

  Thomas and J.J.

  NEW YORK, 1878

  Bell’s work in the 1870s was the start of a great outpouring of new discoveries. A proconsul from the Roman Empire, suddenly transported to the muddy swampland of the American settlement of Fort Dearborn, in the year 1850 A.D.—a little before Bell’s work—would not have been especially surprised at what he found. There were horse-drawn vehicles and wooden houses, and candles or oil lamps to hold back the night. The few telegraphs that might be found in big cities had scarcely changed the quality of daily life. But if that proconsul had returned a single lifetime later, in 1910, that muddy town would have exploded to become the city of Chicago—and amid the cars and electric lights and telephone poles, where powerful electric charges were led whirling along at immense velocities, our time-voyaging proconsul would have been utterly startled.

  This second generation of transformations was begun by individual inventors such as Bell. But as the 1870s went on, an increasing number of discoveries were made by larger groups of researchers, working in a new style of industrial research laboratory. They were the ones who produced the generators and streetcars and motors and lighting systems that created modern Chicago and other great metropolises around the world.

  Running these big research labs required a different personality than that of the gentle Alec Bell. The new research directors had to understand electricity, of course, but they also had to be willing to work on assignment…and not worry too much what those assignments were.