THE COMING OF THE TELEPHONE

By Thomas A. Watson.

WATSON was an expert machinist and pioneer electrician who greatly assisted Alexander Graham Bell in the discovery and early construction of the telephone. This address, delivered at Chicago in 1913, before the Third Annual Convention of the Telephone Pioneers of America, is reprinted from The Telephone Review. It recounts the memorable June 2, 1875, when a sound was first electrically transmitted and "the speaking telephone was born," at 109 Court Street, Boston. Directed by Bell, Watson "made the first telephone, put up the first telephone wire and heard the first words ever uttered through a telephone." They were, "Mr. Watson, please come here. I want you."

On February 14, 1876, Bell received a patent for his speaking telephone. Though his claims were disputed by other inventors, his rights were sustained by the United States Supreme Court, and he is given credit for being the first to perfect and construct a working instrument.

I AM to speak to you of the birth and babyhood of the telephone, and something of the events which preceded that important occasion. These are matters that must seem to you ancient history; in fact, they seem so to me, although the events all happened less than 40 years ago, in the years 1874 to 1880.

I realize now what a lucky boy I was, when at 13 years of age I had to leave school and go to work for my living, although I didn't think so at that time. There's a "tide in the affairs of men," you know, and that was the beginning of its flood in my life, for after trying several vocations clerking, bookkeeping, carpentering, etc. and finding them all unattractive, I at last found just the job that suited me in the electrical workshop of Charles Williams, at 109 Court Street, Boston one of the best men I have ever known. Better luck couldn't befall a boy than to be brought so early in life under the influence of such a high-minded gentleman as Charles Williams.

Besides the regular work at Williams', there was a constant stream of wild-eyed inventors, with big ideas in their heads and little money in their pockets, coming to the shop to have their ideas tried out in brass and iron.

Among them was dear old Moses G. Farmer, perhaps the leading practical electrician of that day. He was full of good ideas, which he was constantly bringing to Williams to have worked out. I did much of his work and learned from him more about electricity than ever before or since. He was electrician at that time for the United States Torpedo Station at Newport, Rhode Island, and in the early winter of 1874, I was making for him some experimental torpedo exploding apparatus. That apparatus will always be connected in my mind with the telephone, for one day when I was hard at work on it, a tall, slender, quick-motioned man with pale face, black side-whiskers, and drooping mustache, big nose and high sloping forehead crowned with bushy, jet black hair, came rushing out of the office and over to my work bench. It was Alexander Graham Bell, whom I saw then for the first time. He was bringing to me a piece of mechanism which I had made for him under instructions from the office. It had not been made as he had directed and he had broken down the rudimentary discipline of the shop in coming directly to me to get it altered. It was a receiver and a transmitter of his "Harmonic Telegraph," an invention of his with which he was then endeavoring to win fame and fortune. It was a simple affair by means of which, utilizing the law of sympathetic vibration, he expected to send six or eight Morse messages on a single wire at the same time, without interference.

Although most of you are probably familiar with the device, I must, to make my story clear, give you a brief description of the instruments, for though Bell never succeeded in perfecting his telegraph, his experimenting on it led to a discovery of the highest importance.

The essential parts of both transmitter and receiver were an electro-magnet and a flattened piece of steel clock spring. The spring was clamped by one end to one pole of the magnet, and had its other end free to vibrate over the other pole. The transmitter had, besides this, make-and-break points like an ordinary vibrating bell which, when the current was on, kept the spring vibrating in a sort of nasal whine, of a pitch corresponding to the pitch of the spring. When the signaling key was closed, an electrical copy of that whine passed through the wire and the distant receiver. There were, say, six transmitters with their springs tuned to six different pitches and six receivers with their springs tuned to correspond. Now, theoretically, when a transmitter sent its electrical whine into the line wire, its own faithful receiver spring at the distant station would wriggle sympathetically but all the others on the same line would remain coldly quiescent. Even when all the transmitters were whining at once through their entire gamut, making a row as if all the miseries this world of trouble ever produced were concentrated there, each receiver spring along the line would select its own from that sea of troubles and ignore all the others. Just see what a simple, sure-to-work invention this was; for just break up those various whines into the dots and dashes of Morse messages and one wire would do the work of six, and the "Duplex" telegraph that had just been invented would be beaten to a frazzle. Bell's reward would be immediate and rich, for the "Duplex" had been bought by the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company, giving them a great advantage over their only competitor, the Western Union Company, and the latter would, of course, buy Bell's invention and his financial problems would be solved.

All this was, as I have said, theoretical, and it was mighty lucky for Graham Bell that it was, for had his harmonic telegraph been a well behaved apparatus that always did what its parent wanted it to do, the speaking telephone might never have emerged from a certain marvelous conception, that had even then been surging back of Bell's high forehead for two or three years. What that conception was, I soon learned, for he couldn't help speaking about it, although his friends tried to hush it up. They didn't like to have him get the reputation of being visionary, or something worse.

To go on with my story; after Mr. Farmer's peacemaking machines were finished, I made half a dozen pairs of the harmonic instruments for Bell. He was surprised, when he tried them to find that they didn't work as well as he expected. The cynical Watson wasn't at all surprised, for he had never seen anything electrical yet that worked at first the way the inventor thought it would. Bell wasn't discouraged in the least and a long course of experiments followed which gave me a steady job that winter and brought me into close contact with a wonderful personality that did more to mold my life rightly than anything else that ever came into it.

I became mightily tired of those "whiners" that winter. I call them by that name, perhaps, as an inadequate expression of my disgust with their persistent perversity, the struggle with which soon began to take all the joy out of my young life, not being endowed with the power of Macbeth's weird sisters to;

"Look into the seeds of time,

And say which grain will grow and which will not."

Let me say here, that I have always had a feeling of respect for Elisha Gray, who, a few years later, made that harmonic telegraph work, and vibrate well-behaved messages, that would go where they were sent, without fooling with every receiver on the line.

Mr. Bell was very apt to do his experimenting at night, for he was busy during the day at the Boston University, where he was Professor of Vocal Physiology, especially teaching his father's system of visible speech, by which a deaf mute might learn to talk quite significant of what Bell was soon to do in making mute metal talk. For this reason I would often remain at the shop during the evening to help him test some improvement he had had me make on the instruments.

One evening when we were resting from our struggles with the apparatus, Bell said to me : "Watson, I want to tell you of another idea I have, which I think will surprise you." I listened, I suspect, somewhat languidly, for I must have been working that day about sixteen hours, with only a short nutritive interval, and Bell had already given me, during the weeks we had worked together, more new ideas on a great variety of subjects, including visible speech, elocution and flying machines, than my brain could assimilate, but when he went on to say that he had an idea by which he believed it would be possible to talk by telegraph, my nervous system got such a shock that the tired feeling vanished. I have never forgotten his exact words; they have run in my mind ever since like a mathematical formula. "If," he said, "I could make a current of electricity vary in intensity, precisely as the air varies in density during the production of a sound, I should be able to transmit speech telegraphically." He then sketched for me an instrument that he thought would do this, and we discussed the possibility of constructing one. I did not make it; it was altogether too costly, and the chances of its working too uncertain to impress his financial backers Mr. Gardiner G. Hubbard and Mr. Thomas Sanders who were insisting that the wisest thing for Bell to do was to perfect the harmonic telegraph ; then he would have money and leisure enough to build air castles like the telephone.

If the exact time could be fixed, the date when the conception of the undulatory or speech-transmitting current took its perfect form in Bell's mind would be the greatest day in the history of the telephone, but certainly June 2, 1875, must always rank next; for on that day the mocking fiend inhabiting that demonic telegraph apparatus, just as a now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don't sort of a satanic joke, opened the curtain that hides from man great Nature's secrets and gave us a glimpse as quick as if it were through the shutter of a snap-shot camera, into that treasury of things not yet discovered. That imp didn't do this in any kindly, helpful spirit any inventor knows he isn't that kind of a being he just meant to tantalize and prove that a man is too stupid to grasp a secret, even if it is revealed to him. But he hadn't properly estimated Bell, though he had probably sized me up all right. That glimpse was enough to let Bell see and seize the very thing he had been dreaming about and drag it out into the world of human affairs.

Coming back to earth, I'll try and tell you what happened that day. In the experiments on the harmonic telegraph, Bell had found that the reason why the messages got mixed up was inaccuracy in the adjustment of the pitches of the receiver springs to those of the transmitter. Bell always had to do this tuning himself, as my sense of pitch and knowledge of music were quite lacking a faculty (or lackulty) which you will hear later became quite useful. Mr. Bell was in the habit of observing the pitch of a spring by pressing it against his ear while the corresponding transmitter in a distant room was sending its intermittent current through the magnet of that receiver. He would then manipulate the tuning screw until that spring was tuned to accord with the pitch of the whine coming from the transmitter. All this experimenting was carried on in the upper story of the Williams building, where we had a wire connecting two rooms perhaps sixty feet apart looking out on Court Street.