Early Telephone Development
For more information on Leyden jars, including photographs and instructions on how to build them, go this page at the Static Generator site:
http://www.alaska.net/~natnkell/leyden.htm
A static electricity web page is here: http://www.sciencemadesimple.com/static.html
In 1729 English chemist Stephen Gray transmitted electricity over a wire. He sent charges nearly 300 feet over brass wire and moistened thread. An electrostatic generator powered his experiments, one charge at a time. A few years later, Dutchman Pieter van Musschenbroek and German Ewald Georg von Kleist in 1746 independently developed the Leyden jar, a sort of battery or condenser for storing static electricity. Named for its Holland city of invention, the jar was a glass bottle lined inside and out with tin or lead. The glass sandwiched between the metal sheets stored electricity; a strong charge could be kept for a few days and transported. Over the years these jars were used in countless experiments, lectures, and demonstrations.
In 1753 an anonymous writer, possibly physician Charles Morrison, suggested in The Scot's Magazine that electricity might transmit messages. He thought up a scheme using separate wires to represent each letter. An electrostatic generator, he posited, could electrify each line in turn, attracting a bit of paper by static charge on the other end. By noting which paper letters were attracted one might spell out a message. Needing wires by the dozen, signals got transmitted a mile or two. People labored with telegraphs like this for many decades. Experiments continued slowly until 1800. Many inventors worked alone, misunderstood earlier discoveries, or spent time producing results already achieved. Poor equipment didn't help either.
Balky electrostatic generators produced static electricity by friction, often by spinning leather against glass. And while static electricity could make hair stand on end or throw sparks, it couldn't provide the energy to do truly useful things. Inventors and industry needed a reliable and continuous current.
In 1800 Alessandro Volta produced the first battery. A major development, Volta's battery provided sustained low powered electric current at high cost. Chemically based, as all batteries are, the battery improved quickly and became the electrical source for further experimenting. But while batteries got more reliable, they still couldn't produce the power needed to work machinery, light cities, or provide heat. And although batteries would work telegraph and telephone systems, and still do, transmitting speech required understanding two related elements, namely, electricity and magnetism.
In 1820 Danish physicist Christian Oersted discovered electromagnetism, the critical idea needed to develop electrical power and to communicate. In a famous experiment at his University of Copenhagen classroom, Oersted pushed a compass under a live electric wire. This caused its needle to turn from pointing north, as if acted on by a larger magnet. Oersted discovered that an electric current creates a magnetic field. But could a magnetic field create electricity? If so, a new source of power beckoned. And the principle of electromagnetism, if fully understood and applied, promised a new era of communication
For an excellent summary of Christian Oersted's life, visit:
http://www.longman.co.uk/tt_secsci/resources/scimon/mar_01/oersted.htm
In 1821 Michael Faraday reversed Oersted's experiment and in so doing discovered induction. He got a weak current to flow in a wire revolving around a permanent magnet. In other words, a magnetic field caused or induced an electric current to flow in a nearby wire. In so doing, Faraday had built the world's first electric generator. Mechanical energy could now be converted to electrical energy. Is that clear? This is a very important point.
The simple act of moving ones' hand caused current to move. Mechanical energy into electrical energy. Although many years away, a turbine powered dynamo would let the power of flowing water or burning coal produce electricity. Got a river or a dam? The water spins the turbines which turns the generators which produce electricity. The more water you have the more generators you can add and the more electricity you can produce. Mechanical energy into electrical energy.
(By comparison, a motor turns electrical energy into mechanical energy. Thanks to A. Almoian for pointing out this key difference and to Neal Kling for another correction.)
Click here for a clear, large diagram on turning mechanical energy into electrical energy.
And it's a good science fair idea!
I also have a page on easy to do electrical experiments for kids
Again, good science fair ideas.
Faraday worked through different electrical problems in the next ten years, eventually publishing his results on induction in 1831. By that year many people were producing electrical dynamos. But electromagnetism still needed understanding. Someone had to show how to use it for communicating.
For more information on Michael Faraday, visit the ENC at: http://www.enc.org/features/calendar/unit/0,1819,196,00.shtm (external link)
In 1830 the great American scientist Professor Joseph Henry transmitted the first practical electrical signal. A short time before Henry had invented the first efficient electromagnet. He also concluded similar thoughts about induction before Faraday but he didn't publish them first. Henry's place in electrical history however, has always been secure, in particular for showing that electromagnetism could do more than create current or pick up heavy weights -- it could communicate.
In a stunning demonstration in his Albany Academy classroom, Henry created the forerunner of the telegraph. In the demonstration, Henry first built an electromagnet by winding an iron bar with several feet of wire. A pivot mounted steel bar sat next to the magnet. A bell, in turn, stood next to the bar. From the electromagnet Henry strung a mile of wire around the inside of the classroom. He completed the circuit by connecting the ends of the wires at a battery. Guess what happened? The steel bar swung toward the magnet, of course, striking the bell at the same time. Breaking the connection released the bar and it was free to strike again. And while Henry did not pursue electrical signaling, he did help someone who did. And that man was Samuel Finley Breese Morse.
For more information on Joseph Henry, visit the Joseph Henry Papers Project at:
http://www.si.edu/archives/ihd/jhp/papers00.htm (external link)
From the December, 1963 American Heritage magazine, "a sketch of Henry's primitive telegraph, a dozen years before Morse, reveals the essential components: an electromagnet activated by a distant battery, and a pivoted iron bar that moves to ring a bell." See the two books listed to the left for more information.
In 1837 Samuel Morse invented the first workable telegraph, applied for its patent in 1838, and was finally granted it in 1848. Joseph Henry helped Morse build a telegraph relay or repeater that allowed long distance operation. The telegraph later helped unite the country and eventually the world. Not a professional inventor, Morse was nevertheless captivated by electrical experiments. In 1832 he heard of Faraday's recently published work on inductance, and was given an electromagnet at the same time to ponder over. An idea came to him and Morse quickly worked out details for his telegraph.
As depicted below, his system used a key (a switch) to make or break the electrical circuit, a battery to produce power, a single line joining one telegraph station to another and an electromagnetic receiver or sounder that upon being turned on and off, produced a clicking noise. He completed the package by devising the Morse code system of dots and dashes. A quick key tap broke the circuit momentarily, transmitting a short pulse to a distant sounder, interpreted by an operator as a dot. A more lengthy break produced a dash.
Telegraphy became big business as it replaced messengers, the Pony Express, clipper ships and every other slow paced means of communicating. The fact that service was limited to Western Union offices or large firms seemed hardly a problem. After all, communicating over long distances instantly was otherwise impossible. Yet as the telegraph was perfected, man's thoughts turned to speech over a wire.
In 1854 Charles Bourseul wrote about transmitting speech electrically in a well circulated article. In that important paper, the Belgian-born French inventor and engineer described a flexible disk that would make and break an electrical connection to reproduce sound. Bourseul never built an instrument or pursued his ideas further.
For more information on Bourseul and early communications in general, vist this German site:
http://www.fht-esslingen.de/telehistory/1870-.html (external link)
I have a page on easy to do electrical experiments for kids. And adults who want to understand the basics (internal link)
In 1861 Johann Phillip Reis completed the first non-working telephone. Tantalizingly close to reproducing speech, Reis's instrument conveyed certain sounds, poorly, but no more than that. A German physicist and school teacher, Reis's ingenuity was unquestioned. His transmitter and receiver used a cork, a knitting needle, a sausage skin, and a piece of platinum to transmit bits of music and certain other sounds. But intelligible speech could not be reproduced. The problem was simple, minute, and at the same time monumental. His telephone relied on its transmitter's diaphragm making and breaking contact with the electrical circuit, just as Bourseul suggested, and just as the telegraph worked. This approach, however, was completely wrong.
Reproducing speech practically relies on the transmitter making continuous contact with the electrical circuit. A transmitter varies the electrical current depending on how much acoustic pressure it gets. Turning the current off and on like a telegraph cannot begin to duplicate speech since speech, once flowing, is a fluctuating wave of continuous character; it is not a collection of off and on again pulses. The Reis instrument, in fact, worked only when sounds were so soft that the contact connecting the transmitter to the circuit remained unbroken. Speech may have traveled first over a Reis telephone however, it would have done so accidentally and against every principle he thought would make it work. And although accidental discovery is the stuff of invention, Reis did not realize his mistake, did not understand the principle behind voice transmission, did not develop his instrument further, nor did he ever claim to have invented the telephone.
The definitive book in English on Reis is:
Thompson, Silvanus P. Phillip Reis: Inventor of The Telephone. E.&F.N. Spon. London. 1883
For other views and explanations of the Reis instrument, visit Adventures in Cybersound:
http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/REIS_BIO.html (external link)
In the early 1870s the world still did not have a working telephone. Inventors focused on telegraph improvements since these had a waiting market. A good, patentable idea might make an inventor millions. Developing a telephone, on the other hand, had no immediate market, if one at all. Elisha Gray, Alexander Graham Bell, as well as many others, were instead trying to develop a multiplexing telegraph, a device to send several messages over one wire at once. Such an instrument would greatly increase traffic without the telegraph company having to build more lines. As it turned out, for both men, the desire to invent one thing turned into a race to invent something altogether different. And that is truly the story of invention.
Alan J. Rogers' excellent introduction to electromagnetic waves, frequencies, and radio transmission. All applicable to telephony. Really well done. (19 pages, 164K in .pdf)
--------------------------------------------
Resources
[Britannica definition]"Telecommunications Systems: Telephone: THE TELEPHONE INSTRUMENT" Britannica Online. "In modern electret transmitters, developed in the 1970s, the carbon layer is replaced by a thin plastic sheet that has been given a conductive metallic coating on one side. The plastic separates that coating from another metal electrode and maintains an electric field between them. Vibrations caused by speech produce fluctuations in the electric field, which in turn produce small variations in voltage. The voltages are amplified for transmission over the telephone line."
[Accessed 11 February 1999] 9
"[Piezoelectric] crystals are used as transducers to convert mechanical or sound energy into electrical energy in such things as microphones, phonographs, and in sound and vibration detection systems."
"Piezoelectricity was first observed in 1880 when Pierre and Jacques Curie put a weight on a quartz crystal and detected a proportional electric charge on its surface. A year later the converse effect was demonstrated -- that is when a voltage is applied to a crystal, a displacement occurs which is proportional to the voltage."
"Reversing the polarity of the voltages reverses the direction of displacement. The term piezoelectricity is derived from the Greek word piezein meaning to press. Hence, a piezoelectric crystal is one capable of producing electricity when subjected to pressure."
An anonymous writer in the July, 1964 Lenkurt Demodulator
Analog and digital signals compared and contrasted
Analog transmission in telephone working. At the top of the illustration we depict direct current as a flat line. D.C. is the steady and continuous current your telephone company provides. The middle line shows what talking looks like. As in all things analog, it looks like a wave. The third line shows how talking varies that direct current. Your voice varies the telephone line's electrical resistance to represent speech. Click here for another diagram that complements this illustration.
Below is a simplified view of a digital signal. Current goes on and off. No wave thing. There was no chance the Reis telephone described above could transmit intelligible speech since it could not reproduce an analog wave. You can't do that making and breaking a circuit. A pulse in this case is not a wave! (internal link) It was not until the early 1960s that digital carrier techniques (internal link) simulated an analog wave with digital pulses. Even then this simulation was only possible by sampling the wave 8,000 times a second. (Producing CD quality sound means sampling an analog signal 44,000 times a second.) In these days all traffic in America between telephone switches is digital, but the majority of local loops are analog (internal link), still carrying your voice to the central office by varying the current.
The Inventors: Gray and Bell
Elisha Gray was a hard working professional inventor with some
success to his credit. Born in 1835 in Barnesville, Ohio, Gray was well
educated for his time, having worked his way through three years at
Oberlin College. His first telegraph related patent came in 1868. An
expert electrician, he co-founded Gray and Barton, makers of telegraph
equipment. The Western Union Telegraph Company, then funded by the
Vanderbilts and J.P. Morgan, bought a one-third interest in Gray and
Barton in 1872. They then changed its name to the Western Electric
Manufacturing Company, with Gray remaining an important person in the
company. To Gray, transmitting speech was an interesting goal but not
one of a lifetime.
Alexander Graham Bell, on the other hand, saw telephony as the driving force in his early life. He became consumed with inventing the telephone. Born in 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland, Graham was raised in a family involved with music and the spoken word. His mother painted and played music. His father originated a system called visible speech that helped the deaf to speak. His grandfather was a lecturer and speech teacher. Bell's college courses included lectures on anatomy and physiology. His entire education and upbringing revolved around the mechanics of speech and sound. Many years after inventing the telephone Bell remarked, "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."
In 1870 Bell's father moved his family to Canada after losing two sons to tuberculosis. He hoped the Canadian climate would be healthier. In 1873 Bell became a vocal physiology professor at Boston College. He taught the deaf the visual speech system during the day and at night he worked on what he called a harmonic or musical telegraph. Sending several messages at once over a single wire would let a telegraph company increase their sending capacity without having to install more poles and lines. An inventor who made such a device would realize a great economy for the telegraph company and a fortune for his or her self. Familiar with acoustics, Bell thought he could send several telegraph messages at once by varying their musical pitch. Sound odd? I'll give you a crude example, a piano analogy, since Watson said Bell played the piano well.
Imagine playing Morse code on the piano, striking dots and dashes in middle C. Then imagine the instrument wired to a distant piano. Striking middle C in one piano might cause middle C to sound in the other. Now, by playing Morse code on the A or C keys at the same time you might get the distant piano to duplicate your playing, sending two messages at once. Perhaps. Bell didn't experiment with pianos, of course, but with differently pitched magnetic springs. And instead of just sending two messages at once, Bell hoped to send thirty or forty. The harmonic telegraph proved simple to think about, yet maddeningly difficult to build. He labored over this device throughout the year and well into the spring of 1874.
Then, at a friend's suggestion, he worked that summer on a teaching aid for the deaf, a gruesome device called the phonoautograph, made out of a dead man's ear. Speaking into the device caused the ear's membrane to vibrate and in turn move a lever. The lever then wrote a wavelike pattern of the speech on smoked glass. Ugh. Many say Bell was fascinated by how the tiny membrane caused the much heavier lever to work. It might be possible, he speculated, to make a membrane work in telephony, by using it to vary an electric current in intensity with the spoken word. Such a current could then replicate speech with another membrane. Bell had discovered the principle of the telephone, the theory of variable resistance, as depicted below. [Brooks] But learning to apply that principle correctly would take him another two years.
Bell continued harmonic telegraph work through the fall of 1874. He wasn't making much progress but his tinkering gathered attention. Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a prominent Boston lawyer and the president of the Clarke School for The Deaf, became interested in Bell's experiments. He and George Sanders, a prosperous Salem businessman, both sensed Bell might make the harmonic telegraph work. They also knew Bell the man, since Bell tutored Hubbard's daughter and he was helping Sander's deaf five year old son learn to speak.
In October, 1874, Green went to Washington D.C. to conduct a patent search. Finding no invention similar to Bell's proposed harmonic telegraph, Hubbard and Sanders began funding Bell. All three later signed a formal agreement in February, 1875, giving Bell financial backing in return for equal shares from any patents Bell developed. The trio got along but they would have their problems. Sanders would court bankruptcy by investing over $100,000 before any return came to him. Hubbard, on the other hand, discouraged Bell's romance with his daughter until the harmonic telegraph was invented. Bell, in turn, would risk his funding by working so hard on the telephone and by getting engaged to Mabel without Hubbard's permission.
In the spring of 1875, Bell's experimenting picked up quickly with the help of a talented young machinist named Thomas A. Watson. Bell feverishly pursued the harmonic telegraph his backers wanted and the telephone which was now his real interest. Seeking advice, Bell went to Washington D.C. On March 1, 1875, Bell met with Joseph Henry, the great scientist and inventor, then Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. It was Henry, remember, who pioneered electromagnetism and helped Morse with the telegraph. Uninterested in Bell's telegraph work, Henry did say Bell's ideas on transmitting speech electrically represented "the germ of a great invention." He urged Bell to drop all other work and get on with developing the telephone. Bell said he feared he lacked the necessary electrical knowledge, to which the old man replied, "Get it!" [Grosvenor and Wesson] Bell quit pursuing the harmonic telegraph, at least in spirit, and began working full time on the telephone.
After lengthy experimenting in the spring of 1875, Bell told Watson "If I can get a mechanism which will make a current of electricity vary in its intensity as the air varies in density when a sound is passing through it, I can telegraph any sound, even the sound of speech." [Fagen] He communicated the same idea in a letter to Hubbard, who remained unimpressed and urged Bell to work harder on the telegraph. But having at last articulated the principle of variable resistance, Bell was getting much closer.
On June 2, 1875, Bell and Watson were testing the harmonic telegraph when Bell heard a sound come through the receiver. Instead of transmitting a pulse, which it had refused to do in any case, the telegraph passed on the sound of Watson plucking a tuned spring, one of many set at different pitches. How could that be? Their telegraph, like all others, turned current on and off. But in this instance, a contact screw was set too tightly, allowing current to run continuously, the essential element needed to transmit speech. Bell realized what happened and had Watson build a telephone the next day based on this discovery. The Gallows telephone, so called for its distinctive frame, substituted a diaphragm for the spring. Yet it didn't work. A few odd sounds were transmitted, yet nothing more. No speech. Disheartened, tired, and running out of funds, Bell's experimenting slowed through the remainder of 1875.
During the winter of 1875 and 1876 Bell continued experimenting while writing a telephone patent application. Although he hadn't developed a successful telephone, he felt he could describe how it could be done. With his ideas and methods protected he could then focus on making it work. Fortunately for Bell and many others, the Patent Office in 1870 dropped its requirement that a working model accompany a patent application. On February 14, 1876, Bell's patent application was filed by his attorney. It came only hours before Elisha Gray filed his Notice of Invention for a telephone.
Mystery still surrounds Bell's application and what happened that day. In particular, the key point to Bell's application, the principle of variable resistance, was scrawled in a margin, almost as an afterthought. Some think Bell was told of Gray's Notice then allowed to change his application. That was never proved, despite some 600 lawsuits that would eventually challenge the patent. Finally, on March 10, 1876, one week after his patent was allowed, in Boston, Massachusetts, at his lab at 5 Exeter Place, Bell succeeded in transmitting speech. He was not yet 30. Bell used a liquid transmitter, something he hadn't outlined in his patent or even tried before, but something that was described in Gray's Notice.
Bell's patent, U.S. Number 174,465, has been called the most valuable ever issued. If you have QuickTime or another way to view .tif files you can view the document at the United States Patent and Trademark site (external link). Search for it by the number. Each page of the six page document is about 230K. And yes, it is very hard to follow. Patents are meant to protect ideas, not necessarily to explain them . . .
The Watson-built telephone looked odd and acted strangely. Bellowing into the funnel caused a small disk or diaphragm at the bottom to move. This disk was, in turn, attached to a wire floating in an acid-filled metal cup. A wire attached to the cup in turn led to a distant receiver. As the wire moved up and down it changed the resistance within the liquid. This now varying current was then sent to the receiver, causing its membrane to vibrate and thereby produce sound. This telephone wasn't quite practical; it got speech across, but badly. Bell soon improved it by using an electromagnetic transmitter, a metal diaphragm and a permanent magnet. The telephone had been invented. Now it was time for it to evolve.
For the definitive answer on who invented the telephone (A hint, it was Bell), and a link to Edwin S. Grosvenor's authoritative, well researched, and clear thinking site defending Bell, click here. (internal link)
How the first telephone worked
Simplified diagram of Bell's liquid transmitter. The diaphragm vibrated with sound waves, causing a conducting rod to move up and down in a cup of acid water. Battery supplied power electrified the cup of acid. As the rod rose and fell it changed the circuit's resistance. This caused the line current to the receiver (not shown) to fluctuate, which in turn caused the membrane of the receiver to vibrate, producing sound.
This transmitter was quickly dropped in favor of voice powered or induced models. These transmitted speech on the weak electro-magnetic force that the transmitter and receiver's permanent magnets produced.
It was not until 1882, with the introduction of the Blake transmitter, that Bell telephones once again used line power. The so called local battery circuit used a battery supplied at the phone to power the line and take speech to the local switch. Voice powered phones did not go away completely, as some systems continued to be used for critical applications, those which may have been threatened by spark. In 1964 NASA used a voice powered system described as follows:
"A network of 24 channels with a total of more than 450 sound powered telephones, which derive their power solely from the human voice, provide the communications between the East Area central blockhouse (left) and the various test stands at NASA's George C. Marshall Space Flight Center here. . ." The complete article is here:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/scienceservice/007016.htm (external link)
-------------------------------------
Resources
Brooks, John. Telephone: The First Hundred Years. New York: Harper and Row, 1975: 41
Fagen, M.D., ed. A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System. Volume 1 The Early Years, 1875 -1925. New York: Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1975, 6
Grosvenor, Edwin S. and Morgan Wesson. Alexander Graham Bell :The Life and Times of the Man Who Invented the Telephone. New York: Abrams, 1997: 55
Rhodes, Beginning of Telephony 4-5, 13-14 Bell develops the idea for the telephone.
Alexander Graham Bell, on the other hand, saw telephony as the driving force in his early life. He became consumed with inventing the telephone. Born in 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland, Graham was raised in a family involved with music and the spoken word. His mother painted and played music. His father originated a system called visible speech that helped the deaf to speak. His grandfather was a lecturer and speech teacher. Bell's college courses included lectures on anatomy and physiology. His entire education and upbringing revolved around the mechanics of speech and sound. Many years after inventing the telephone Bell remarked, "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."
In 1870 Bell's father moved his family to Canada after losing two sons to tuberculosis. He hoped the Canadian climate would be healthier. In 1873 Bell became a vocal physiology professor at Boston College. He taught the deaf the visual speech system during the day and at night he worked on what he called a harmonic or musical telegraph. Sending several messages at once over a single wire would let a telegraph company increase their sending capacity without having to install more poles and lines. An inventor who made such a device would realize a great economy for the telegraph company and a fortune for his or her self. Familiar with acoustics, Bell thought he could send several telegraph messages at once by varying their musical pitch. Sound odd? I'll give you a crude example, a piano analogy, since Watson said Bell played the piano well.
Imagine playing Morse code on the piano, striking dots and dashes in middle C. Then imagine the instrument wired to a distant piano. Striking middle C in one piano might cause middle C to sound in the other. Now, by playing Morse code on the A or C keys at the same time you might get the distant piano to duplicate your playing, sending two messages at once. Perhaps. Bell didn't experiment with pianos, of course, but with differently pitched magnetic springs. And instead of just sending two messages at once, Bell hoped to send thirty or forty. The harmonic telegraph proved simple to think about, yet maddeningly difficult to build. He labored over this device throughout the year and well into the spring of 1874.
Then, at a friend's suggestion, he worked that summer on a teaching aid for the deaf, a gruesome device called the phonoautograph, made out of a dead man's ear. Speaking into the device caused the ear's membrane to vibrate and in turn move a lever. The lever then wrote a wavelike pattern of the speech on smoked glass. Ugh. Many say Bell was fascinated by how the tiny membrane caused the much heavier lever to work. It might be possible, he speculated, to make a membrane work in telephony, by using it to vary an electric current in intensity with the spoken word. Such a current could then replicate speech with another membrane. Bell had discovered the principle of the telephone, the theory of variable resistance, as depicted below. [Brooks] But learning to apply that principle correctly would take him another two years.
Bell continued harmonic telegraph work through the fall of 1874. He wasn't making much progress but his tinkering gathered attention. Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a prominent Boston lawyer and the president of the Clarke School for The Deaf, became interested in Bell's experiments. He and George Sanders, a prosperous Salem businessman, both sensed Bell might make the harmonic telegraph work. They also knew Bell the man, since Bell tutored Hubbard's daughter and he was helping Sander's deaf five year old son learn to speak.
In October, 1874, Green went to Washington D.C. to conduct a patent search. Finding no invention similar to Bell's proposed harmonic telegraph, Hubbard and Sanders began funding Bell. All three later signed a formal agreement in February, 1875, giving Bell financial backing in return for equal shares from any patents Bell developed. The trio got along but they would have their problems. Sanders would court bankruptcy by investing over $100,000 before any return came to him. Hubbard, on the other hand, discouraged Bell's romance with his daughter until the harmonic telegraph was invented. Bell, in turn, would risk his funding by working so hard on the telephone and by getting engaged to Mabel without Hubbard's permission.
In the spring of 1875, Bell's experimenting picked up quickly with the help of a talented young machinist named Thomas A. Watson. Bell feverishly pursued the harmonic telegraph his backers wanted and the telephone which was now his real interest. Seeking advice, Bell went to Washington D.C. On March 1, 1875, Bell met with Joseph Henry, the great scientist and inventor, then Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. It was Henry, remember, who pioneered electromagnetism and helped Morse with the telegraph. Uninterested in Bell's telegraph work, Henry did say Bell's ideas on transmitting speech electrically represented "the germ of a great invention." He urged Bell to drop all other work and get on with developing the telephone. Bell said he feared he lacked the necessary electrical knowledge, to which the old man replied, "Get it!" [Grosvenor and Wesson] Bell quit pursuing the harmonic telegraph, at least in spirit, and began working full time on the telephone.
After lengthy experimenting in the spring of 1875, Bell told Watson "If I can get a mechanism which will make a current of electricity vary in its intensity as the air varies in density when a sound is passing through it, I can telegraph any sound, even the sound of speech." [Fagen] He communicated the same idea in a letter to Hubbard, who remained unimpressed and urged Bell to work harder on the telegraph. But having at last articulated the principle of variable resistance, Bell was getting much closer.
On June 2, 1875, Bell and Watson were testing the harmonic telegraph when Bell heard a sound come through the receiver. Instead of transmitting a pulse, which it had refused to do in any case, the telegraph passed on the sound of Watson plucking a tuned spring, one of many set at different pitches. How could that be? Their telegraph, like all others, turned current on and off. But in this instance, a contact screw was set too tightly, allowing current to run continuously, the essential element needed to transmit speech. Bell realized what happened and had Watson build a telephone the next day based on this discovery. The Gallows telephone, so called for its distinctive frame, substituted a diaphragm for the spring. Yet it didn't work. A few odd sounds were transmitted, yet nothing more. No speech. Disheartened, tired, and running out of funds, Bell's experimenting slowed through the remainder of 1875.
During the winter of 1875 and 1876 Bell continued experimenting while writing a telephone patent application. Although he hadn't developed a successful telephone, he felt he could describe how it could be done. With his ideas and methods protected he could then focus on making it work. Fortunately for Bell and many others, the Patent Office in 1870 dropped its requirement that a working model accompany a patent application. On February 14, 1876, Bell's patent application was filed by his attorney. It came only hours before Elisha Gray filed his Notice of Invention for a telephone.
Mystery still surrounds Bell's application and what happened that day. In particular, the key point to Bell's application, the principle of variable resistance, was scrawled in a margin, almost as an afterthought. Some think Bell was told of Gray's Notice then allowed to change his application. That was never proved, despite some 600 lawsuits that would eventually challenge the patent. Finally, on March 10, 1876, one week after his patent was allowed, in Boston, Massachusetts, at his lab at 5 Exeter Place, Bell succeeded in transmitting speech. He was not yet 30. Bell used a liquid transmitter, something he hadn't outlined in his patent or even tried before, but something that was described in Gray's Notice.
Bell's patent, U.S. Number 174,465, has been called the most valuable ever issued. If you have QuickTime or another way to view .tif files you can view the document at the United States Patent and Trademark site (external link). Search for it by the number. Each page of the six page document is about 230K. And yes, it is very hard to follow. Patents are meant to protect ideas, not necessarily to explain them . . .
The Watson-built telephone looked odd and acted strangely. Bellowing into the funnel caused a small disk or diaphragm at the bottom to move. This disk was, in turn, attached to a wire floating in an acid-filled metal cup. A wire attached to the cup in turn led to a distant receiver. As the wire moved up and down it changed the resistance within the liquid. This now varying current was then sent to the receiver, causing its membrane to vibrate and thereby produce sound. This telephone wasn't quite practical; it got speech across, but badly. Bell soon improved it by using an electromagnetic transmitter, a metal diaphragm and a permanent magnet. The telephone had been invented. Now it was time for it to evolve.
For the definitive answer on who invented the telephone (A hint, it was Bell), and a link to Edwin S. Grosvenor's authoritative, well researched, and clear thinking site defending Bell, click here. (internal link)
How the first telephone worked
Simplified diagram of Bell's liquid transmitter. The diaphragm vibrated with sound waves, causing a conducting rod to move up and down in a cup of acid water. Battery supplied power electrified the cup of acid. As the rod rose and fell it changed the circuit's resistance. This caused the line current to the receiver (not shown) to fluctuate, which in turn caused the membrane of the receiver to vibrate, producing sound.
This transmitter was quickly dropped in favor of voice powered or induced models. These transmitted speech on the weak electro-magnetic force that the transmitter and receiver's permanent magnets produced.
It was not until 1882, with the introduction of the Blake transmitter, that Bell telephones once again used line power. The so called local battery circuit used a battery supplied at the phone to power the line and take speech to the local switch. Voice powered phones did not go away completely, as some systems continued to be used for critical applications, those which may have been threatened by spark. In 1964 NASA used a voice powered system described as follows:
"A network of 24 channels with a total of more than 450 sound powered telephones, which derive their power solely from the human voice, provide the communications between the East Area central blockhouse (left) and the various test stands at NASA's George C. Marshall Space Flight Center here. . ." The complete article is here:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/scienceservice/007016.htm (external link)
-------------------------------------
Resources
Brooks, John. Telephone: The First Hundred Years. New York: Harper and Row, 1975: 41
Fagen, M.D., ed. A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System. Volume 1 The Early Years, 1875 -1925. New York: Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1975, 6
Grosvenor, Edwin S. and Morgan Wesson. Alexander Graham Bell :The Life and Times of the Man Who Invented the Telephone. New York: Abrams, 1997: 55
Rhodes, Beginning of Telephony 4-5, 13-14 Bell develops the idea for the telephone.
The Telephone Evolves
At this point telephone history becomes fragmented and hard to
follow. Four different but related stories begin: (1) the further
history of the telephone instrument and all its parts, (2) the history
of the telephone business, (3) the history of telephone related
technology and (4) the history of the telephone system. Due to limited
space I can cover only some major North American events. Of these, the
two most important developments were the invention of the vacuum tube
and the transistor; today's telephone system could not have been built
without them.
Progress came slowly after the original invention. Bell and Watson worked constantly on improving the telphone's range. They made their longest call to date on October 9, 1876. It was a distance of only two miles, but they were so overjoyed that later that night they celebrated, doing so much began dancing that their landlady threatened to throw them out. Watson later recalled "Bell . . . had a habit of celebrating by what he called a war dance and I had got so exposed at it that I could do it quite as well as he could." [Watson] The rest of 1876, though, was difficult for Bell and his backers.
Bell and Watson improved the telephone and made better models of it, but these changes weren't enough to turn the telephone from a curiosity into a needed appliance. Promoting and developing the telephone proved far harder than Hubbard, Sanders, or Bell expected. No switchboards existed yet, the telephones were indeed crude and transmission quality was poor. Many questioned why anyone needed a telephone. And despite Bell's patent, broadly covering the entire subject of transmitting speech electrically, many companies sprang up to sell telephones and telephone service. In addition, other people filed applications for telephones and transmitters after Bell's patent was issued. Most claimed Bell's patent couldn't produce a working telephone or that they had a prior claim. Litigation loomed. Fearing financial collapse, Hubbard and Sanders offered in the fall of 1876 to sell their telephone patent rights to Western Union for $100,000. Western Union refused.
(Special thanks to William Farkas of Ontario, Canada for his remarks and corrections)
In 1876 Ericsson begins.
Click here for a short but nice history (internal link)
On April 27, 1877 Thomas Edison filed a patent application for an improved transmitter, a device that made the telephone practical. A major accomplishment, Edison's patent claim was declared in interference to a Notice of Invention for a transmitter filed just two weeks before by Emile Berliner. This conflict was not resolved until 1886 however, Edison decided to produce the transmitter while the matter was disputed. Production began toward the end of 1877. To compete, Bell soon incorporated in their phones an improved transmitter invented by Francis Blake.
Blake's transmitter relied on the diaphragm modifying an existing electrical current, an outside power source. This was quite different than the original invention and its improvements. Bell's first telephone transmitter used the human voice to generate a weak electro-magnetic field, which then went to a distant receiver. Bell later installed larger, better magnets into his telephones but there was a limit to what power the human voice could provide, Myer indicating about 10 microwatts.
On July 9, 1877 Sanders, Hubbard, and Bell formed the first Bell telephone company. Each assigned their rights under four basic patents to Hubbard's trusteeship. Against tough criticism, Hubbard decided to lease telephones and license franchises, instead of selling them. This had enormous consequences. Instead of making money quickly, dollars would flow in over months, years, and decades. Products were also affected, as a lease arrangement meant telephones needed to be of rental quality, with innovations introduced only when the equipment was virtually trouble free. It proved a wise enough decision to sustain the Bell System for over a hundred years.
In September, 1877 Western Union changed its mind about telephony. They saw it would work and they wanted in, especially after a subsidiary of theirs, the Gold and Stock Telegraphy Company, ripped out their telegraphs and started using Bell telephones. Rather than buying patent rights or licenses from the Bell, Western Union decided to buy patents from others and start their own telephone company. They were not alone. At least 1,730 telephone companies organized and operated in the 17 years Bell was supposed to have a monopoly.
Most competitors disappeared as soon as the Bell Company filed suit against them for patent infringement, but many remained. They either disagreed with Bell's right to the patent, ignored it altogether, or started a phone company because Bell's people would not provide service to their area. In any case, Western Union began entering agreements with Gray, Edison, and Amos E. Dolbear for their telephone inventions. In December, 1877 Western Union created the American Speaking Telephone Company. A tremendous selling point for their telephones was Edison's improved transmitter. Bell Telephone was deeply worried since they had installed only 3,000 phones by the end of 1877. Western Union, on the other hand, had 250,000 miles of telegraph wire strung over 100,000 miles of route. If not stopped they would have an enormous head start on making telephone service available across the country. Undaunted by the size of Western Union, then the world's largest telecom company, Bell's Boston lawyers sued them for patent infringement the next year.
On January, 28 1878 , the first commercial switchboard began operating in New Haven, Connecticut. It served 21 telephones on 8 lines consequently, many people were on a party line. On February 17, Western Union opened the first large city exchange in San Francisco. No longer limited to people on the same wire, folks could now talk to many others on different lines. The public switched telephone network was born. Other innovations marked 1878.
For a detailed history of telephone exchanges, particularly dial, please see R.B. Hill's excellent history: http://www.TelecomWriting.com/EarlyWork.html
On February 21, 1878, the world's first telephone directory came out, a single paper of only fifty names. George Williard Coy and a group of investors in the New Haven District Telephone Company at 219 Chapel Street produced it. It was followed quickly by the listing produced by the oddly named Boston Telephone Despatch Company. [First directory]
In 1878 President Rutherford B. Hayes administration installed the first telephone in the White House. [First tele] Mary Finch Hoyt reports that the first outgoing call went to Alexander Graham Bell himself, thirteen miles distant. Hayes first words instructed Bell to speak more slowly. [Hoyt]
In that year the Butterstamp telephone came into use. This telephone combined the receiver and transmitter into one handheld unit. You talked into one end, turned the instrument round and listened to the other end. People got confused with this clumsy arrangement, consequently, a telephone with a second transmitter and receiver unit was developed in the same year. You could use either one to talk or listen and you didn't have to turn them around. This wall set used a crank to signal the operator.
The Butterstamp telephone.
For another great page on the earliest commercial telephones go here:
http://atcaonline.com/phone/index.html (external link)
On August 1, 1878 Thomas Watson filed for a ringer patent. Similar to Henry's classroom doorbell, a hammer operated by an electromagnet struck two bells. Turning a crank on the calling telephone spun a magneto, producing an alternating or ringing current. Previously, people used a crude thumper to signal the called party, hoping someone would be around to hear it. The ringer was an immediate success. Bell himself became more optimistic about the telephone's future, prophetically writing in 1878 "I believe that in the future, wires will unite the head offices of the Telephone Company in different cities, and that a man in one part of the country may communicate by word of mouth with another in a distant place."
Subscribers, meanwhile, grew steadily but slowly. Sanders had invested $110,000 by early 1878 without any return. He located a group of New Englanders willing to invest but unwilling to do business outside their area. Needing the funding, the Bell Telephone Company reorganized in June, 1878, forming a new Bell Telephone Company as well as the New England Telephone Company, a forerunner of the strong regional Bell companies to come. 10,755 Bell phones were now in service. Reorganizing passed control to an executive committee, ending Hubbard's stewardship but not his overall vision. For Hubbard's last act was to hire a far seeing general manager named Theodore Vail. But the corporate shuffle wasn't over yet. In early 1879 the company reorganized once again, under pressure from patent suits and competition from other companies selling phones with Edison's superior transmitter. Capitalization was $850,000. William H. Forbes was elected to head the board of directors. He soon restructured it to embrace all Bell interests into a single company, the National Bell Company, incorporated on March 13, 1879. Growth was steady enough, however, that in late 1879 the first telephone numbers were used.
On November 10, 1879 Bell won its patent infringement suit against Western Union in the United States Supreme Court. In the resulting settlement, Western Union gave up its telephone patents and the 56,000 phones it managed, in return for 20% of Bell rentals for the 17 year life of Bell's patents. It also retained its telegraph business as before. This decision so enlarged National Bell that a new entity with a new name, American Bell Company, was created on February 20, 1880, capitalized with over seven million dollars. Bell now managed 133,000 telephones. As Chief Operating Officer, Theodore Vail began creating the Bell System, composed of regional companies offering local service, a long distance company providing toll service, and a manufacturing arm providing equipment. For the manufacturer he turned to a previous company rival. In 1880 Vail started buying Western Electric stock and took controlling interest on November, 1881. The takeover was consummated on February 26, 1882, with Western Electric giving up its remaining patent rights as well as agreeing to produce products exclusively for American Bell. It was not until 1885 that Vail would form his long distance telephone company. It was called AT&T.
On July 19, 1881 Bell was granted a patent for the metallic circuit, the concept of two wires connecting each telephone. Until that time a single iron wire connected telephone subscribers, just like a telegraph circuit. A conversation works over one wire since grounding each end provides a complete path for an electrical circuit. But houses, factories and the telegraph system were all grounding their electrical circuits using the same earth the telephone company employed. A huge amount of static and noise was consequently introduced by using a grounded circuit. A metallic circuit, on the other hand, used two wires to complete the electrical circuit, avoiding the ground altogether and thus providing a better sounding call.
The brilliant J.J. Carty introduced two wireservice commercially in October of that year on a circuit between Boston and Providence. It cut noise greatly over those forty five miles and heralded the beginning of long distance service. Still, it was not until 10 years later that Bell started converting grounded circuits to metallic ones
Progress came slowly after the original invention. Bell and Watson worked constantly on improving the telphone's range. They made their longest call to date on October 9, 1876. It was a distance of only two miles, but they were so overjoyed that later that night they celebrated, doing so much began dancing that their landlady threatened to throw them out. Watson later recalled "Bell . . . had a habit of celebrating by what he called a war dance and I had got so exposed at it that I could do it quite as well as he could." [Watson] The rest of 1876, though, was difficult for Bell and his backers.
Bell and Watson improved the telephone and made better models of it, but these changes weren't enough to turn the telephone from a curiosity into a needed appliance. Promoting and developing the telephone proved far harder than Hubbard, Sanders, or Bell expected. No switchboards existed yet, the telephones were indeed crude and transmission quality was poor. Many questioned why anyone needed a telephone. And despite Bell's patent, broadly covering the entire subject of transmitting speech electrically, many companies sprang up to sell telephones and telephone service. In addition, other people filed applications for telephones and transmitters after Bell's patent was issued. Most claimed Bell's patent couldn't produce a working telephone or that they had a prior claim. Litigation loomed. Fearing financial collapse, Hubbard and Sanders offered in the fall of 1876 to sell their telephone patent rights to Western Union for $100,000. Western Union refused.
(Special thanks to William Farkas of Ontario, Canada for his remarks and corrections)
In 1876 Ericsson begins.
Click here for a short but nice history (internal link)
On April 27, 1877 Thomas Edison filed a patent application for an improved transmitter, a device that made the telephone practical. A major accomplishment, Edison's patent claim was declared in interference to a Notice of Invention for a transmitter filed just two weeks before by Emile Berliner. This conflict was not resolved until 1886 however, Edison decided to produce the transmitter while the matter was disputed. Production began toward the end of 1877. To compete, Bell soon incorporated in their phones an improved transmitter invented by Francis Blake.
Blake's transmitter relied on the diaphragm modifying an existing electrical current, an outside power source. This was quite different than the original invention and its improvements. Bell's first telephone transmitter used the human voice to generate a weak electro-magnetic field, which then went to a distant receiver. Bell later installed larger, better magnets into his telephones but there was a limit to what power the human voice could provide, Myer indicating about 10 microwatts.
On July 9, 1877 Sanders, Hubbard, and Bell formed the first Bell telephone company. Each assigned their rights under four basic patents to Hubbard's trusteeship. Against tough criticism, Hubbard decided to lease telephones and license franchises, instead of selling them. This had enormous consequences. Instead of making money quickly, dollars would flow in over months, years, and decades. Products were also affected, as a lease arrangement meant telephones needed to be of rental quality, with innovations introduced only when the equipment was virtually trouble free. It proved a wise enough decision to sustain the Bell System for over a hundred years.
In September, 1877 Western Union changed its mind about telephony. They saw it would work and they wanted in, especially after a subsidiary of theirs, the Gold and Stock Telegraphy Company, ripped out their telegraphs and started using Bell telephones. Rather than buying patent rights or licenses from the Bell, Western Union decided to buy patents from others and start their own telephone company. They were not alone. At least 1,730 telephone companies organized and operated in the 17 years Bell was supposed to have a monopoly.
Most competitors disappeared as soon as the Bell Company filed suit against them for patent infringement, but many remained. They either disagreed with Bell's right to the patent, ignored it altogether, or started a phone company because Bell's people would not provide service to their area. In any case, Western Union began entering agreements with Gray, Edison, and Amos E. Dolbear for their telephone inventions. In December, 1877 Western Union created the American Speaking Telephone Company. A tremendous selling point for their telephones was Edison's improved transmitter. Bell Telephone was deeply worried since they had installed only 3,000 phones by the end of 1877. Western Union, on the other hand, had 250,000 miles of telegraph wire strung over 100,000 miles of route. If not stopped they would have an enormous head start on making telephone service available across the country. Undaunted by the size of Western Union, then the world's largest telecom company, Bell's Boston lawyers sued them for patent infringement the next year.
On January, 28 1878 , the first commercial switchboard began operating in New Haven, Connecticut. It served 21 telephones on 8 lines consequently, many people were on a party line. On February 17, Western Union opened the first large city exchange in San Francisco. No longer limited to people on the same wire, folks could now talk to many others on different lines. The public switched telephone network was born. Other innovations marked 1878.
For a detailed history of telephone exchanges, particularly dial, please see R.B. Hill's excellent history: http://www.TelecomWriting.com/EarlyWork.html
On February 21, 1878, the world's first telephone directory came out, a single paper of only fifty names. George Williard Coy and a group of investors in the New Haven District Telephone Company at 219 Chapel Street produced it. It was followed quickly by the listing produced by the oddly named Boston Telephone Despatch Company. [First directory]
In 1878 President Rutherford B. Hayes administration installed the first telephone in the White House. [First tele] Mary Finch Hoyt reports that the first outgoing call went to Alexander Graham Bell himself, thirteen miles distant. Hayes first words instructed Bell to speak more slowly. [Hoyt]
In that year the Butterstamp telephone came into use. This telephone combined the receiver and transmitter into one handheld unit. You talked into one end, turned the instrument round and listened to the other end. People got confused with this clumsy arrangement, consequently, a telephone with a second transmitter and receiver unit was developed in the same year. You could use either one to talk or listen and you didn't have to turn them around. This wall set used a crank to signal the operator.
The Butterstamp telephone.
For another great page on the earliest commercial telephones go here:
http://atcaonline.com/phone/index.html (external link)
On August 1, 1878 Thomas Watson filed for a ringer patent. Similar to Henry's classroom doorbell, a hammer operated by an electromagnet struck two bells. Turning a crank on the calling telephone spun a magneto, producing an alternating or ringing current. Previously, people used a crude thumper to signal the called party, hoping someone would be around to hear it. The ringer was an immediate success. Bell himself became more optimistic about the telephone's future, prophetically writing in 1878 "I believe that in the future, wires will unite the head offices of the Telephone Company in different cities, and that a man in one part of the country may communicate by word of mouth with another in a distant place."
Subscribers, meanwhile, grew steadily but slowly. Sanders had invested $110,000 by early 1878 without any return. He located a group of New Englanders willing to invest but unwilling to do business outside their area. Needing the funding, the Bell Telephone Company reorganized in June, 1878, forming a new Bell Telephone Company as well as the New England Telephone Company, a forerunner of the strong regional Bell companies to come. 10,755 Bell phones were now in service. Reorganizing passed control to an executive committee, ending Hubbard's stewardship but not his overall vision. For Hubbard's last act was to hire a far seeing general manager named Theodore Vail. But the corporate shuffle wasn't over yet. In early 1879 the company reorganized once again, under pressure from patent suits and competition from other companies selling phones with Edison's superior transmitter. Capitalization was $850,000. William H. Forbes was elected to head the board of directors. He soon restructured it to embrace all Bell interests into a single company, the National Bell Company, incorporated on March 13, 1879. Growth was steady enough, however, that in late 1879 the first telephone numbers were used.
On November 10, 1879 Bell won its patent infringement suit against Western Union in the United States Supreme Court. In the resulting settlement, Western Union gave up its telephone patents and the 56,000 phones it managed, in return for 20% of Bell rentals for the 17 year life of Bell's patents. It also retained its telegraph business as before. This decision so enlarged National Bell that a new entity with a new name, American Bell Company, was created on February 20, 1880, capitalized with over seven million dollars. Bell now managed 133,000 telephones. As Chief Operating Officer, Theodore Vail began creating the Bell System, composed of regional companies offering local service, a long distance company providing toll service, and a manufacturing arm providing equipment. For the manufacturer he turned to a previous company rival. In 1880 Vail started buying Western Electric stock and took controlling interest on November, 1881. The takeover was consummated on February 26, 1882, with Western Electric giving up its remaining patent rights as well as agreeing to produce products exclusively for American Bell. It was not until 1885 that Vail would form his long distance telephone company. It was called AT&T.
On July 19, 1881 Bell was granted a patent for the metallic circuit, the concept of two wires connecting each telephone. Until that time a single iron wire connected telephone subscribers, just like a telegraph circuit. A conversation works over one wire since grounding each end provides a complete path for an electrical circuit. But houses, factories and the telegraph system were all grounding their electrical circuits using the same earth the telephone company employed. A huge amount of static and noise was consequently introduced by using a grounded circuit. A metallic circuit, on the other hand, used two wires to complete the electrical circuit, avoiding the ground altogether and thus providing a better sounding call.
The brilliant J.J. Carty introduced two wireservice commercially in October of that year on a circuit between Boston and Providence. It cut noise greatly over those forty five miles and heralded the beginning of long distance service. Still, it was not until 10 years later that Bell started converting grounded circuits to metallic ones
Part A
Before continuing let's look at Strowger's achievement. The automatic dial system, after all, changed telephony forever. Almon Brown Strowger (pronounced STRO-jer) was born in 1839 in Penfield, New York, a close suburb of Rochester. Like Bell, Strowger was not a professional inventor, but a man with a keen interest in things mechanical. Swihart says he went to an excellent New York State university, served in the Civil War from 1861 to 1865 (ending as a lieutenant), taught school in Kansas and Ohio afterwards, and wound up first in Topeka and then Kansas City as an undertaker in 1886. This unlikely profession of an inventor so inspired seems odd indeed, but the stories surrounding his motivation to invent the automatic switch are odder still.Thanks to Joe Oster for supplying Strowger's birthplace
The many stories suggest, none of which I can confirm, that someone was stealing Almon Strowger's business. Telephone operators, perhaps in league with his competitors, were routing calls to other undertakers. These operators, supposedly, gave busy signals to customers calling Strowger or even disconnected their calls. Strowger thus invented a system to replace an operator from handling local calls. In the distillation of these many stories, Stephan Lesher relates a story from Almon's time in Topeka:
"In his book, Good Connections, telephone historian Dave Park writes that Strowger grew darkly suspicious when a close friend in Topeka died and the man's family delivered the body to a rival mortician. Strowger contended that an operator at the new telephone exchange had intentionally directed the call to a competitor -- an allegation that gave rise to tales that the operator was either married to, or the daughter of, a competing undertaker."
Good connections : A Century of Service by the Men & Women of Southwestern Bell by David G. Park (Long out of print, but try htttp://www,abe.com)
Whatever the circumstances, we do know that anti-Bell System sentiment ran high at this time, that good telephone inventions commanded ready money, and that Strowger did have numerous problems with his local telephone company. Strowger was a regular complainer and one complaint stands out.
Swihart describes how Southwestern Bell personnel were called out to once again visit Strowger's business, to fix a dead line. The cause turned out to be a hanging sign which flapped in the breeze against exposed telephone contacts. This shorted the line. Once the sign was removed the line worked again. It may be supposed that this sort of problem was beyond a customer's ability to diagnose, that Strowger had a legitimate complaint. But on this occasion Southwestern Bell's assistant general manager, a one Herman Ritterhoff, was along with the repair crew. Strowger invited the man inside and showed him a model for an automatic switch. So Strowger was working on the problem for quite some time and was no novice to telephone theory.
Brooks says that, in fact, Strowger knew technology so well that he built his patent on Bell system inventions. It must be pointed out, however, that every inventor draws ideas and inspiration from previously done work. Brooks says specifically that the Connolly-McTighe patent (Patent number 222, 458, dated December 9, 1879) helped Strowger, a failed dial switchboard, as well as an early automatic switch developed by Erza Gilliland. But Strowger did not build the instrument since he did not have the mechanical skills. A rather clueless jeweler was employed instead to build the first model, and much time was wasted with this man, getting him to follow instructions.
As with Bell, Strowger filed his patent without having perfected a working invention. Yet he described the switch in sufficient detail and with enough novel points for it to be granted Patent number 447,918, on March 10, 1891. And in a further parallel with Bell, Almon Strowger lost interest in the device once he got it built. It fell upon his brother, Walter S. Strowger, to carry development and promotion further, along with a great man, Joseph Harris, who also helped with promotion and investment money. Without Harris, soon to be the organizer and guiding force behind Automatic Electric, dial service may have taken decades longer for the Bell System to recognize and develop. Competition by A.E. forced the Bell System to play switching catchup, something they really only accomplished in the 1940s with the introduction of crossbar.
Need something technical on Strowger's work? I've put R.B. Hill's switching history article on line here:
http://www.TelecomWriting.com/Switching/EarlyYears.html
The citation to that article is here.For more on common battery and the last manual switchboard to be retired in America, click here
In 1897 Milo Gifford Kellogg founded the Kellogg Switchboard and Supply Company near Chicago. Kellogg was a "graduate engineer and accomplished circuit designer"[Pleasance], who began his career in 1870 with Gray and Barton, equipment manufacturers for Western Electric. There he developed Western Electric's best telephone switchboards: a standard model and a multiple switchboard. Both were invented in 1879 and patented in 1881 and 1884, respectively. He retired from Western Electric in 1885, "and began making and patenting a series of telephone inventions of his own, which work extended over a period of 12 years and which culminated in the issue of 125 patents to him on October 17, 1897, besides which over 25 had previously been issued to him."[Telephony] He was also quite political, successfully winning suits against Bell and delaying other Bell actions to his benefit. Telecom History called him "probably the man in the American independent telephone business who first placed himself in opposition to the Bell Company."[Telephony]
His major accomplishment was the so called divided-multiple switchboard, of which two were built. One was sold to the Cuyahoga Telephone Company of Cleveland, Ohio and the other to the Kinloch Telephone company of Saint Louis. The Cleveland installation boasted 9,600 lines, with an ultimate capacity of 24,000! Such large switchboards were needed to handle increasing demand. The Kellog boards were much larger than Bell equipment, mostly designed by Charles Scribner. Saint Louis and Detroit independents started switching to Kellog boards, "threaten[ing] Bell's profitable urban markets."[Grosvenor] Under such pressure and once again running out of money, Bell regrouped.
In 1899 American Bell Telephone Company reorganized yet once again. In a major change, American Bell Telephone Company conveyed all assets, with the exception of AT&T stock, to the New York state charted American Telephone and Telegraph Company. It was figured that New York had less restrictive corporate laws than Massachusetts. The American Bell Telephone Company name passed into history.
In 1900 loading coils came into use. Patented by Physics Professor Michael I. Pupin, loading coils helped improve long distance transmission. Spaced every three to six thousand feet, cable circuits were extended three to four times their previous length. Essentially a small electro-magnet, a loading coil or inductance coil strengthens the transmission line by decreasing attenuation, the normal loss of signal strength over distance. Wired into the transmission line, these electromagnetic loading coils keep signal strength up as easily as an electromagnet pulls a weight off the ground. But coils must be the right size and carefully spaced to avoid distortion and other transmission problems.
Pupin's patent is U.S. number 652,230 which you can view at the United States Patent Office: http://www.uspto.gov (external link) His patent in 1900 caused almost as much controversy as Bell's telephone patents. As the crucial invention for extending long distance circuits it was an extremely valuable patent and hence contested by groups like AT&T which eventually bought the rights. It also served as an incentive for the Bell System to found Bell Labs. As Wasserman put it, AT&T had been "played to a virtual tie with a lone inventor working in an academic setting. . . This point was not ignored by management."
The definitive book on loading coil history and early long distance working is Neil Wasserman's book, From Invention to Innovation: Long Distance Telephone Transmission at The Turn of the Century. John Hopkins/AT&T Series in Telephone History. 1985.
Details from the patent. Click to enlarge
In 1901 the Automatic Electric Company was formed from Almon Strowger's original company. The only maker of dial telephone equipment at the time, Automatic Electric grew quickly. The Bell System's Western Electric would not sell equipment to the independents, consequently, A.E. and then makers like Kellog and Stromberg-Carlson found ready acceptance. Desperate to fight off the rising independent tide, the Bell System concocted a wild and devious plan. AT&T's president Fredrick Fish approved a secret plan to buy out the Kellog Switchboard and Supply Company and put it under Bell control. Kellog would continue selling their major switchboards to the independents for a year. At that time the Bell System would file a patent suit against Kellog, which they would intentionally loose. This would force the independents to rip out their newly installed switchboards, crushing the largest independents. The plan was discovered, aborted, and further scandalized AT&T.[Grosvenor2]
By 1903 independent telephones numbered 2,000,000 while Bell managed 1,278,000. Bell's reputation for high prices and poor service continued. As bankers got hold of the company, the Bell System faltered.
In 1907 Theodore Vail returned to the AT&T as president, pressured by none other than J.P. Morgan himself, who had gained financial control of the Bell System. A true robber baron, Morgan thought he could turn the Bell System into America's only telephone company. To that end he bought independents by the dozen, adding them to Bell's existing regional telephone companies. The chart shows how AT&T management finally organized the regional holding companies in 1911, a structure that held up over the next seventy years. But Morgan wasn't finished yet. He also worked on buying all of Western Union, acquiring 30% of its stock in 1909, culminating that action by installing Vail as its president. For his part, Vail thought telephone service was a natural monopoly, much as gas or electric service. But he also knew times were changing and that the present system couldn't continue.
In January 1913 the Justice Department informed the Bell System that the company was close to violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. Vail knew things were going badly with the government, especially since the Interstate Commerce Commission had been looking into AT&T acquisitions since 1910. J.P. Morgan died in March, 1913; Vail lost a good ally and the strongest Bell system monopoly advocate. In a radical but visionary move, Vail cut his losses with a bold plan. On December 19, 1913, AT&T agreed to rid itself of Western Union stock, buy no more independent telephone companies without government approval and to finally connect the independents with AT&T's long distance lines. Rather than let the government remake the Bell System, Vail did the job himself.
Known as the Kingsbury agreement for the AT&T vice president who wrote the historic letter of agreement to the Justice Department, Vail ended any plans for a complete telecommunications monopoly. But with the independents paying a fee for each long distance call placed on its network, and with the threat of governmental control eased, the Bell System grew to be a de facto monopoly within the areas it controlled, accomplishing by craft what force could not do. Interestingly, although the Bell System would service eighty three percent of American telephones, it never controlled more than thirty percent of the United States geographical area. To this day, 1,435 independent telephone companies still exist, often serving rural areas the Bell System ignored. Vail's restructuring was so successful it lasted until modern times. In 1976, on the hundredth anniversary of the Bell System, AT&T stood as the richest company on earth.
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