The Blake Transmitter
You wouldn’t believe me if I should tell you a tithe of the difficulties we got into by flexible cords breaking inside the covering, when we first began to use hand telephones!
Then they began to clamor for switchboards for the first centrals, and individual call bells began to keep me awake nights. The latter were very important then, for such luxuries as one station lines were scarce. Six to twenty stations on a wire was the rule, and we were trying hard to get a signal that would call one station without disturbing the whole town. All of these and many other things had to be done at once, and, as if this was not enough, it suddenly became necessary for me to devise a battery transmitter. The Western Union people had discovered that the telephone was not such a toy as they had thought, and as our $100,000 offer was no longer open for acceptance, they decided to get a share of the business for themselves, and Edison evolved for them his carbon-button transmitter. This was the hardest blow yet.
Theodore N. Vail in 1878
We were still using the magneto transmitter, although Bell’s patent clearly covered the battery transmitter. Our transmitter was doing much to develop the American voice and lungs, making them powerful but not melodious. This was, by the way, the telephone epoch when they used to say that all the farmers waiting in a country grocery would rush out and hold their horses when they saw any one preparing to use the telephone. Edison’s transmitter talked louder than the magnetos we were using and our agents began to clamor for them, and I had to work nights to get up something just as good. Fortunately for my constitution, Frank Blake came along with his transmitter. We bought it and I got a little sleep for a few days. Then our little David of a corporation sued that big Goliath, the Western Union Company, for infringing the Bell patents, and I had to devote my leisure to testifying in that suit, and making reproductions of the earliest apparatus to prove to the court that they would really talk and were not a bluff, as our opponents were asserting.
Then I put in the rest of my leisure making trips among our agents this side of the Mississippi to bring them up to date and see what the enemy were up to. I kept a diary of those trips. It reads rather funnily to-day, but I won’t go into that. It would detract from the seriousness of this discourse.