THE TELEPHONE.
Perhaps no other great invention of man has been within so short a period so widely distributed as the telephone. The use of the instrument is already co-extensive with civilization. The cost at which the instruments are furnished is still so considerable that the poor of the world are not able to avail themselves of the invention; but in the so-called upper circles of society the use of the telephone is virtually universal. It has made its way from the city to the town, from the town to the village, from the village to the hamlet, and even to the country-side where the millions dwell.
The telephone came by a speedy revelation. It was born of that intense scientific activity which is the peculiarity of our age. The antecedent knowledge out of which it sprang had existed in various forms for a long time. The laws of acoustics were among the first to be investigated after a true physical science began to be taught. The phenomena of sound are so universal and experimentation in sound production so easy, that the governing laws were readily discovered.
Acoustics, we think, foreran somewhat the science of heat, as the science of heat preceded that of light. Electricity came last. The telephone is an instrument belonging not wholly, not chiefly, but only in part, to acoustics. It owes its existence to magnetic induction and electrical transmission as much as to the mere action of sound. One foot of the instrument, so to speak, is acoustics, and the other foot electricity. The telephone philosophically considered is an instrument for the conversion of a sound-wave into electrical motion, and its reconversion into sound at a distance. The sound is, as it were, committed to the electrical current and is thus sent to the end of the journey, and there discharged with its message. The possibility of this result lies first of all in the fact of electrical transmission by wire, and in the second place to the mounting of a sound-rider on the electrical saddle for an instantaneous journey with important despatches!
New results in scientific progress generally seem marvelous. The unfamiliar and unexpected thing is always a marvel; but scientifically considered, the telephone does not seem so surprising as at first view. The atmosphere is a conductor of sound. It is the natural agent of transmission, and so far as the natural man is concerned, it is his only agent for the transmission of oral utterance. If the unlearned man have his attention called to the surprising fact of hearing his fellow-man call out to him across a field or from far off on the prairie, he does not think it marvelous, but only natural. Yet how strange it is that one human being can speak to another through the intervening space!
It is strange that one should see another at a distance; but seeing and hearing at distances are natural functions of living creatures. The sunlight is for one sense and the sound-wave is for the other. The sound-wave travels on the atmosphere, and preserves its integrity. A given sound is produced, and the same sound is heard by some ear at a distance. All the people of the world are telephoning to one another; for oral speech leaping from the vocal organs of one human being to the ear of another is always telephonic. It is only when this phenomenon of speech at a distance is taken from the soft wings of the air, confined to a wire, and made to fly along the slender thread and deliver itself afar in a manner to which the world has hitherto been a stranger that the thing done and the apparatus by which it is done seem miraculous. Indeed it is a miracle; for miraculum signifies wonderful.
The history of the invention of the telephone is easily apprehended. The scientific principles on which it depends may be understood without difficulty. There is, however, about the instrument and its action something that is well nigh unbelievable. It is essentially a thing contrary to universal experience, if not positively inconceivable, that the slight phenomenon of the human voice should be, so to speak, picked up by a physical contrivance, carried a thousand miles through a thread of wire not a quarter of an inch in diameter, and delivered in its integrity to the sense of another waiting to receive it! At all events, the history of the telephone, belonging so distinctly to our own age, will stand as a reminder to after times of the great stride which the human race made in inventive skill and scientific progress in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
The telephone, like many similar instruments, was the work of several ingenious minds directed at nearly the same time to the same problem. The solution, however, must be accredited first of all to Elisha P. Gray, of Chicago, and Alexander Graham Bell, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It should be mentioned, however, that Amos E. Dolbear, of Tufts College, Massachusetts, and Thomas A. Edison, of Menlo Park, New Jersey, likewise succeeded in solving the difficulty in the way of telephonic communication, and in answering practically several of the minor questions that hindered at first the complete success of the invention. The telephone is an instrument for the reproduction of sounds, particularly the sounds of the human voice, by the agency of electrical conduction at long distances from the origin of the vocal disturbance. Or it may be defined as an instrument for the transmission of the sounds referred to by the agencies described. Indeed it were hard to say whether in a telephonic message we receive a reproduced sound or a transmitted sound. On the whole, it is more proper to speak of a reproduction of the original sound by transmission of the waves in which that sound is first written.
It is now well known that the phenomenon called sound consists of a wave agitation communicated through the particles of some medium to the organ of hearing. Every particular sound has its own physical equivalent in the system of waves in which it is written. The only thing, therefore, that is necessary in order to carry a sound in its integrity to any distance, is to transmit its physical equivalent, and to redeliver that equivalent to some organ of hearing capable of receiving it.
Upon these principles the telephone was produced—created. Every sound which falls by impact upon the sheet-iron disk of the instrument communicates thereto a sort of tremor. This tremor causes the disk to approach and recede from the magnetic pole placed just behind the diaphragm. A current of electricity is thus induced, pulsates along the wire to the other end, and is delivered to the metallic disk of the second instrument, many miles away, just as it was produced in the first. The ear of the hearer receives from the second instrument the exact physical equivalent of the sound, or sounds, which were delivered against the disk of the first instrument, and thus the utterance is received at a distance just as it was given forth.
As already said, the invention of the telephone stands chiefly to the credit of Professors Gray and Bell. It should be recorded that as early as 1837, the philosopher Page succeeded, by means of electro-magnetism, in transmitting musical tones to a distance. It was not, however, until 1877 that Professer Bell, in a public lecture given at Salem, Mass., astonished his audience, and the whole country as well, by receiving and transmitting vocal messages from Boston, twenty miles away. Incredulity had no more a place as it respected the feasibility of talking to persons at a distance. The experiments of Gray at Chicago, a few days later in the same month, were equally successful. Messages were distinctly delivered between that city and Milwaukee, a distance of eighty-five miles, nor could it be longer doubted that a new era in the means of communication had come.
The Bell telephone, with its many modifications and improvements, has come into rapid use. Within reasonable limits of distance, the new method of transmitting intelligence by direct vocal utterance, has taken the place of all slower and less convenient means of intercommunication. The appearance of the simple instrument has been one of the many harbingers of the oncoming better time, when the interchange of thought and sentiment between man and man, community and community, nation and nation, and race and race shall be the preliminary of universal peace in the world and of the good-fellowship of mankind.
Every such fact as the invention of the telephone, produces a complex and almost indescribable result in human society. This result has in it, in the first place, a change in the manners and method of the individual There is also a change in his sentiments. He whose work in life, whatever it may be, is accomplished in touch with the telephone will realize that he is in touch with the whole world. This intimacy reaches, first, his neighbors and friends. He seems to live henceforth in their presence, and in communication with them.
The isolation of the individual life is virtually obliterated by such an agency. Solitude disappears before it; for he whose ear is within hearing of his instrument, knows not at what moment any one of many thousands of people may speak to him. He knows not at what moment intelligence of an ever-varying kind may be spoken to him from his own community or out of the depths of distance. The mind is thus affiliated with an enlarged and ever-present society. These considerations do not relate to mere matters of convenience and quickness and advantage and safety, but to the larger question of the aggregate effect upon the individual.
The effect on the community is of like kind. The community is no longer so segregated as it was before. The community is in touch with other communities of like character. The conflagration in one town is felt in the neighboring towns, if it is not seen. The epidemic of the one is the epidemic of many. The sensation of the one community diffuses itself instantly into several. The effect is in the intellectual life like that of a wave produced on the lake by the casting in of a stone. The wave widens and recedes. It may be obstructed or unobstructed in its progress. If obstructed, the obstructions may be removed. Then the motion of the wave will become free and regular. So also on the tide of public thought. The telephone is an agency for removing mental obstructions, and for the regular diffusion of a common thought.
All this, however, is attended with draw-backs. One of these is the breaking in on the privacy and seclusion of the individual life. Individuality suffers under scientific progress. Great thinking is accomplished best in solitude. Emerson has forcibly pointed out the advantages which arise in the intellectual life from its isolation and seclusion—from its free and uninterrupted communion with itself.
The convenience—the physical convenience—of life is vastly augmented by such a contrivance as the telephone. Time is saved and trouble obviated. But at the same time the necessity for bodily exercise is reduced, and the overgrowth of brain at the expense of body encouraged. The fact is that the invention of the telephone and its general use, while it has added very greatly to the comfort of life, while it has promoted ease and diffused a social sense that needed stimulation and development, has at the same time brought in conditions that are not wholly favorable to human welfare. More largely still, the truth is that the telephone, like every other symbol and agency of progress, has brought enlarged responsibilities.
No man, no community, no people or nation can gain an increase of power without accepting the accompanying increase of responsibility. The moral nature of man is thus involved. Every forward stride of scientific invention places upon the life of man, including his bodily activity, his mental moods and his spiritual and moral powers, an added stress of duty, of energy, and of rectitude in conduct from which he may not shrink if he would be the gainer rather than the loser. Each discovery and each improved method of employing the beneficent forces of the natural world, brings with it a strain upon the moral nature of man which, if he stand it, well; but if he stand it not, then it shall go ill with him.