Thus modestly is told the debut of Edison in the telephone art, to which with his carbon transmitter he gave the valuable principle of varying the resistance of the transmitting circuit with changes in the pressure, as well as the vital practice of using the induction coil as a means of increasing the effective length of the talking circuit. Without these, modern telephony would not and could not exist. [6] But Edison, in telephonic work, as in other directions, was remarkably fertile and prolific. His first inventions in the art, made in 1875-76, continue through many later years, including all kinds of carbon instruments —the water telephone, electrostatic telephone, condenser telephone, chemical telephone, various magneto telephones, inertia telephone, mercury telephone, voltaic pile telephone, musical transmitter, and the electromotograph. All were actually made and tested.
[Footnote 6: Briefly stated, the essential difference
between Bell's telephone and Edison's is this: With the
former the sound vibrations impinge upon a steel diaphragm
arranged adjacent to the pole of a bar electromagnet,
whereby the diaphragm acts as an armature, and by its
vibrations induces very weak electric impulses in the
magnetic coil. These impulses, according to Bell's theory,
correspond in form to the sound-waves, and passing over the
line energize the magnet coil at the receiving end, and by
varying the magnetism cause the receiving diaphragm to be
similarly vibrated to reproduce the sounds. A single
apparatus is therefore used at each end, performing the
double function of transmitter and receiver. With Edison's
telephone a closed circuit is used on which is constantly
flowing a battery current, and included in that circuit is a
pair of electrodes, one or both of which is of carbon. These
electrodes are always in contact with a certain initial
pressure, so that current will be always flowing over the
circuit. One of the electrodes is connected with the
diaphragm on which the sound-waves impinge, and the
vibration of this diaphragm causes the pressure between the
electrodes to be correspondingly varied, and thereby effects
a variation in the current, resulting in the production of
impulses which actuate the receiving magnet. In other words,
with Bell's telephone the sound-waves themselves generate
the electric impulses, which are hence extremely faint. With
the Edison telephone, the sound-waves actuate an electric
valve, so to speak, and permit variations in a current of
any desired strength.
A second distinction between the two telephones is this:
With the Bell apparatus the very weak electric impulses
generated by the vibration of the transmitting diaphragm
pass over the entire line to the receiving end, and in
consequence the permissible length of line is limited to a
few miles under ideal conditions. With Edison's telephone
the battery current does not flow on the main line, but
passes through the primary circuit of an induction coil, by
which corresponding impulses of enormously higher potential
are sent out on the main line to the receiving end. In
consequence, the line may be hundreds of miles in length. No
modern telephone system in use to-day lacks these
characteristic features—the varying resistance and the
induction coil.]
The principle of the electromotograph was utilized by Edison in more ways than one, first of all in telegraphy at this juncture. The well-known Page patent, which had lingered in the Patent Office for years, had just been issued, and was considered a formidable weapon. It related to the use of a retractile spring to withdraw the armature lever from the magnet of a telegraph or other relay or sounder, and thus controlled the art of telegraphy, except in simple circuits. "There was no known way," remarks Edison, "whereby this patent could be evaded, and its possessor would eventually control the use of what is known as the relay and sounder, and this was vital to telegraphy. Gould was pounding the Western Union on the Stock Exchange, disturbing its railroad contracts, and, being advised by his lawyers that this patent was of great value, bought it. The moment Mr. Orton heard this he sent for me and explained the situation, and wanted me to go to work immediately and see if I couldn't evade it or discover some other means that could be used in case Gould sustained the patent. It seemed a pretty hard job, because there was no known means of moving a lever at the other end of a telegraph wire except by the use of a magnet. I said I would go at it that night. In experimenting some years previously, I had discovered a very peculiar phenomenon, and that was that if a piece of metal connected to a battery was rubbed over a moistened piece of chalk resting on a metal connected to the other pole, when the current passed the friction was greatly diminished. When the current was reversed the friction was greatly increased over what it was when no current was passing. Remembering this, I substituted a piece of chalk rotated by a small electric motor for the magnet, and connecting a sounder to a metallic finger resting on the chalk, the combination claim of Page was made worthless. A hitherto unknown means was introduced in the electric art. Two or three of the devices were made and tested by the company's expert. Mr. Orton, after he had me sign the patent application and got it in the Patent Office, wanted to settle for it at once. He asked my price. Again I said: 'Make me an offer.' Again he named $100,000. I accepted, providing he would pay it at the rate of $6000 a year for seventeen years. This was done, and thus, with the telephone money, I received $12,000 yearly for that period from the Western Union Telegraph Company."
A year or two later the motograph cropped up again in Edison's work in a curious manner. The telephone was being developed in England, and Edison had made arrangements with Colonel Gouraud, his old associate in the automatic telegraph, to represent his interests. A company was formed, a large number of instruments were made and sent to Gouraud in London, and prospects were bright. Then there came a threat of litigation from the owners of the Bell patent, and Gouraud found he could not push the enterprise unless he could avoid using what was asserted to be an infringement of the Bell receiver. He cabled for help to Edison, who sent back word telling him to hold the fort. "I had recourse again," says Edison, "to the phenomenon discovered by me years previous, that the friction of a rubbing electrode passing over a moist chalk surface was varied by electricity. I devised a telephone receiver which was afterward known as the 'loud-speaking telephone,' or 'chalk receiver.' There was no magnet, simply a diaphragm and a cylinder of compressed chalk about the size of a thimble. A thin spring connected to the centre of the diaphragm extended outwardly and rested on the chalk cylinder, and was pressed against it with a pressure equal to that which would be due to a weight of about six pounds. The chalk was rotated by hand. The volume of sound was very great. A person talking into the carbon transmitter in New York had his voice so amplified that he could be heard one thousand feet away in an open field at Menlo Park. This great excess of power was due to the fact that the latter came from the person turning the handle. The voice, instead of furnishing all the power as with the present receiver, merely controlled the power, just as an engineer working a valve would control a powerful engine.
"I made six of these receivers and sent them in charge of an expert on the first steamer. They were welcomed and tested, and shortly afterward I shipped a hundred more. At the same time I was ordered to send twenty young men, after teaching them to become expert. I set up an exchange, around the laboratory, of ten instruments. I would then go out and get each one out of order in every conceivable way, cutting the wires of one, short-circuiting another, destroying the adjustment of a third, putting dirt between the electrodes of a fourth, and so on. A man would be sent to each to find out the trouble. When he could find the trouble ten consecutive times, using five minutes each, he was sent to London. About sixty men were sifted to get twenty. Before all had arrived, the Bell company there, seeing we could not be stopped, entered into negotiations for consolidation. One day I received a cable from Gouraud offering '30,000' for my interest. I cabled back I would accept. When the draft came I was astonished to find it was for L30,000. I had thought it was dollars."
In regard to this singular and happy conclusion, Edison makes some interesting comments as to the attitude of the courts toward inventors, and the difference between American and English courts. "The men I sent over were used to establish telephone exchanges all over the Continent, and some of them became wealthy. It was among this crowd in London that Bernard Shaw was employed before he became famous. The chalk telephone was finally discarded in favor of the Bell receiver—the latter being more simple and cheaper. Extensive litigation with new-comers followed. My carbon-transmitter patent was sustained, and preserved the monopoly of the telephone in England for many years. Bell's patent was not sustained by the courts. Sir Richard Webster, now Chief-Justice of England, was my counsel, and sustained all of my patents in England for many years. Webster has a marvellous capacity for understanding things scientific; and his address before the courts was lucidity itself. His brain is highly organized. My experience with the legal fraternity is that scientific subjects are distasteful to them, and it is rare in this country, on account of the system of trying patent suits, for a judge really to reach the meat of the controversy, and inventors scarcely ever get a decision squarely and entirely in their favor. The fault rests, in my judgment, almost wholly with the system under which testimony to the extent of thousands of pages bearing on all conceivable subjects, many of them having no possible connection with the invention in dispute, is presented to an over-worked judge in an hour or two of argument supported by several hundred pages of briefs; and the judge is supposed to extract some essence of justice from this mass of conflicting, blind, and misleading statements. It is a human impossibility, no matter how able and fair-minded the judge may be. In England the case is different. There the judges are face to face with the experts and other witnesses. They get the testimony first-hand and only so much as they need, and there are no long-winded briefs and arguments, and the case is decided then and there, a few months perhaps after suit is brought, instead of many years afterward, as in this country. And in England, when a case is once finally decided it is settled for the whole country, while here it is not so. Here a patent having once been sustained, say, in Boston, may have to be litigated all over again in New York, and again in Philadelphia, and so on for all the Federal circuits. Furthermore, it seems to me that scientific disputes should be decided by some court containing at least one or two scientific men—men capable of comprehending the significance of an invention and the difficulties of its accomplishment—if justice is ever to be given to an inventor. And I think, also, that this court should have the power to summon before it and examine any recognized expert in the special art, who might be able to testify to FACTS for or against the patent, instead of trying to gather the truth from the tedious essays of hired experts, whose depositions are really nothing but sworn arguments. The real gist of patent suits is generally very simple, and I have no doubt that any judge of fair intelligence, assisted by one or more scientific advisers, could in a couple of days at the most examine all the necessary witnesses; hear all the necessary arguments, and actually decide an ordinary patent suit in a way that would more nearly be just, than can now be done at an expenditure of a hundred times as much money and months and years of preparation. And I have no doubt that the time taken by the court would be enormously less, because if a judge attempts to read the bulky records and briefs, that work alone would require several days.
"Acting as judges, inventors would not be very apt to correctly decide a complicated law point; and on the other hand, it is hard to see how a lawyer can decide a complicated scientific point rightly. Some inventors complain of our Patent Office, but my own experience with the Patent Office is that the examiners are fair-minded and intelligent, and when they refuse a patent they are generally right; but I think the whole trouble lies with the system in vogue in the Federal courts for trying patent suits, and in the fact, which cannot be disputed, that the Federal judges, with but few exceptions, do not comprehend complicated scientific questions. To secure uniformity in the several Federal circuits and correct errors, it has been proposed to establish a central court of patent appeals in Washington. This I believe in; but this court should also contain at least two scientific men, who would not be blind to the sophistry of paid experts. [7] Men whose inventions would have created wealth of millions have been ruined and prevented from making any money whereby they could continue their careers as creators of wealth for the general good, just because the experts befuddled the judge by their misleading statements."
[Footnote 7: As an illustration of the perplexing nature of
expert evidence in patent cases, the reader will probably be
interested in perusing the following extracts from the
opinion of Judge Dayton, in the suit of Bryce Bros. Co. vs.
Seneca Glass Co., tried in the United States Circuit Court,
Northern District of West Virginia, reported in The Federal
Reporter, 140, page 161:
"On this subject of the validity of this patent, a vast
amount of conflicting, technical, perplexing, and almost
hypercritical discussion and opinion has been indulged, both
in the testimony and in the able and exhaustive arguments
and briefs of counsel. Expert Osborn for defendant, after
setting forth minutely his superior qualifications
mechanical education, and great experience, takes up in
detail the patent claims, and shows to his own entire
satisfaction that none of them are new; that all of them
have been applied, under one form or another, in some
twenty-two previous patents, and in two other machines, not
patented, to-wit, the Central Glass and Kuny Kahbel ones;
that the whole machine is only 'an aggregation of well-known
mechanical elements that any skilled designer would bring to
his use in the construction of such a machine.' This
certainly, under ordinary conditions, would settle the
matter beyond peradventure; for this witness is a very wise
and learned man in these things, and very positive. But
expert Clarke appears for the plaintiff, and after setting
forth just as minutely his superior qualifications,
mechanical education, and great experience, which appear
fully equal in all respects to those of expert Osborn,
proceeds to take up in detail the patent claims, and shows
to his entire satisfaction that all, with possibly one
exception, are new, show inventive genius, and distinct
advances upon the prior art. In the most lucid, and even
fascinating, way he discusses all the parts of this machine,
compares it with the others, draws distinctions, points out
the merits of the one in controversy and the defects of all
the others, considers the twenty-odd patents referred to by
Osborn, and in the politest, but neatest, manner imaginable
shows that expert Osborn did not know what he was talking
about, and sums the whole matter up by declaring this
'invention of Mr. Schrader's, as embodied in the patent in
suit, a radical and wide departure, from the Kahbel machine'
(admitted on all sides to be nearest prior approach to it),
'a distinct and important advance in the art of engraving
glassware, and generally a machine for this purpose which
has involved the exercise of the inventive faculty in the
highest degree.'
"Thus a more radical and irreconcilable disagreement between
experts touching the same thing could hardly be found. So it
is with the testimony. If we take that for the defendant,
the Central Glass Company machine, and especially the Kuny
Kahbel machine, built and operated years before this patent
issued, and not patented, are just as good, just as
effective and practical, as this one, and capable of turning
out just as perfect work and as great a variety of it. On
the other hand, if we take that produced by the plaintiff,
we are driven to the conclusion that these prior machines,
the product of the same mind, were only progressive steps
forward from utter darkness, so to speak, into full
inventive sunlight, which made clear to him the solution of
the problem in this patented machine. The shortcomings of
the earlier machines are minutely set forth, and the
witnesses for the plaintiff are clear that they are neither
practical nor profitable.
"But this is not all of the trouble that confronts us in
this case. Counsel of both sides, with an indomitable
courage that must command admiration, a courage that has led
them to a vast amount of study, investigation, and thought,
that in fact has made them all experts, have dissected this
record of 356 closely printed pages, applied all mechanical
principles and laws to the facts as they see them, and,
besides, have ransacked the law-books and cited an enormous
number of cases, more or less in point, as illustration of
their respective contentions. The courts find nothing more
difficult than to apply an abstract principle to all classes
of cases that may arise. The facts in each case so
frequently create an exception to the general rule that such
rule must be honored rather in its breach than in its
observance. Therefore, after a careful examination of these
cases, it is no criticism of the courts to say that both
sides have found abundant and about an equal amount of
authority to sustain their respective contentions, and, as a
result, counsel have submitted, in briefs, a sum total of
225 closely printed pages, in which they have clearly, yet,
almost to a mathematical certainty, demonstrated on the one
side that this Schrader machine is new and patentable, and
on the other that it is old and not so. Under these
circumstances, it would be unnecessary labor and a fruitless
task for me to enter into any further technical discussion
of the mechanical problems involved, for the purpose of
seeking to convince either side of its error. In cases of
such perplexity as this generally some incidents appear that
speak more unerringly than do the tongues of the witnesses,
and to some of these I purpose to now refer.">[
Mr. Bernard Shaw, the distinguished English author, has given a most vivid and amusing picture of this introduction of Edison's telephone into England, describing the apparatus as "a much too ingenious invention, being nothing less than a telephone of such stentorian efficiency that it bellowed your most private communications all over the house, instead of whispering them with some sort of discretion." Shaw, as a young man, was employed by the Edison Telephone Company, and was very much alive to his surroundings, often assisting in public demonstrations of the apparatus "in a manner which I am persuaded laid the foundation of Mr. Edison's reputation." The sketch of the men sent over from America is graphic: "Whilst the Edison Telephone Company lasted it crowded the basement of a high pile of offices in Queen Victoria Street with American artificers. These deluded and romantic men gave me a glimpse of the skilled proletariat of the United States. They sang obsolete sentimental songs with genuine emotion; and their language was frightful even to an Irishman. They worked with a ferocious energy which was out of all proportion to the actual result achieved. Indomitably resolved to assert their republican manhood by taking no orders from a tall-hatted Englishman whose stiff politeness covered his conviction that they were relatively to himself inferior and common persons, they insisted on being slave-driven with genuine American oaths by a genuine free and equal American foreman. They utterly despised the artfully slow British workman, who did as little for his wages as he possibly could; never hurried himself; and had a deep reverence for one whose pocket could be tapped by respectful behavior. Need I add that they were contemptuously wondered at by this same British workman as a parcel of outlandish adult boys who sweated themselves for their employer's benefit instead of looking after their own interest? They adored Mr. Edison as the greatest man of all time in every possible department of science, art, and philosophy, and execrated Mr. Graham Bell, the inventor of the rival telephone, as his Satanic adversary; but each of them had (or intended to have) on the brink of completion an improvement on the telephone, usually a new transmitter. They were free-souled creatures, excellent company, sensitive, cheerful, and profane; liars, braggarts, and hustlers, with an air of making slow old England hum, which never left them even when, as often happened, they were wrestling with difficulties of their own making, or struggling in no-thoroughfares, from which they had to be retrieved like stray sheep by Englishmen without imagination enough to go wrong."
Mr. Samuel Insull, who afterward became private secretary to Mr. Edison, and a leader in the development of American electrical manufacturing and the central-station art, was also in close touch with the London situation thus depicted, being at the time private secretary to Colonel Gouraud, and acting for the first half hour as the amateur telephone operator in the first experimental exchange erected in Europe. He took notes of an early meeting where the affairs of the company were discussed by leading men like Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury) and the Right Hon. E. P. Bouverie (then a cabinet minister), none of whom could see in the telephone much more than an auxiliary for getting out promptly in the next morning's papers the midnight debates in Parliament. "I remember another incident," says Mr. Insull. "It was at some celebration of one of the Royal Societies at the Burlington House, Piccadilly. We had a telephone line running across the roofs to the basement of the building. I think it was to Tyndall's laboratory in Burlington Street. As the ladies and gentlemen came through, they naturally wanted to look at the great curiosity, the loud-speaking telephone: in fact, any telephone was a curiosity then. Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone came through. I was handling the telephone at the Burlington House end. Mrs. Gladstone asked the man over the telephone whether he knew if a man or woman was speaking; and the reply came in quite loud tones that it was a man!"