Triumphs and Wonders of the 19th Century: The True Mirror of a Phenomenal Era / A volume of original, entertaining and instructive historic and descriptive writings, showing the many and marvellous achievements which distinguish an hundred years of material, intellectual, social and moral progress

by James P. Boyd

THE GREAT EASTERN LAYING AN OCEAN CABLE.

IV. HELLO! HELLO!

Telegraph (Gr. tele, far, and graphein, to write) implies the production of writing at a distance by means of an electric current upon a conductor. Telephone (Gr. tele, far, and phone, sound) implies the production of sound at a distance by the same means, though the word telephone was in early use to describe the transmission of sound by means of a rod or tightly stretched string connecting two diaphragms of wood, membrane, or other substance. This last plan of transmitting sound came to be known as the string telephone, and it retained this name until the invention of the electric telephone.

Like the electric telegraph, the electric telephone was an evolution. The string telephone, in the hands of Wheatstone, showed, as early as 1819, that the vibrations of the air produced by a musical instrument were very minute, and could be transmitted hundreds of yards by means of a string armed with delicate diaphragms. But while the string telephone served to confirm the fact that sounds are vibrations of the atmosphere which affect the tympanum of the ear, it remained but a toy or experimental device till after electric telegraphy became an accepted science, that is, in the year 1837 and subsequently. One of the earliest steps toward the evolution of the electric telephone was taken by Mr. Page, of Salem, Mass., in 1837, who discovered that a magnetic bar could emit sounds when rapidly magnetized and demagnetized; and that those sounds corresponded with the number of currents which produced them. This led to the discovery, between 1847 and 1852, of several kinds of electric vibrators adapted to the production of musical sounds and their transmission to a distance. All this was wonderful and momentous, but a little while had still to elapse before one arose bold enough to admit the possibility of transmitting human speech by electricity. He came in 1854, in the person of Charles Bourseul, of Paris, who, though as if writing out a fanciful dream, said, “We know that sounds are produced by vibrations, and are adapted to the ear by the same vibrations which are reproduced by the intervening medium. But the intensity of the vibrations diminishes very rapidly with the distance, so that it is, even with the aid of speaking-tubes and trumpets, impossible to exceed somewhat narrow limits. Suppose that a man speaks near a movable disk, sufficiently flexible to lose none of the vibrations of the voice, that this disk alternately makes and breaks the current from a battery, you may have at a distance another disk, which will at the same time execute the same vibrations.”

A STRING TELEPHONE.

Bourseul further showed that the sounds of the voice thus reproduced would have the same pitch, but admitted that, in the then present state of acoustic science, it could not be affirmed that the syllables uttered by the human voice could be so reproduced, since nothing was known of them, except that some were uttered by the teeth, others by the lips, and so on. The status of the telephone then, according to Bourseul, was that voice could be reproduced at a distance at the pitch of the speaker, but that something more was needed to transmit the delicate and varied intonations of human speech when it was broken into syllables and utterances. To transmit simply voice was one thing; to transmit the timbre or quality of speech was another.

THOMAS ALVA EDISON.

Bourseul made plain the problem that was still before the investigator. And now comes one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of electricity,—a chapter of mingled shame and glory. In the village of Eberly’s Mills, Cumberland County, Pa., lived a genius by the name of Daniel Drawbaugh, who had made a study of telephony up to the very point Bourseul had left it. He had transmitted musical sound, sound of the voice, and other sounds in the same pitch. He had said that this was all that could be done till some means was discovered of holding up the constant onward flow of the electric current along a conducting wire by introducing into such flow a variable resistance such as would impart to simple pitch of voice the quality or timbre of human speech. Drawbaugh achieved this in his simple workshop as early as 1859–60, according to evidence furnished to the United States Supreme Court at the celebrated trial of the cases which robbed him of the right to his prior invention. He did it by introducing into the circuit a small quantity of powdered charcoal confined in a tumbler, through which the current was passing. The charcoal, being a poor conductor and in small grains, offered just that kind of variable resistance to the current necessary to reproduce the tones and syllables of speech. He transmitted speech between his shop and house, and proved the success he had met with before audiences in New York and Philadelphia. But he neglected to care for the commercial side of his discovery, though many of his patents antedated those which contributed to deprive him of deserved honor and profit.