Ted and the Telephone

by Sara Ware Bassett

"Go on!" Laurie said quickly. "Tell us what happened."

"Nothing happened!" answered the tutor. "Watson listened but there was not a sound."

"Great Scott!"

"The poor assistant was aghast," went on Mr. Hazen. "He was at a complete loss to understand what was the matter. Could it be that the contrivance which worked so promisingly in the Boston rooms would not work under these other conditions? Perhaps an electric current was too delicate a thing to carry sound very far. Or was it that the force of the vibration filtered off at each insulator along the line until it became too feeble to be heard? All these possibilities flashed into Watson's mind while at his post two miles away from Mr. Bell he struggled to readjust the instrument. Then suddenly an inspiration came to his alert brain. Might there not be another Morse sounder somewhere about? If there were, that would account for the whole difficulty. Springing up, he began to search the room and after following the wires, sure enough, he traced them to a relay with a high resistance coil in the circuit. Feverishly he cut this out and rushed back to his telephone. Plainly over the wire came Bell's voice, 'Ahoy! Ahoy!' For a few seconds both of them were too delighted to say much of anything else. Then they sobered down and began this first long-distance conversation. Now one of the objections Mr. Bell had constantly been forced to meet from the skeptical public was that while the telegraph delivered messages that were of unchallenged accuracy telephone conversations were liable to errors of misunderstanding. One could not therefore rely so completely on the trustworthiness of the latter as on that of the former. To refute this charge Mr. Bell had insisted that both he and Watson carefully write out whatever they heard that the two records might afterward be compared and verified. 'That is,' Mr. Bell had added with the flicker of a smile, 'if we succeed in talking at all!' Well, they did succeed, as you have heard. At first they held only a stilted dialogue and conscientiously jotted it down; but afterward their exuberance got the better of them and in sheer joy they chattered away like magpies until long past midnight. Then, loath to destroy the connection, Watson detached his telephone, replaced the Company's wires, and set out for Boston. In the meantime Mr. Bell, who had previously made an arrangement with the Boston Advertiser to publish on the following morning an account of the experiment, together with the recorded conversations, had gone to the newspaper office to carry his material to the press. Hence he was not at the Exeter Place rooms when the jubilant Watson arrived. But the early morning hour did not daunt the young electrician; and when, after some delay, Mr. Bell came in, the two men rushed toward one another and regardless of everything else executed what Mr. Watson has since characterized as a war dance. Certainly they were quite justified in their rejoicings and perhaps if their landlady had understood the cause of their exultations she might have joined in the dance herself. Unluckily she had only a scant sympathy with inventive genius and since the victory celebration not only aroused her, but also wakened most of her boarders from their slumbers, her ire was great and the next morning she informed the two men that if they could not be more quiet at night they would have to leave her house."

An appreciative chuckle came from the listeners.

"If she had known what she was sheltering, I suppose she would have been proud as a peacock and promptly told all her neighbors," grinned Ted.

"Undoubtedly! But she did not know, poor soul!" returned Mr. Hazen.

"After this Mr. Bell and Mr. Watson must have shot ahead by leaps and bounds," commented Laurie.

"There is no denying that that two-mile test did give them both courage and assurance," responded the tutor. "They got chances to try out the invention on longer telegraph wires; and in spite of the fact that no such thing as hard-drawn copper wire was in existence they managed to get results even over rusty wires with their unsoldered joinings. Through such experiments an increasingly wider circle of outside persons heard of the telephone and the marvel began to attract greater attention. Mr. Bell's modest little laboratory became the mecca of scientists and visitors of every imaginable type. Moses G. Farmer, well known in the electrical world, came to view the wonder and confessed to Mr. Bell that more than once he had lingered on the threshold of the same mighty discovery but had never been able to step across it into success. It amused both Mr. Bell and Mr. Watson to see how embarrassed persons were when allowed to talk over the wire. Standing up and speaking into a box has long since become too much a matter of course with us to appear ridiculous; but those experiencing the novelty for the first time were so overwhelmed by self-consciousness that they could think of nothing to say. One day when Mr. Watson called from his end of the line, 'How do you do?' a dignified lawyer who was trying the instrument answered with a foolish giggle, 'Rig-a-jig-jig and away we go!' The psychological reaction was too much for many a well-poised individual and I do not wonder it was, do you?"

"It must have been almost as good as a vaudeville show to watch the people," commented Ted.