Magneto Wall Set (Williams’ Coffin)
Gower went to England later. There he made some small modification of Bell’s telephone, called it the “Gower-Bell” telephone, and made a fortune out of his hyphenated atrocity. Later he married Lillian Nordica, although she soon separated from him. He became interested in ballooning. The last scene in his life before the curtain dropped showed a balloon over the waters of the English Channel. A fishing boat hails him, “Where are you bound?” Gower’s voice replies, “To London.” Then the balloon and its pilot drifted into the mist forever.
Developing a Calling Apparatus; the Watson “Buzzer”
Francis Blake
As I said, I went back to work, and my next two years was a continuous performance. It began to dawn on us that people engaged in getting their living in the ordinary walks of life couldn’t be expected to keep the telephone at their ear all the time waiting for a call, especially as it weighed about ten pounds then and was as big as a small packing case, so it devolved on me to get up some sort of a call signal. Williams on his line used to call by thumping the diaphragm through the mouthpiece with the butt of a lead pencil. If there was someone close to the telephone at the other end, and it was very still, it did pretty well, but it seriously damaged the vitals of the machine and therefore I decided it wasn’t really practical for the general public; besides, we might have to supply a pencil with every telephone and that would be expensive. Then I rigged a little hammer inside the box with a button on the outside. When the button was thumped the hammer would hit the side of the diaphragm where it could not be damaged, the usual electrical transformation took place, and a much more modest but still unmistakable thump would issue from the telephone at the other end.
That was the first calling apparatus ever devised for use with the telephone, not counting Williams’ lead pencil, and several with that attachment were put into practical use. But the exacting public wanted something better, and I devised the Watson “Buzzer”—the only practical use we ever made of the harmonic telegraph relics. Many of these were sent out. It was a vast improvement on the Watson “Thumper,” but still it didn’t take the popular fancy. It made a sound quite like the horseradish grater automobile signal we are so familiar with nowadays, and aroused just the same feeling of resentment which that does. It brought me only a fleeting fame for I soon superseded it by a magneto-electric call bell that solved the problem, and was destined to make a long-suffering public turn cranks for the next fifteen years or so, as it never had before, or ever will hereafter.
The Blake Transmitter
Perhaps I didn’t have any trouble with the plaguy thing! The generator part of it was only an adaptation of a magneto shocking machine I found in Davis’ Manual of Magnetism and worked well enough, but I was guilty of the jingling part of it. At any rate, I felt guilty when letters began to come from our agents reciting their woes with the thing, which they said had a trick of sticking and failing on the most important occasions to tinkle in response to the frantic crankings of the man who wanted you. But I soon got it so it behaved itself and it has been good ever since, for Chief Engineer Carty told me the other day that nothing better has ever been invented, that they have been manufactured by the millions all over the world, and that identical jingler to-day does practically all the world’s telephone calling.