The essential parts of both transmitter and receiver were an electro-magnet and a flattened piece of steel clock spring. The spring was clamped by one end to one pole of the magnet, and had its other end free to vibrate over the other pole. The transmitter had, besides this, make-and-break points like an ordinary vibrating bell which, when the current was on, kept the spring vibrating in a sort of nasal whine, of a pitch corresponding to the pitch of the spring. When the signalling key was closed, an electrical copy of that whine passed through the wire and the distant receiver. There were, say, six transmitters with their springs tuned to six different pitches and six receivers with their springs tuned to correspond. Now, theoretically, when a transmitter sent its electrical whine into the line wire, its own faithful receiver spring at the distant station would wriggle sympathetically but all the others on the same line would remain coldly quiescent. Even when all the transmitters were whining at once through their entire gamut, making a row as if all the miseries this world of trouble ever produced were concentrated there, each receiver spring along the line would select its own from that sea of troubles and ignore all the others. Just see what a simple, sure-to-work invention this was; for just break up those various whines into the dots and dashes of Morse messages and one wire would do the work of six, and the “Duplex” telegraph that had just been invented would be beaten to a frazzle. Bell’s reward would be immediate and rich, for the “Duplex” had been bought by the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company, giving them a great advantage over their only competitor, the Western Union Company, and the latter would, of course, buy Bell’s invention and his financial problems would be solved.
The Garret, 109 Court St., Boston, where Bell Verified the Principle of Electrical Speech Transmission
All this was, as I have said, theoretical, and it was mighty lucky for Graham Bell that it was, for had his harmonic telegraph been a well behaved apparatus that always did what its parent wanted it to do, the speaking telephone might never have emerged from a certain marvelous conception, that had even then been surging back of Bell’s high forehead for two or three years. What that conception was, I soon learned, for he couldn’t help speaking about it, although his friends tried to hush it up. They didn’t like to have him get the reputation of being visionary, or—something worse.
To go on with my story; after Mr. Farmer’s peace-making machines were finished, I made half a dozen pairs of the harmonic instruments for Bell. He was surprised, when he tried them, to find that they didn’t work as well as he expected. The cynical Watson wasn’t at all surprised for he had never seen anything electrical yet that worked at first the way the inventor thought it would. Bell wasn’t discouraged in the least and a long course of experiments followed which gave me a steady job that winter and brought me into close contact with a wonderful personality that did more to mould my life rightly than anything else that ever came into it.
I became mightily tired of those “whiners” that winter. I called them by that name, perhaps, as an inadequate expression of my disgust with their persistent perversity, the struggle with which soon began to take all the joy out of my young life, not being endowed with the power of Macbeth’s weird sisters to
“Look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not.”
Let me say here, that I have always had a feeling of respect for Elisha Gray, who, a few years later, made that harmonic telegraph work, and vibrate well-behaved messages, that would go where they were sent without fooling with every receiver on the line.
Most of Bell’s early experimenting on the harmonic telegraph was done in Salem, at the home of Mrs. George Sanders, where he resided for several years, having charge of the instruction of her deaf nephew. The present Y. M. C. A. building is on the site of that house. I would occasionally work with Bell there, but most of his experimenting in which I took part was done in Boston.