Masters of Space / Morse and the Telegraph; Thompson and the Cable; Bell and the Telephone; Marconi and the Wireless Telegraph; Carty and the Wireless Telephone

by Walter Kellogg Towers

Up to this time it had been thought necessary to have individual batteries supplying current to each line. These were a constant source of difficulty, and Carty directed his own attention, and that of his associate engineers, to finding a satisfactory solution. He sought a method of utilizing one common battery at the central station and the way was found and the improvement accomplished.

Though the telephone circuits were now protected from the earth, telephone-users, at times when the lines were busy, were still troubled with roarings and strange cross-talk. Though busy with the many engineering problems which the telephone heads had assigned to him, Carty found time for some original research. He showed that the roarings in the wires were largely caused by electro-static induction. In 1889 he read a paper before the Electric Club that startled the engineers of that day. He demonstrated that in every telephone circuit there is a particular point at which, if a telephone is inserted, no cross-talk can be heard. He had worked out the rules for determining this point. Thus he had at once discovered the trouble and prescribed the cure. Of course it could not be expected that the sage experts would all agree with young Carty right away; but they were forced to in the end, for again he was proved right.

By 1901 Carty was ready with another invention which was to place the telephone in the homes of hundreds of thousands who, without it, could scarcely have afforded this modern necessity. This was the "bridging bell" which made possible the party line. By its use four telephones could be placed on a single line, each with its own signal, so that any one could be rung without ringing the others. Its introduction inaugurated a new boom in the use of the telephone.

Theodore Vail had resigned from his positions with the telephone companies in 1890 with the determination to retire from business. But when the panic of 1907 came the directors of the company went to him on his Vermont farm and pleaded with him to return and again resume the leadership. Other and younger men would not do in this business crisis. They also pointed out that the nation's telephones had not yet been molded into the national system which had been his dream—a system of universal service in which any one at any point in the country might talk by telephone with any other. So Vail re-entered the telephone field and again took the presidency of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.

One of his first official acts was to appoint John J. Carty his chief engineer. Vail had selected the right man to make his dreams come true; Carty now had the executive who would make it possible for him to accomplish even larger things. He set about building up the engineering organization which was to accomplish the work, selecting the most brilliant graduates of American technical schools. He set this organization to work upon the extension and development of the long-distance telephone lines.

As a "hello boy" Carty had believed in the possibility of the long-distance telephone when others had scoffed. He has told of an early experience while in the Boston exchange:

One hot day an old lady toiled up the inevitable flights of stairs which led to the telephone-office of those times. Out of breath, she sat down, and when she had recovered sufficiently to speak she said she wanted to talk to Chicago. My colleagues of that time were all what the ethnologists would rank a little bit lower than the wild Indian. These youngsters set up a great laugh; and, indeed, the absurdity of the old lady's project could hardly be overstated, because at that time Salem was a long-distance line, Lowell sometimes worked, and Worcester was the limit—that is, in every sense of the word. The Lowell line was so unreliable that we had a telegraph operator there, and when the talk was not possible, he pushed the message through by Morse. It is no wonder that the absurdity of the old lady's proposal was the cause of poorly suppressed merriment. But I can remember that I explained to her that our wires had not yet been extended to Chicago, and that, after she had departed, I turned to the other operators and said that the day would come when we could talk to Chicago. My prophecy was received with what might be called—putting it mildly—vociferous discourtesy. Nevertheless, I remember very well the impression which that old lady's request made upon me; and I really did believe that, some day or other, in some way, we would be able to talk to Chicago.

By 1912 it was possible to talk from New York to Denver, a distance of 2,100 miles. No European engineers had achieved any such results, and this feat brought to Carty and his wonderful staff the admiration of foreign experts. But for the American engineers this was only a starting-point.

The next step was to link New York and California. This was more than a matter of setting poles and stringing wires, stupendous though this task was. The line crosses thirteen States, and is carried on 130,000 poles. Three thousand tons of wire are used in the line. The Panama Canal took nine years to complete, and cost over three hundred million dollars; but within that time the telephone company spent twice that amount in engineering construction work alone, extending the scope of the telephone.

The technical problems were even more difficult. Carty and his engineers had to find a way to send something three thousand miles with the breath as its motive power. It was a problem of the conservation of the tiny electric current which carried the speech. The power could not be augmented or speech would not result at the destination.