Great Inventions and Discoveries

by Willis Duff Piercy

Everyone except Field was disheartened. He went to work again, and during the next five years, the long years of the Civil War, he labored unceasingly. A larger cable with a greater resisting force was made. On the twenty-third of July, 1865, the steamship Great Eastern began another attempt to lay the cable. When it was within six hundred miles of Newfoundland, the cable parted again. For nine days attempts were made, in two and a half miles of water, to grapple the cable, splice it, and continue the work of laying it. Three times the cable was grappled, but the apparatus on the ship was not strong enough to hoist it aboard. Still Field never faltered. Another British company was formed and another cable was constructed. The Great Eastern was again loaded and on July 13, a Friday, set sail westward laying the cable. After an uncertain voyage of two weeks the Great Eastern arrived at Newfoundland, and the undertaking had again been successfully accomplished. Field telegraphed his arrival as follows: "Hearts Content, July 27, 1866. We arrived here at nine o'clock this morning. All well. Thank God, the cable is laid, and is in perfect working order. Cyrus W. Field."

Twelve years of unfaltering perseverance had won. Honors were heaped upon Field. Congress voted him a gold medal and the thanks of the nation. The prime minister of Great Britain declared that only the fact of his being the citizen of another nation prevented his receiving the highest honors in the power of the British government to bestow. The Paris "Exposition Universelle" of 1867 honored him with the Grand Medal, the highest prize it had to give.

Mr. Field was afterward interested in the laying of cables connecting Europe, India, China, Australia, the West Indies, and South America. In 1880-81 he made a trip around the world, full of satisfaction in his own part in making a new era of the world's civilization. He died at his home in New York on July 11, 1892.

The effect of the electric telegraph on government, intelligence, and civilization in general can scarcely be overstated. Sydney Smith, writing to Earl Grey after the admission of California into the United States, said that this marked an end to the great American republic; for how could people with such diversified interests, with such natural barriers, hold together? He did not foresee how strongly a fine copper wire could bind together the two seaboards and the great plains of the interior. Without the electric telegraph, neither the great daily newspaper nor the modern operation of railroads would be possible. It wipes away the natural boundaries of nations and makes neighbors of all men.

In 1819 Sir Charles Wheatsone, an English physicist, invented an instrument popularly known as the "magic lyre," but which he called the telephone. The first part of this word is the same Greek adverb tele that is found in telegraph. The phone is from another Greek word meaning "to sound." To telephone, therefore, means "to sound afar." The use of the English word telephone by Wheatsone is historically the first appearance of the word in our language. His device did nothing but reproduce music by means of sounding boards. The inventor of the modern telephone is Alexander Graham Bell.

Mr. Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, March 3, 1847. His father was Alexander Melville Bell, a Scotch educator, inventor of a system of visible speech, and author of some text-books on elocution. His grandfather was Alexander Bell, noted for his efforts to remove impediments of speech. Alexander Graham Bell was therefore well fitted by heredity for the invention of an instrument to transmit speech. He was educated in the Edinburgh high school and in the University of Edinburgh, and in 1867 he entered the University of London. Hard study broke down his health and he moved to Canada. Thence he moved to the United States, becoming first a teacher of deaf mutes, and afterward professor of vocal physiology in Boston University. In 1874, at the suggestion of the Boston Board of Education, he began some experiments to show to the eye the vibrations of sound, for the use of the deaf and dumb. The results of these experiments convinced Bell that articulate speech could be transmitted through space. Early in 1876 he completed the first telephone. The same year he exhibited it at the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia, where it was pronounced the "wonder of wonders."

He filed application for a patent on his invention at the Patent Office in Washington, February 14, 1876. It is a singular fact that another application for a patent on the telephone was received at the Patent Office a few hours later on the same day from Elisha Gray, an electrical inventor of Chicago. The patent was issued to Bell, not because his invention was superior in merit to Gray's, but on the ground that his application was received first. This is a case where "the early bird catches the worm," for the profits arising from the patent have made Mr. Bell very wealthy, and high honors have come to him as the inventor of one of the world's greatest and most marvelous inventions.

The Bell Telephone Company was organized in 1877, and in 1878 the first telephone exchanges were constructed. By the following year the telephone was firmly established as a social and commercial necessity. It has grown with great rapidity. It is now found in every city of the world; hotels, large buildings, and ships have their private exchanges, and it has found its way recently into thousands of farmhouses.

Bell had to fight hard in the courts to sustain his patent. Suit after suit was brought by rival claimants, attacking his right to the patent. The litigation was bitter and protracted. One of the most noteworthy of these suits was brought by a Pennsylvania mechanic named Drawbaugh. He claimed that about 1872 he had made a working telephone out of a cigar box, a glass tumbler, a tin can, and some other crude materials; and that with the apparatus thus constructed he had talked over a wire several hundred feet long. Many persons testified that they were acquainted with Drawbaugh's apparatus, some of them having used it. Some instruments, said to be the original ones which Drawbaugh had constructed, were brought into court and exhibited. It was shown that speech could be transmitted with them in a crude way. Drawbaugh claimed that he was too poor at the time of making the apparatus to take out the necessary patent. The Court decided in favor of Bell. Elisha Gray, whose application for a patent had been received the same day that Bell's was, also brought suit against Bell. Before making his application, Gray had filed some preliminary papers looking forward to a patent on the telephone. In his suit against Bell he charged that the patent examiner had fraudulently and secretly conveyed to Bell the contents of those papers. But Bell won this suit, and he finally established over all rivals his legal title as the inventor of the telephone.

Recently a wireless system of telephoning has been in process of development, and it will not be strange if, within a few years, we shall be talking through space without wires, so boundless seem the possibilities of the age.