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his was all. There were no switchboards of any account, no cables of any value, no wires that were in any sense adequate, no theory of tests or signals, no exchanges, NO TELEPHONE SYSTEM OF ANY SORT WHATEVER. As for Bell's first telephone lines, they were as simple as clothes-lines. Each short little wire stood by itself, with one instrument at each end. There were no operators, switchboards, or exchanges. But there had now come a time when more than two persons wanted to be in the same conversational group. This was a larger use of the telephone; and while Bell himself had foreseen it, he had not worked out a plan whereby it could be carried out. Here was the new problem, and a most stupendous one--how to link together three telephones, or three hundred, or three thousand, or three million, so that any two of them could be joined at a moment's notice. And that was not all. These young men had not only to battle against mystery and "the powers of the air"; they had not only to protect their tiny electric messenger, and to create a system of wire highways along which he could run up and down safely; they had to do more. They had to make this system so simple and fool-proof that every one--every one except the deaf and dumb--could use it without any previous experience. They had to educate Bell's Genie of the Wire so that he would not only obey his masters, but anybody--anybody who could speak to him in any language. No doubt, if the young men had stopped to consider their life-work as a whole, some of them might have turned back. But they had no time to philosophize. They were like the boy who learns how to swim by being pushed into deep water. Once the telephone business was started, it had to be kept going; and as it grew, there came one after another a series of congestions. Two courses were open; either the business had to be kept down to suit the apparatus, or the apparatus had to be developed to keep pace with the business. The telephone men, most of them, at least, chose development; and the brilliant inventions that afterwards made some of them famous were compelled by sheer necessity and desperation. The first notable improvement upon Bell's invention was the making of the transmitter, in 1877, by Emile Berliner. This, too, was a romance. Berliner, as a poor German youth of nineteen, had landed in Castle Garden in 1870 to seek his fortune. He got a job as "a sort of bottle-washer at six dollars a week,"
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