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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