he says, in a chemical shop in New
York. At nights he studied science in the free classes of Cooper Union.
Then a druggist named Engel gave him a copy of Muller's book on physics,
which was precisely the stimulus needed by his creative brain. In 1876
he was fascinated by the telephone, and set out to construct one on a
different plan. Several months later he had succeeded and was overjoyed
to receive his first patent for a telephone transmitter. He had by this
time climbed up from his bottle-washing to be a clerk in a drygoods
store in Washington; but he was still poor and as unpractical as most
inventors. Joseph Henry, the Sage of the American scientific world,
was his friend, though too old to give him any help. Consequently, when
Edison, two weeks later, also invented a transmitter, the prior claim
of Berliner was for a time wholly ignored. Later the Bell Company
bought Berliner's patent and took up his side of the case. There was
a seemingly endless succession of delays--fourteen years of the most
vexatious delays--until finally the Supreme Court of the United States
ruled that Berliner, and not Edison, was the original inventor of the
transmitter.
From first to last, the transmitter has been the product of several
minds. Its basic idea is the varying of the electric current by varying
the pressure between two points. Bell unquestionably suggested it in
his famous patent, when he wrote of "increasing and diminishing the
resistance." Berliner was the first actually to construct one. Edison
greatly improved it by using soft carbon instead of a steel point. A
Kentucky professor, David E. Hughes, started a new line of development
by adapting a Bell telephone into a "microphone," a fantastic little
instrument that would detect the noise made by a fly in walking across
a table. Francis Blake, of Boston, changed a microphone into a practical
transmitter. The Rev. Henry Hunnings, an English clergyman, hit upon the
happy idea of using carbon in the form of small granules. And one of the
Bell experts, named White, improved the Hunnings transmitter into its
present shape. Both transmitter and receiver seem now to be as complete
an artificial tongue and ear as human ingenuity can make them. They have
persistently grown more elaborate, until today a telephone set, as it
stands on a desk, contains as many as one hundred and thirty separate
pieces, as well as a saltspoonful of glistening granules of carbon.
Next after the trans
|