Today, consumers finish inventing the telephone.
The University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
In 1910 telephones were 30
years old. One European in 150 had one. In America
one person in 11 had a phone. That means 13 times
as many Americans had access to phones by 1910.
Yet the telephone had come out of Europe. Phillipp
Reis built a crude phone in Germany in 1861. He
coined the word telephone. Fifteen
years later Bell created a far better phone. But he
used the work of the German scientist Helmholtz.
How could our phones be so far ahead of Germany's
or anyone else's? In 1911 an English writer,
Herbert Laws Webb, tried to see why. He blamed
European government monopolies. We also had a
telephone monopoly. But we'd set up a system of
regulation that forced our monopoly to respond to
its public. We managed to do what Europe couldn't.
Why had Europe let her phones become isolated from
the public? Webb points to the telegraph. The world
was solidly wired for telegraphy in 1910. European
telegraphs were part of the government post
offices.
At first, telegraph companies had turned telephone
inventors away. Telegraphy was businesslike. Phones
were frivolous.
But the public wanted telephones. As popular appeal
mounted, Europe turned around and nationalized its
new phone companies. They made them a branch of
telegraphy -- cast in the same image. European
phones were for business and news. You would never
make a social invitation over the phone.
Alexander Graham Bell knew his phones would become
a social machine. He talked about it. And a quality
of play was always part of his brilliant inventive
work. Once he made a phone with a triple mouthpiece
so a vocal trio could sing into it.
You see, Webb gave only half an answer to his
question: why have European phones done so poorly
under European governments? He said Europe had too
much investment in telegraphy. They couldn't let
telephones compete with it.
The other half of the answer was that we forced our
monopoly to answer its public. American consumers
shaped the new technology here. I think Webb's
contemporary, Carl Sandburg, saw that as clearly as
anyone. He wrote:
I am a copper wire slung in the air,
Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line
of shadow.
Night and day I keep singing -- humming and
thrumming; ...
Death and laughter of men and women passing through
me,
carrier of your speech.
In America, the technology was close-coupled to the
sounds of death and laughter passing through its
wires. That's how we shaped the telephone so
quickly to our ears -- and to our hearts.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Webb, H.L., The Development of the Telephone in
Europe, London: Electrical Press Ltd., 1911.
The Social Impact of the Telephone (I.
de Sola Pool, ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977.
(See Chapter 9 for the Sandburg quotation.)
Garnet, R.W., The Telephone Enterprise: The
Evolution of the Bell System's Horizontal
Structure, 1876-1909. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Marland, E.A., Early Electrical
Communication. London: Abelard-Schuman Ltd.,
1964, Chapter 11.
Mosco, V., Whose Computer Revolution Is It?
The Information Environment: A Reader
(G. Walker, ed.). New York: G.K. Hall & Co.,
1992, pp. 157-170.
For more on the invention of the telephone, see
Episode 1098.
From the 1897 Encyclopaedia Britannica
From the 1897 Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
Lienhard.
Previous
Episode | Search Episodes |
Index |
Home |
Next
Episode
