Part 14
Fortunately, at this point, a Cambridge dealer in coal and wood, by the name of Fisher, heard of Howe’s machine, and asked to see it. Howe jumped at the opportunity, explained its mechanism, and told how he was situated. Mr. Fisher thought the model had possibilities, and agreed to provide board for the inventor and his family, to give the young man a workshop in his own house, and to advance him the sum of $500, which Howe said was absolutely necessary to pay for the construction of such a machine as could be shown to the public. For his assistance Fisher was to receive a half-interest in a patent for the sewing-machine if Howe could obtain one. This arrangement proved Howe’s salvation, and in December, 1844, he moved into his new friend’s house.
He worked all that winter, meeting the many practical difficulties that arose as he progressed with his machine, and devising solutions for overcoming each. He worked all day, and many a time long into the night. His machine progressed so well that by April, 1845, he found that it would sew a seam four yards long. The machine was entirely completed by the latter part of May, and its work proved satisfactory to both partners. Howe sewed the seams of two woolen suits with it, one for himself, and one for Fisher, and it was declared that the mechanical sewing was so well done that it promised to outlast the cloth. There was no longer any doubt that Howe had invented a machine that would lighten labor to a very great degree.
He took out his first patent on the sewing-machine toward the end of 1845. But when he tried to introduce his invention he met the same difficulties that had faced all men who tried to supplant hand labor by any mechanical process. The tailors of Boston to whom he showed it were willing to admit its efficiency, but told him that he could never secure its general use, as such a proceeding would ruin their business. Every one admired the sewing-machine and praised Howe’s ingenuity, but no one would buy one. The opposition to the completed machine seemed insuperable, and Fisher, believing it to be so, at length withdrew from his partnership with Howe. The latter and his family had to move back again to his father’s house.
To make a living Howe took a position as a locomotive engineer, leaving his invention unused at home. This work proved too hard, his health broke down, and he was compelled to give up the position. In his enforced idleness he began to devise new ways of selling his machine, and finally decided to send his brother Amasa to England, and see if he could not interest some one there in the invention. His brother was willing to do this, and arrived in London, with a sewing-machine, in October, 1846. He showed it to a man named William Thomas, who became interested in it, offered $1,250 for it, and also offered to employ Elias Howe in his business of umbrella and corset maker.
Howe decided that this position was preferable to his idleness in Cambridge, and accepted it. He sailed for England, and entered the factory of William Thomas. But, although Thomas had taken a very lively interest in Howe’s sewing-machine, he did not treat the inventor well. For eight months Howe worked for him, and meantime he had sent for his wife and three children, and they had arrived in London. But eight months was the limit of his endurance of his new master’s tyranny, and at the end of that time he gave up his position. Matters seemed tending worse and worse with him, and the situation of the Howe family in London, almost penniless, grew daily more and more precarious.
His family at home sent Howe a little money before his earnings were entirely spent, and he used this to buy passage for his wife and children back to the United States. He himself stayed in London, believing there were better chances for the sale of his machine there than in America. But his pursuit of fortune in England proved but the search for the rainbow’s pot of gold. There was no market for his wares, and after months of actual destitution he pawned the model of his sewing-machine and even his patent papers in order to secure funds to pay his passage home. Tragedy dogged his footsteps. He reached New York with only a few small coins in his pocket, and received word that his wife was lying desperately ill in Cambridge. His own strength was spent, and he had to wait several days before he had the money to pay his railroad fare to Boston. Soon after he reached home his wife died. Blow after blow had fallen on him until he was almost crushed.
Even his hard-won invention seemed now about to be snatched from him. Certain mechanics in New England, who had heard descriptions of his model, built machines on its lines, and sold them. The newspapers learned of these, and began to suggest their use in a number of industries. Howe looked about him, saw the sewing-machine growing in favor, heard it praised, and realized that it had been actually stolen from him. He bestirred himself, found patent attorneys who were willing to look into his patents, and when they pronounced them unassailable, found money enough to defend them. He began several suits to establish his claims in August, 1850, and at about the same time formed a partnership with a New Yorker named Bliss, who agreed to try to sell the machines if Howe would open a shop and build them in New York.
Howe’s claims to the invention of the sewing-machine were positively established by the courts in 1854. The machine was now well known, and its value as a moneymaker very apparent. But the workers in cheap clothing shops organized to prevent the introduction of the machines, claiming that they would destroy their livelihood. Labor leaders took up the slogan, and led the men and women workers in what were known as the Sewing-machine Riots. In the few shops where the machines were actually introduced they were injured or destroyed by the workmen. The pressure became so great that the larger establishments ceased their use, and only the small shops, that employed a few workers, were able to continue using the new machine. In spite of its recognized value it looked as if the sewing-machine could not prove a financial success, and when Howe’s partner Bliss died in 1855 the inventor was able to buy his share in the business from his heirs for a very small sum.
Opposition, even of the most strenuous order, has never been able to retard for long the use of an invention that simplifies industry. If a machine is made that will in an hour do the work that formerly required several days’ hand labor that machine is certain to displace that hand labor. The workers may protest, but industrial progress demands the more economic method. So it was with the sewing-machine. The riots died away, the labor leaders turned to other fields, and one by one the clothing factories installed the new machines. Howe had the patience to wait, and in one way and another obtained the sinews of war to sue the infringers of his patents. The waiting was worth while. He ultimately forced all other manufacturers of sewing-machines to pay him for their products. In six years his royalties increased from $300 a year to over $200,000 a year. His machine was shown at the Paris Exposition of 1867, and was awarded a gold medal, and Howe himself was given the ribbon of the French Legion of Honor.
The wheel of fortune has turned quickly for many inventors, but perhaps never more completely than it did for Elias Howe. The man who had pawned his goods in London, and had reached New York with less than a dollar in his pocket, had an income of $200,000 a year. He who had been rebuffed by the tailors of Boston was recognized as one of the great men of his generation, and one who, instead of taking the bread from the mouths of poor working men and women, had lightened their labor a thousandfold. The women, like his own wife, who had sewed by day and night, were saved their strength and vision, and the slavery of the clothing factories, notorious in those days, was inestimably lightened. But it had been a hard fight to make the world take what it sorely needed.
Howe’s struggle had been so hard that his health was badly broken when he did succeed. He had several years to enjoy his profits and honors. He died October 3, 1867, at his home in Brooklyn.
Many inventors have barely escaped with their lives from the fury of mobs who thought the inventor would take their living from them. Papin, and Hargreaves, and Arkwright all learned what such resistance meant. But as one invention has succeeded another people have grown wiser, and realized that each has conferred a benefit rather than taken away a right. Howe was one of the last to find the people he hoped to benefit aligned against him. The world has moved, since Galileo’s day, and the inventor is now known as the great benefactor. But Howe’s life was a fight, and his triumph that of one of the great martyrs of invention.
XIII
BELL AND THE TELEPHONE
1847-
None of the inventions that have resulted from the study of electricity have been stumbled upon in the dark. Scientists in both England and America had realized the possibility of the telegraph before Morse built his first working outfit in his rooms on Washington Square. Edison took out a patent covering wireless telegraphy before Marconi gave his name to the new means of communication. Often a man who has been following one trail through this new field has come upon another, glanced down it, and decided to go back and explore it more thoroughly another day. Meantime the trail is run down by a rival. The prize has gone to that persevering one who has made that trail his own, and learned its secret while other men were only glancing at it. Alexander Graham Bell was by no means the first man to realize that the sound of the human voice could be sent over a wire. He did not happen to stumble upon this fact. He worked it out bit by bit, from what other men had already learned concerning electricity, and his object was to make the telephone of real use to the world. It so happened that Elisha Gray and Bell each filed a claim upon the telephone at the Patent Office on the same day, February 14, 1876. But it was Bell who was able to place the first telephone at the public’s service.
He came of a family that had long been interested in the study of speech. His father, his grandfather, his uncle, and two brothers had all taught elocution in one form or another at the Universities of Edinburgh, Dublin, and London. His grandfather had worked out a successful system to correct stammering, his father, widely known as a splendid elocutionist, had invented a sign-language that he called “Visible Speech,” which was of help to those learning foreign tongues, and also a system to enable the deaf to read spoken words by the movements of the lips. Naturally enough the young inventor started with a very considerable knowledge of the laws of sound.
Bell was born in Edinburgh March 1, 1847, and educated there and in London. When he was sixteen family influence was able to get him the post of teacher of elocution in certain schools, and he spent his leisure hours studying the science of sound. Soon after he came of age he met two well-known Englishmen who were experts in his line of study, Sir Charles Wheatstone and Alexander J. Ellis. Ellis had translated Helmholtz’s celebrated book on “The Sensations of Tone,” and was able to show Bell in his own laboratory how the German scientist had succeeded in keeping tuning-forks in vibration by the power of electro-magnets, and had blended the tones of several tuning-forks so as to produce approximately the sound of the human voice. This idea was new to Bell, and led him to wonder whether it would not be possible to construct what might be called a musical telegraph, sending different notes over a wire by electro-magnetism, using a piano keyboard to give the different notes.
Sir Charles Wheatstone, the leading English authority on the telegraph, received young Bell with the greatest interest, and showed him a new talking-machine that had been constructed by Baron de Kempelin. Bell studied this closely, discussed it with Wheatstone, and decided that he would devote himself to the problems of reproducing sounds mechanically.
The course of his life was then suddenly altered. His two brothers died in Edinburgh of consumption, and he was told that he must seek a change of climate. Accordingly his father and mother sailed with him to the town of Brantford in Canada. There he at once became interested in teaching his father’s system of “Visible Speech” to a tribe of Mohawk Indians in the neighborhood.
He had already had very considerable success in teaching deaf-mutes to talk by visible speech, or sign-language, and this success was repeated in Canada. Word of it went to Boston, and as a result the Board of Education of that city wrote to him, offering to pay him five hundred dollars if he would teach his system in a school for deaf-mutes there. He was glad to accept, and in 1871 moved to Boston, which he planned to make his permanent residence.
Success crowned his teaching almost immediately. Boston University offered him a professorship, and he opened a “School of Vocal Physiology,” which paid him well. Most of his remarkable skill in teaching the deaf and dumb to understand spoken words and in a manner to speak themselves was due to his father’s system, which he had carefully followed, and had in some respects improved upon.
At this time a resident of Salem, Thomas Sanders, engaged the young teacher to train his small deaf-mute son, and asked him to make his home at Sanders’ house in Salem. As he could easily reach Boston from there Bell consented, and in the cellar of Mr. Sanders’ house he set up a workshop, where for three years he experimented with tuning-forks and electric batteries along the line of his early studies in London.
At nearly the same time Miss Mabel Hubbard came to him to be taught his system of speech. He became engaged to her, and some years later they were married.
His future wife’s father was a well-known Boston lawyer, Gardiner G. Hubbard. It is related that one evening as Bell sat at the piano in Mr. Hubbard’s home in Cambridge, he said, “Do you know that if I sing the note G close to the strings of the piano, the G-string will answer me?” “What of it?” asked Mr. Hubbard. “Why, it means that some day we ought to have a musical telegraph, that will send as many messages simultaneously over one wire as there are notes on the piano.”
Bell knew the field of his work in a general way, but he had not yet decided which path to choose of several that looked as if they might lead across it. His far-distant goal was to construct a machine that would carry, not the dots and dashes of the telegraph, but the complex vibrations of the human voice. This would be much more difficult to attain than a musical telegraph, and for some time he wavered between the two ideas. His work with his deaf and dumb pupils was all in the line of making sound vibrations visible to the eye. He knew that with what was called the phonautograph he could get tracings of such sound vibrations upon blackened paper by means of a pencil or marker attached to a vibrating cord or membrane, and furthermore that he could obtain tracings of certain vowel sound vibrations upon smoked glass. He studied the effect of vibrations upon the bones of the ear, and this led him to experiment with vibrating a thin piece of iron before an electro-magnet.
His study of the effect of vibrations on the human eardrum showed Bell what path he should follow. Sound waves striking the delicate ear-drum could send thrills through the heavier bones inside the ear. He thought that if he could construct two iron discs, which should be similar to the ear-drums, and connect them by an electrified wire, he might be able to make the disc at one end vibrate with sound waves, send those vibrations through the wire to the other disc, and have that give out the vibrations again in the form of sounds. That now became his working idea, and it was the principle on which the telephone was ultimately to be built.
But Bell had been giving so much time and attention to this absorbing project that his teaching had suffered. His “School of Vocal Physiology” had had to be abandoned, and he found that his only pupils were Miss Hubbard and small George Sanders. Both Mr. Sanders and Mr. Hubbard, who had been helping him with the cost of his experiments, refused to do so any longer unless he would devote himself to working out his musical telegraph, in which both had a great deal of faith as a successful business proposition.
While he was struggling with these distracting calls of duty and science he was obliged to go to Washington to see his patent attorney. There he determined to call upon Professor Joseph Henry, who was the greatest American authority on electrical science, and who had experimented with the telegraph in the early years of the century. Bell, aged twenty-eight, explained his new idea to Henry, then aged seventy-eight. The theory was new to Henry, but he saw at once that it had tremendous possibilities. He told Bell so. “But,” said Bell, “I have not the expert knowledge of electricity that is needed.” “You can get it,” answered Henry. “You must, for you are in possession of the germ of a great invention.”
Those few words, coming from such a man, were of the greatest possible encouragement to Bell. He returned home, determined to get the knowledge of electricity he needed, and to carry on his work with the telephone.
He rented a room at 109 Court Street, Boston, for a workshop, and took a bedroom in the neighborhood. He studied electricity night and day, and he gave equal time to the musical telegraph that his friends favored and to the invention that now claimed his real interest.
The man from whom Bell rented his workshop was Charles Williams, himself a manufacturer of electrical supplies. Bell had for his assistant Thomas A. Watson, who helped him construct the two armatures, or vibrating discs, at the end of an electrified wire that stretched from the workshop to an adjoining room. Watson was working with Bell on an afternoon in June, 1875. Bell was in the workshop, and Watson in the next room. Bell was stooping down over the instrument at his end of the wire. Suddenly he gave an exclamation. He had heard a faint twang come from the disc in front of him.
He dashed into the next room. “Snap that reed again, Watson,” he commanded. Back at his own end of the wire he waited. In a minute he caught the light twang again. It was only what he had been expecting to hear at any time during the months of his work, but nevertheless he was amazed when he did catch the sound. It proved that a sound could be carried over a wire, and accurately reproduced at the farther end. And that meant that the vibrations of the human voice could ultimately be sent in the same way.
Bell’s enthusiasm had already converted his assistant, Watson; it now won over Hubbard and Sanders. They began to believe that there might be something of real value in his strange scheme, and offered to help him finance it. He went on with his studies in electricity, and gradually began to learn how he could make it serve him best.
But it was a far cry from that first faint sound to the actual transmission of words. For a long time his receiving instruments would only give out vague rumbling noises. In November, 1875, his experiments showed him that the vibrations created in a reed by the human voice could be transmitted in such a way as to reproduce words and sounds. Then, in January, 1876, he showed a few of the pupils at Monroe’s School of Oratory in Boston an apparatus by which singing could be carried more or less satisfactorily from the cellar of the building to a room on the fourth floor. But on March 10, 1876, the new instrument actually talked. Watson, who was at the basement end of the wire, heard the disc say, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” He dashed up the three flights of stairs to the room in which Bell was. “I can _hear_ you!” he cried. “I can _hear the words_!”
“Had I known more about electricity, and less about sound,” Bell is reported to have said, “I would never have invented the telephone.” He had come upon his discovery by the right path, but it was a path that very few men could ever have picked out. Other inventors had tried to make a machine that would carry the voice, but they had all worked from the standpoint of the telegraph. Bell, inheriting unusual knowledge of the laws of speech and sound, came from the other direction. He started with the laws of sound transmission rather than with the laws of the telegraph. The result was that he had created something altogether new, basically different from all the other inventions that made use of electricity, for which there was as yet no common name even, and which he described in his application for a patent, as “an improvement in telegraphy.”
Only two months after the day on which the telephone had actually talked for the first time the Centennial Exposition opened in Philadelphia. Mr. Hubbard was one of the Commissioners, and he obtained permission to have Bell’s first telephone placed on a small table in the Department of Education. Bell himself was too poor to be able to go to Philadelphia, and intended to stay in Boston, and try to find new deaf-mute pupils. But when Miss Hubbard left for the Centennial, and begged him to go with her, he could not resist. He stayed on the train, without a ticket, without baggage, and reached Philadelphia with the Hubbards.
The new instrument had been at the Exposition for six weeks without attracting serious attention. But Mr. Hubbard arranged that the judges should examine it for a few minutes on the Sunday afternoon following Bell’s arrival. The afternoon, however, was very warm, and there were a great many exhibits for the judges to inspect. There was the first grain-binder, and the earliest crude electric light, and Elisha Gray’s musical telegraph, and exhibits of printing telegraphs. It was seven o’clock when the judges reached Bell’s table, and they were tired and hungry. One of the judges picked up the receiver, looked at it, and put it back on the table. The others laughed and joked as they started to go by. Then they stopped short. A man had come up to the table, with a crowd of attendants at his heels. He said to the young man at the table, “Professor Bell, I am delighted to see you again.” The new arrival was the Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil, who had once visited Bell’s school for deaf-mutes in Boston. The Emperor said he would like to test Bell’s new machine.
With the judges, a group of famous scientific men, and the Emperor’s suite for audience, Bell went to the transmitter at the other end of the wire, while Dom Pedro put the receiver to his ear. There was a moment’s pause, and then the Emperor threw back his head, exclaiming, “_My God--it talks!_”
The Emperor put down the receiver. Joseph Henry, who had encouraged Bell in Washington, picked it up. He too heard Bell’s own words coming from the disc. He too showed his amazement. “This comes nearer to overthrowing the doctrine of the conservation of energy,” said he, “than anything I ever saw.” After him came Sir William Thomson, later known as Lord Kelvin. He had been the engineer of the first Atlantic Cable. He listened intently. “Yes,” said he at last, “it does speak. It is the most wonderful thing I have seen in America!”