The Radio Telephone
The Impact of the Telephone on Turn-of-the-Century Communicationby Megan Gallagher
My God. It talks! exclaimed a visiting Spanish nobleman after witnessing Alexander Graham Bell's public demonstration of the telephone at the 1896 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. The Spaniard's reaction was far from unique. Bell's odd-looking gadget inspired awe and admiration wherever the inventor demonstrated it. Yet, the true use of the telephone was not immediately apparent to the audiences that gathered to watch the clumsy brown box speak.
Early Bell Telephone Transmitter
Bell did not initially claim that two people could use his invention to conduct a conversation. Instead, the inventor predicted that the telephone could be used to bring music, drama and news to subscribers, much as the radio does today ( Aronson, 20 ). Bell was merely grasping at straws with his radio concept of telephony.
Saddled with a telephone that could transmit sound in only one direction and struggling with mounting debts, Bell needed to sell his invention as soon as possible. A shrewd businessman, the inventor also understood that weaning people away from their dependence on the telegraph could take a long time. Thus, at first, he didn t market his machine as a replacement for the telegraph but as an entirely new technology with an entirely new purpose, entertainment.
Bell's novel advertising approach influenced society far more than the inventor could ever have envisioned. Even several decades after person-to- person communication became technically possible, many still did not capitalize on Bell's breakthrough. The telephone not only played a vital role in interactive communication, but it laid the foundation for the radio as well.
Installed in nearly every home in America, the telephone today plays a vital role in our daily lives. Yet, at the turn-of-the-century, few saw the phone's potential. Western Union executives actually laughed when Gardener Hubbard, Bell's partner, offered to sell his share of the telephone patent in 1877 for $10,000 ( Cooper, 20 ). With 214,000 miles of telegraph wire criss-crossing the United States by 1876 ( Aronson, 18 ), the telephone appeared to be a flash in the pan, unable to threaten the deeply entrenched telegraph.
Given the hold of telegraphy over communications in the America of 1876, it is not surprising that many could not see any immediate use for Bell's invention. The inventor and his backers thus faced the formidable task of inventing uses for the telephone and impressing them on others ( Aronson, 19 ). Indeed, the early models of the telephone could hardly compete with the telegram in accuracy or efficiency.
Early Bell Telephone Receiver
Two-way communication could only be conducted on short-circuits and reception was very poor. By concentrating on one transmitter and one receiver, Bell achieved good sound-quality. Yet, the result was one-way communication ( Aronson, 19 ). Impoverished by his years as an unpaid inventor and hassled by impatient investors, Bell was desperate for quick cash.
He eventually turned to the lecture circuit, advertising his new invention, not as a means to communicate over vast distances, but as a source of entertainment and information. In his radio-like performances, Bell transmitted organ music over the phone, recited Hamlet s soliloquy and even hired various entertainers, such as opera singer Signor Brignoli, to perform for an audience miles away ( Aronson, 21 ). Once relegated to the back pages of Scientific American, the telephone soon became a source of enjoyment and entertainment for all.
Bell's lecture tours were wildly successful in popularizing his invention. For those living during the turn-of-the-century, the inventor s talking box was a modern miracle, a marvelous electrical toy. The rich and famous scrambled to install telephones in their homes and impress friends and acquaintances with the latest technological breakthrough.
British prime minister Lord Salisbury equipped every room of his house with a telephone and delighted in startling his visitors with the new technology:
Guests were diverted...sitting in their rooms as they thought alone, to hear their host's spectral voice reciting nursery rhymes from a mysterious instrument on a neighboring table ( Briggs, 41 ).
Even the middle and lower classes gradually got access to the incredible machine. Demonstrating the telephone became a performance art open to large numbers of listeners:
Before long, brisk young men in hard bowler hats, with handle-bar moustaches and broad check suits were promoting telephone concerts during which ladies recited or sang...( Briggs, 42 ).
In 1878, a Quebec jeweler piped an early version of "Musak" into his store by hiring singers and transmitting their voices to his shop via the telephone ( Briggs, 42 ). In 1881, anyone with enough pocket change could pause on the boulevards of Paris, pay five pence and listen on a "theatrephone" to an ongoing theatrical performance for five minutes ( Briggs, 43 ). Clearly, the American public was more interested in using the telephone for entertainment than communication.
Yet, even after Bell introduced the two-way telephone and abandoned his idea of radio telephony, subscribers clung tenaciously to it. As late as 1890, Vice President E.J. Hall of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company described a plan to provide music for all telephone subscribers: Thus a family, club, or hotel may be regaled with the choicest airs from their favorite operas...an the effect will be as real and enjoyable as though the performers were actually present in the apartment ( Briggs, 44 ).
Telephone operators were often the first to learn about recent events and transmit news about crises like floods, fires, missing persons reports, man-wanted bulletins, and accounts of recent crimes ( Martin, 145 ). Soon, customers began to expect such news reports when calling the central telephone switch. Operators at the Philadelphia Bell Telephone Co. began giving callers round-the-clock news summaries with information provided by the local newspaper, the North American ( Aronson, 33 ).
In Budapest, Hungary, an enterprising telephone company went even further, introducing a telephone newspaper in 1898 which provided subscribers with current events, music and theatrical skits ( Aronson, 33 ). For many, such services were far more valuable than the conversations one could conduct by phone. As telephone usage spread throughout the countryside by 1894 through farmers cooperative lines, the operator became the isolated farmer s only access to the outside world.
In the early years of its existance, the telephone was much more than a way to communicate with others. Bell s invention became a combined newspaper, concert hall and theater for the thousands who used it daily.
In 1922, Frank Gill, Engineer-in-Chief of the National Telephone Company, made a particularly prophetic remark about radio telephony. Telephony, Gill claimed, has something of the properties both of the letter and the newspaper: it can be clothed with privacy and given to one individual only, or it can be broadcast to millions simultaneously ( Briggs, 48 ).
Gill had a point. Pick up the phone today and you can have only one aim in mind--a conversation. Yet, for those living at the turn-of-the-century, the telephone served a duel-purpose. Thousands depended on the telephone, not only for an occasional chat with a friend, but to hear news, weather, theater and music. Bell's remarkable device revolutionized the ways in which people accessed information and laid the ground-work for our radio-friendly society.
Works Cited
Briggs, Asa. The Pleasure Telephone. The Social Impact of the Telephone. ed. Ithiel de Sola Pool. Cambridge, Massachusetts: the MIT Press, 1977. (41-48).
Cooper, Dennis R. The People Machine. Tampa, Florida: The General Telephone Company of Florida, 1971.
Martin, Michele. Hello, Central? : Gender, Technology, and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen s University Press, 1944.
Source: http://sparc20-1.unixlab.virginia.edu/~ams4k/enwr201/connect/megan.html
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