“These deluded and romantic men gave me a glimpse of the skilled proletariat of the United States. They sang obsolete sentimental songs with genuine emotion; and their language was frightful even to an Irishman. They worked with a ferocious energy which was out of all proportion to the actual result achieved…They were free-souled creatures, excellent company: sensitive, cheerful, and profane; liars, braggarts, and hustlers…” What sort of men was playwright George Bernard Shaw referring to? Telephone engineers. During a brief stint at Thomas Edison’s London HQ in 1879, Shaw saw Edison’s entrepreneurial talents in operation. With a piece of chalk and some singing engineers, Edison carved himself a slice of the new telephone industry.
THOMAS EDISON’s “English telephone” was never really going to last. Admittedly, it had one obvious advantage over the rival telephone invented by Alexander Graham Bell: you could hear what the person on the other end of the line was saying. Unlike the indistinct mumblings emanating from the earpiece of Bell’s device, the voice emerging from Edison’s telephone was clear and loud. “It was a telephone of such stentorian efficiency,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, aspiring author and one-time employee of Edison’s short-lived London operation, “that it bellowed your most private communications all over the house instead of whispering them with some sort of discretion”.
Privacy aside, the advantage of loudness was offset by two big drawbacks. To hear your caller’s voice, you had to keep turning a handle attached to the receiver. Hesitate and you’d cut off the flow of conversation. Added to that, you had to learn to like telephone engineers – you were going to see a lot of them.
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Both these inconveniences sprang from the same source: at the heart of Edison’s telephone receiver was a thimble-sized piece of chalk that had to be kept turning (hence the handle) and kept damp with a solution of potassium iodide (requiring frequent visits from the engineer). Technically, Edison’s chalk receiver, created specifically for sale in the UK, was an unnecessary invention. A much less troublesome receiver existed already. Unfortunately for Edison, the Bell Telephone Company owned the patent on it. If Edison was to do business in England, he had to come up with something completely different. The chalk receiver was inconvenient and impractical, but it bore absolutely no resemblance to Bell’s. “It was clever and it worked,” says John Liffen, curator of communications at the Science Museum, London. “But you wouldn’t do it that way unless you had to.”
In 1878, when Edison decided to launch his telephone in London, the push to commercialise the technology was already under way in the US. Bell had been first to patent a working telephone in 1876 but his apparatus was poor, mainly because he used the same technology to transmit and receive sound. His set-up consisted of a diaphragm connected to a magnet with an electrical coil around it. When a voice caused the diaphragm to vibrate, the magnet moved and induced an electrical current in the wiring. At the other end, the process was repeated in reverse, recreating the sound of the voice. However, the induced current was so weak that the system had a range of just a few kilometres and even then the sound quality was terrible. Seeing an opportunity to muscle in on any future market, the Western Union Telegraph Company asked Edison to invent something better.
Bell’s problem was in transmitting sound; his device was fine as a receiver. So Edison concentrated on finding a better means of transmission. By the summer of 1877, he had cracked it. His transmitter relied on a peculiar property of carbon: its electrical conductivity changes in response to pressure. In his transmitter, the diaphragm was in contact with a button of carbon linked to an external battery. As the diaphragm vibrated it changed the pressure on the carbon and so altered the conductivity, which in turn generated small fluctuations in electrical current. The more powerful current in this system meant it could transmit sound over more than 100 kilometres and still be heard clearly.
“Songs sung and tunes whistled came belting out of the earpiece”
Impatient to establish a lead, the companies pushed ahead with the technology they had. To provide customers with a system that worked, both companies resorted to piracy, the Bell company pirating Western Union’s Edison transmitter and Western Union pirating Bell’s receiver. What followed was probably the most famous patent dispute of all time. Bell had the strongest hand, with a patent on the concept of the telephone as well as his device. As the rivals worked towards a deal, a second front in the battle for telephone supremacy was opening up in England.
In 1878, Edison launched his own telephone company in the UK to compete with Bell’s English enterprise, which was just beginning to sign up subscribers. Here Bell had no overarching patent on telephony as he had in the US, giving Edison a chance of grabbing a share of the market. At Edison’s instigation, his old acquaintance George Gouraud acquired a London office and set up the Edison Telephone Company. Edison shipped the necessary equipment and several telephones to London and in November Gouraud demonstrated it to a select group by making a call from London to Norwich, a distance of 180 kilometres.
Then disaster struck. Bell’s company discovered that Edison was planning to sell a system with a Bell-type receiver. The company’s lawyers threatened to sue for patent infringement, a move likely to put Edison out of business. Gouraud cabled with the bad news. The next day, Edison cabled back: if Gouraud could give him 60 to 90 days, he said, he would invent another receiver.
By February, Edison had done it. A few years earlier, he had discovered that changes in electrical current caused changes in friction between an electrode and a moist chalk surface. He now exploited this to turn electrical signals into sound. The receiver contained a chalk cylinder in contact with a sprung metal stylus connected to a diaphragm. The cylinder was turned by hand and the current from the receiver altered the friction, transmitting the vibrations along the stylus to the diaphragm. These vibrations were so forceful that the stylus practically thumped the diaphragm, projecting the caller’s voice right across the room. “It was a bizarre thing. But it was good enough to sell,” says Liffen.
In March, the great inventor sent his nephew Charles to London with six chalk receivers he had “thrown together” in five days. He wanted to unveil his new device before May, when John Tyndall of the Royal Institution was to preside over a lecture on the latest developments in telephone technology. As soon as Charles arrived, Gouraud laid on a demonstration, setting up the equipment at offices almost a kilometre apart.
“This telephone is a remarkable instrument, delivering sounds loudly and clearly through any length of wire,” reported The Times. “Conversations were maintained between the two extreme points, songs were sung and tunes were whistled, and in all cases everything was most distinctly heard some 15 feet from the instrument and could have been heard at a greater distance had the size of the room permitted it.”
The reporter from Engineering was equally impressed. “No one who heard Mr. Edison’s new telephone can fail to have been astonished at its clear, articulate and loud tones; it might appropriately be called ‘The Shouting Telephone’, for its voice is louder than that of an ordinary speaker.”
When the great and the good assembled at the Society of Arts in May to hear the latest on telephony, they heard about the astonishing new “loud-speaking telephone” and were able to judge for themselves as “songs sung from a distant room in the building, tunes played on the cornet, and also whistled” came belting out of the earpiece of one of Edison’s hastily assembled phones.
Edison was back in business. He had more receivers made and shipped them on the first available steamer to London – along with 20 equally hastily trained engineers to ensure the phones kept working. Little did they know that Shaw, who had taken a job at Edison’s offices, would make the hero of his next novel, The Irrational Knot, a telephone engineer.
By September Edison was signing up subscribers, much to Bell’s dismay. In the US Bell and Western Union were finalising a deal. In November Bell bought Western Union’s patent on the Edison transmitter and agreed to pay substantial royalties. But what to do about Edison in England? He could no longer be threatened; Bell would have to negotiate. In May 1880, Bell bought out Edison and the two companies merged to become the United Telephone Company. The chalk receiver was dropped in favour of the more reliable Bell design. Edison’s odd receiver hadn’t lasted long, but it had served its purpose. “It kept Edison in contention long enough to cause considerable concern to the Bell people,” says Liffen. “And that brought them to the negotiating table.”
