On a Phone Call

We’ve spoken before about how some historians argue that the modern world largely began in the period between 1820 and 1850. The use of steam engines to power factories, the creation of the railroad, and the invention of the telegraph occurred during those thirty years. It can be argued that almost all modern conveniences are merely modifications or improvements over these technologies. For example, the telephone is simply a better and more convenient telegraph, cars are trains for individuals that don’t run on tracks, and so on. Few inventions had an impact on society as the telephone, however.

We are all familiar with the story of how Scottish inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, and his assistant, Thomas Watson, were working on their telephone device one day when the first phone message was transmitted. The story goes that one day in 1875, Bell had spilled something toxic and needed Watson’s help, so he said something like, “Mr. Watson, come here–I need you,” and Watson heard the message through the machine as he was in the next room. Soon, the nation’s cities were crisscrossed with telephone wires tying people together instantly.

But there was no transcontinental phone system in place. The railroad had connected east to west in 1869. Paved highways from one ocean to the other were finished by 1913. It would be another two years later when phone wires were finally hung across the United States so that a phone call could be placed in New York and received in San Francisco. And to mark that historic milestone, a celebration and many commemorative events were planned. Now, phone lines had been connected from New York City to Chicago by 1892; that network had been expanded to Denver by 1911. And the final section across the Rocky Mountains to California was finished by late 1914. The president of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) at the time, Theodore Vail, had tested the system that year, and it worked, but that first call was kept secret so that the event could be properly celebrated and marked. That’s why the first “official” call was scheduled for January of 1915.

Several dignitaries were to be involved in the call. Vail would be listening in from his winter home in Georgia. The mayors of both New York and San Francisco were also listening in on the line. And President Woodrow Wilson himself later spoke live from the White House to an audience assembled in San Francisco. In his remarks, Wilson noted that it boggled the imagination that a voice from thousands of miles away could be heard almost instantly by the people there. He mentioned the thousands of workers over the years since the invention of the device, the mostly anonymous men and women who manned the operator stations, erected the telephone poles, buried or strung the wires, and did the maintenance on the lines that made all of that possible. That part rubbed Vail the wrong way a little, because he wanted the celebration to recognize the power of AT&T and not the “little people” who were involved.

But the first call that day in January was placed from New York. Telephones had come a long way since Bell had first spoken to Watson 40 years earlier. To honor that event, the first official intercontinental telephone call repeated the words that Bell had said, too: “Mr. Watson, come here. I need you.” And, to make the call even more memorable, those words were spoken by the inventor himself, Alexander Graham Bell, on that January day in 1915.

And, on the other end of the line in San Francisco, when he clearly heard the same message that Bell had said to him 40 years earlier, Thomas Watson smiled.

On Waiting Impatiently

We’ve spoken before about how much Alexander Graham Bell, the Scottish inventor of the telephone, really didn’t care much for his own invention. He felt that the device would stifle personal relationships. He’s not alone. Even (especially?) in the modern age, people don’t like talking on the phone as much as doing a whole bunch of other stuff on the devices. Today, it seems that using the cell phone to talk to someone else is about the last thing we wish to do. Even when there were such things as “home phones,” there was still a group of people who disliked the device and saw it as a personal intrusion. Others felt that, rather than feeling connected by the phone, some even felt, like Bell, that it was rapidly replacing face-to-face meetings between people. And that feeling of separation was found by some to be increased when people were calling businesses–businesses who often depend on face-to-face interactions to establish trust with a customer.

Take the case of Alfred Levy. In 1962, Levy was not only a business and factory owner, but he was also somewhat of an inventor, a tinkerer, and he brought that mentality to the issue of making business phone conversations more personal and more, well, connected. He found that potential customers who called his factory would often become impatient when they were being assisted. He realized that the impatience of his phone customers didn’t exist so much when customers were standing in front of him. Part of the issue was that, since the business was often quite busy and calls came into a switchboard, clients were frustrated when the office operator would put them on hold to transfer their calls to the appropriate department.

Levy thought about how to resolve this issue. What could he do to make sure the customers on the other end of the phone line would be handled within a proper and appropriate time-frame by first the operator and then by the particular office that their calls were being transferred to? The answer to Levy’s situation came to him quite by accident, and it had to do with the construction of his factory, of all things. And this lucky accident helped to alleviate Levy’s issue of his customers being frustrated while waiting to be served.

You see, the frame for Levy’s factory was steel. If you saw it, you’d think it looked like one of those steel frame warehouse structures that have aluminum siding on a concrete slab. And the building had been constructed right next door to an AM radio station. Turns out that, in 1962, a loose wire in the factory’s phone system had been accidentally allowed to touch one of the building’s steel frame girders. And that steel frame of Levy’s factory acted as a giant antenna for the AM station. When people called Levy’s business, and the company operator would put them on hold to transfer the call, it seems that the caller was able to clearly hear the music that the AM station was playing at the moment.

Thus, out of sheer luck and chance (and poor wiring), Alfred Levy is credited with inventing on hold music, an invention which he patented in 1966.

On Disliking New Tech

Ah, the omnipresent telephone! Since its invention in 1876, fewer inventions have become so widely used by more people on the planet. Some people have said that there are 3 telephones for every person on earth these days. The convenience and power of these little devices would astound someone from even 40 years ago. In the late 1800s, as the new telephone technology was starting to become more and more widespread, even popular music helped the spread of the device:

Hello, my baby. Hello, my honey. Hello, my Ragtime Gal. Send me a kiss by wire. Baby, my heart’s on fire! If you refuse me, honey you’ll lose me. Soon, you’ll be all alone. Oh, baby! Telephone, and tell me I’m your own.

And that was 1899.

Businesses first, of course, capitalized on the instant communicative abilities brought about by the phone. Soon, telephone wires crisscrossed most major cities as phones began to quickly replace messengers and errand boys. Some old-fashioned business tycoons, however, refused to embrace the new technology.

One such business tycoon in the late 1800s dug in his heels and refused to jump on the telephone bandwagon. Writing to one of her husband’s business associates after his death, this man’s wife commented on her husband’s reluctance to have a phone in his study, saying, “Of course, he never had one in his study. That was where he went when he wanted to be alone with his thoughts and his work.”

For this important businessman, the telephone, of course, meant intrusion from the outside world. He felt strongly that the phone kept him from having conversations with people he was with. For this and other reasons, the phone irritated the important man. He preferred to have others send and receive phone messages if they were crucial to his work. In fact, he came to almost hate the device.

Yet, the man was not so much of a curmudgeon that he did not have a phone in the house for use by others. He was astute enough to realize that, for someone of his importance and for the sake of his business, the phone kept him in close touch with other businessmen and companies, with doctors and neighbors, and with the telegraph office. It was simply that he, himself, did not care for the invention that was sweeping the globe.

Which is ironic, perhaps.

Because, as his wife pointed out, Alexander Graham Bell did like to say, “Why did I ever invent the Telephone?”