| A Word Edgewise
by Mary Joe Clendenin |
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ALEXANDER G. BELL'S DREAM COMES TRUE
At almost any stoplight, even in small Texas towns, you can look around and find someone talking on a telephone. Walking down the street, in the waiting room at the doctor's office, fishing, eating in fancy restaurants, trying on shoes in a shoe store, telephones get the first line of attention.
Those little pocket size folding telephones are a far piece from the old hanging-on-the-wall type that required batteries and a crank to put them in operation. When Maxwell Smart, the bundling comedian of early television, used a telephone in his shoe heel, I thought, "Now, that is going too far." But the future has proven again that I have very little foresight.
Walt Disney and Superman character telephones have been in children's rooms for several years now. Phones that look like bouquets, like animals of various kinds, transparent ones where you can see the insides, marble ones. You name it, someone will sell it.
Cordless and crankless, telephones have expanded and multiplied like grassburs. As with everything else, misuse becomes a problem: all the way from prank calls in the middle of the night, obscene calls, and on the cordless, the person who tapes others calls and resorts to blackmail.
At least three men were working on the invention of the telephone at the same time: Antonio Meucci, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray. Both Gray and Bell were working on a telegraph system over which more than one message at a time could be sent over a single wire. After all, wires were being strung like spider webs all over the country, especially along rail-way tracks to accommodate the telegraph messages sent in dots and dashes. Gray, declaring that instruments to convey the human voice were mere playthings, said he would concentrate on the more practical telegraph. Meucci had trouble getting his patents processed, so that cleared the way for Bell.
Alexander Graham Bell's effort, though very primitive, won the grand prize for inventions at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. He first was working with the deaf, teaching elocution and inventing ways to help them, but his inventive mind kept telling him he could build a telephone. He created several other machines, including the audiometer to detect hearing loss. Because of his work, degrees of loudness in sound are measured in bels or decibels. Another of his many inventions, his hydrofoil, in 1919, set a marine speed record of 70.86 miles per hour.
Mark Twain was about as far-sighted as the rest of us. He refused to invest $500 dollars in his friend Bell's invention. That would have earned him $190,000 in just a few years.
The first cross country call, using 6,780 miles of copper wire, from New York to San Francisco, required 130,000 telephone poles and carried two circuits, just for one voice exchange. Wonder if Bell imagined fiberglass with the ability to carry thousands of messages, even messages bounced off satellites. For that first cross-country call Alexander Bell called his friend Thomas A. Watson from New York. "Ahoy! Ahoy! Mr. Watson! Are you there? Do you hear me?"
""Yes, Dr. Bell," came the reply. "I hear you perfectly."
It was April 25, 1935 that the first message--by AT&T--was transmitted around the world. Part of the time it went underground, part shortwave from California to Java, part of the time by underwater cable and back to the building from whence it started in New York, to a room across the hall. All the way in a quarter of a second!
All sorts of harmless tricks have been and are played by telephone--some not so harmless. One I recall was when a friend called me at Cloudcroft from Whitesands, New Mexcio. (I think my husband put him up to it). The conversation went like this.
"Hello, hello, can you hear me?" Caller.
"Yes, I hear you. Seems to be a little static, though." I said.
"Same here. Hold the phone away from your ear a little piece while I blow out the line."
I looked at the phone and held it a little away--heard the blowing. Then, "Now, is that better?" Always gullible, poor innocent me.
Whatever form they take--even if we wear them for wristwatches in the next decade, or wear Maxwell Smart shoes, telephones are here to stay. I'm not for those that give a view of the sender and receiver--but then, I don't have a phone in the bathroom--unless one is masquerading as a bar of soap. Guess I could be on guard other times.