At Home - Bill Bryson [124]
Displayed at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in the summer of 1876, it attracted little attention. Most visitors were far more impressed by an electric pen invented by Thomas Edison. The pen worked by rapidly punching holes in a sheet of paper to form an outline of letters in a stencil fashion, permitting ink to be injected onto pages below, which allowed multiple copies of a document to be made quickly. Edison, ever misguided, was confident that the invention would be “bigger than telegraphy.” Of course it wasn’t, but someone else was taken with the idea of the rapidly punching pen and redeveloped it to inject ink under skin. The modern tattoo gun was born.
As for the telephone, Bell persevered and gradually built up a following. The first telephone installation began functioning in Boston in 1877. It allowed three-way communications between two banks (one of them the interestingly named Shoe and Leather Bank) and a private company. By July of that year Bell had two hundred phones in operation in the city, and by August the number had leaped to thirteen hundred, though mostly these were two-way connections within offices—more like intercoms than telephones. The real breakthrough was the invention of the switchboard the following year. This allowed any phone user to talk to any other phone user in his district—and soon there were lots of those. By the early 1880s, America had sixty thousand telephones in operation. In the next twenty years that figure would increase to over six million.
Phones were originally seen as providing services—weather reports, stock market news, fire alarms, musical entertainment, even lullabies to soothe restless babies. Nobody saw them as being used primarily for gossip, social intercourse, or keeping in touch with friends and family. The idea that you would chat by phone to someone you saw regularly anyway would have struck most people as absurd.
Because it was based on so many existing technologies, and because it proved so swiftly lucrative, a stream of people and companies challenged Bell’s patents or simply ignored them. Luckily for Bell, his father-in-law, Gardiner Hubbard, was a brilliant and tireless lawyer. He launched or defended six hundred legal actions and won every one. The biggest was against the great and monolithic Western Union, which teamed up with Edison and Elisha Gray to try to get control of the phone business by whatever means it could. Western Union was by now a central component of the Vanderbilt empire, and the Vanderbilts just hated not to come first. They had every advantage—financial resources, an existing network of wires, technicians and engineers of the highest caliber—whereas Bell had only two things: a patent and Gardiner Hubbard. Hubbard sued for patent infringement and won the case in less than a year.
By the early twentieth century Bell’s telephone company, renamed American Telephone & Telegraph, was the largest corporation in America, with stock worth $1,000 a share. (When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and employed a million people.) Bell moved to Washington, D.C., became a U.S. citizen, and devoted himself to worthwhile pursuits. Among other things, he invented the iron lung and experimented with telepathy. When President James A. Garfield was shot by a disgruntled lunatic in 1881, Bell was called in to see if he could help locate the bullet. He invented a metal detector, which worked beautifully in the laboratory but gave