At Home - Bill Bryson [125]
Bell treated his friend and colleague Watson generously. Though he had no legal obligations to do so, he awarded Watson 10 percent of the company, allowing Watson to retire rich at the age of just twenty-seven. Able to do anything he wanted, Watson devoted the rest of his life to just that. He traveled the world, read widely, and took a degree in geology at MIT for the simple satisfaction of improving his brain. He then started a shipyard, which quickly grew to employ four thousand men, producing a scale of stress and obligation way beyond anything he wished for, so he sold the business, converted to Islam, and became a follower of Edward Bellamy, a radical philosopher and quasi communist who for a short period in the 1880s enjoyed phenomenal esteem and popularity. Tiring of Bellamy, Watson moved to England in early middle age and took up acting, for which he showed an unexpected talent. He proved particularly adept at Shakespearean roles and performed many times at Stratford-upon-Avon before returning to America and a life of quiet retirement. He died, contented and rich, at his winter home on Pass-Grille Key, Florida, just shy of his eighty-first birthday in 1934.
Two other names deserve passing mentions with respect to the telephone. The first is Henry Dreyfuss. A young theatrical designer whose previous experience had been with designing stage sets and the interiors of movie theaters, Dreyfuss was commissioned by the new AT&T in the early 1920s to design a new type of phone to replace the upright “candlestick” design. Dreyfuss came up with a startlingly squat, slightly boxy, sleekly modern design in which the handset rested laterally in a cradle slightly above and behind a large dial. This of course became the standard model throughout most of the world for much of the twentieth century. It was one of those things—rather like the Eiffel Tower—that did its job so well and seemed so inevitable that it takes some effort to remember that someone had to imagine it, but in fact nearly everything about it—the amount of resistance built into the dial, the low center of gravity that made it next to impossible to knock over, the brilliant notion of having the hearing and speaking functions contained in a single handset—was the result of conscious and inspired thinking by a man who would normally never have been allowed anywhere near industrial design. Why AT&T engineers chose the youthful Dreyfuss for the project is forgotten, but they could not have made a better choice.
Dreyfuss didn’t design the dial itself. That had already been designed in-house, in 1917, by a Bell employee, William G. Blauvelt. It was Blauvelt who decided to put three letters with most, but not all, of the numbers. He assigned no letters to the first hole because in those early days the telephone dial needed to be rotated slightly beyond the first hole to generate a signal initiating a call. So the sequence ran 2 (ABC), 3 (DEF), 4 (GHI), and so on. Blauvelt left out Q from the outset, because it would always have to be followed by a U, limiting its utility, and eventually dropped Z as well because it didn’t feature enough in English to be useful. Every exchange was given a name, usually derived from the street or district in which it stood—Bensonhurst, Hollywood, Pennsylvania Avenue, for instance, though some exchanges used the names of trees or other objects—and the caller would ask the operator to be connected to “Pennsylvania 6–5000” (as in the Glenn Miller tune) or “Bensonhurst 5342.” When direct dialing was introduced in 1921, the names were reduced to two-letter prefixes and the convention became to capitalize those letters, as in HOllywood and BEnsonhurst. The system had a certain charm, but became