Made In America - Bill Bryson [61]
Throughout his career Morse was the lucky beneficiary of men more generous and gifted than he. In Paris he persuaded Louis Daguerre to show him how his newly invented photographic process worked. He then took it home with him to America and handsomely supplemented his fortune by making pictures and selling them (becoming in the process the first to photograph a living person). On the same trip, he actually stole a magnet crucial to long-distance telegraphy invented by Louis Breguet, and took it home with him to study at leisure.
It is almost impossible to conceive at this remove how the telegraph astonished and captivated the world. That news from remote places could be conveyed instantaneously to locations hundreds of miles away was as miraculous to Americans as it would be today if someone announced a way to teleport humans between continents. It was too miraculous for words. Within just four years of Morse’s first public demonstration, America had five thousand miles of telegraph wire and Morse was widely regarded as the greatest man of his age.25
Morse was knocked from the pantheon by an invention more useful and lasting, and far more ingenious, than the telegraph. I refer to the telephone, invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 (and not strictly an American invention since Bell, a native of Edinburgh, Scotland, didn’t become a US citizen until six years later). Bell did not coin the term telephone. The word had been around since the 1830s, and had been applied to a number of devices designed to produce noise, from a kind of musical instrument to a particularly loud foghorn. Bell described his appliance on the patent application as a new kind of ‘telegraphy’ and soon afterwards began referring to it as an ‘electrical speaking telephone’. Others commonly referred to it in its early days as a ‘speaking telegraph’.
Bell had become interested in the possibility of long-distance speech through his work with the deaf (a misfortune that extended to both his wife and mother). He was just twenty-eight and his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, just twenty-one, when they made their breakthrough on 10 March 1876. Despite their long and close association, there was a formality in their relationship that was somehow touching. It is notable that Bell’s first telephonic communication was not Tom, come here, I want you,’ but ‘Mr Watson, come here, I want you.’
Flushed with excitement, Bell and Watson demonstrated their new device to Western Union, but the company’s executives – why does this seem so inevitable? – failed to see its potential. ‘Mr Bell,’ they wrote to him, ‘after careful consideration of your invention, while it is a very interesting novelty, we have come to the conclusion that it has no commercial possibilities,’ adding that they saw no future for ‘an electrical toy’.26 Fortunately for Bell, others were not so short-sighted. Within just four years of its invention, America had 60,000 telephones. In the next twenty years that figure would increase to over six million, and Bell’s telephone company, renamed American Telephone and Telegraph, would become the largest corporation in America, with stock worth $1,000 a share. The Bell patent (No. 174,465) became the single most valuable patent in history.27 The speed with which the telephone insinuated itself into American life is indicated by the fact that by the early 1880s when a person said ‘I