Made In America - Bill Bryson [62]
Bell sold his interests in the telephone in 1881 and devoted himself to other scientific pursuits. He invented ailerons for airplanes, and made significant contributions to the phonograph, the iron lung, the photoelectric cell and water desalination.28 When President Garfield lay dying from bullet wounds, Bell was the natural candidate to try to save him.
The telephone not only brought instant communication to millions, but enriched American English in a way the telegraph never had. Scores of new words entered the language or were given new meaning. Operator was current by the late 1870s, as was ‘Hello, central’, the phrase universally used before the introduction of dial phones. ‘Number, please?’ dates from 1895, as does telephone booth. Yellow pages and information first appeared in 1906, telephone directory in 1907 (the first, listing fifty subscribers, appeared in New Haven, Connecticut), and telephone book in 1915.29 That year also saw the introduction of coast-to-coast service. It took almost half an hour to make all the connections and the minimum charge was $20.70.
At first people were not sure what to say in response to a ringing phone. Edison thought callers should answer with a jaunty ‘Ahoy!’ and that was the word habitually used by the first telephone operator, one George Coy of New Haven. (Only male operators were employed at first. As so often happens with new technologies, women weren’t allowed anywhere near it until the novelty had worn off.) Others said, ‘Yes!’ or ‘What?’ and many merely picked up the receiver and listened hopefully. The problem was such that magazines ran long articles explaining the etiquette of phone use.
Today, America is the most phone-dependent nation on earth. Ninety-three per cent of American homes have a phone and almost 70 per cent have two phones, a level of penetration no other nation but Canada comes anywhere near equalling, and each household makes or receives on average 3,516 calls per year,30 a figure astonishing to almost all other people in the world.
Such was the outpouring of inventions in the late nineteenth century that in 1899 Charles Duell resigned as head of the US Patent Office declaring that ‘everything that can be invented has been invented’.31 As patent applications proliferated and grew ever more arcane, the definition of what constitutes a patentable invention had to be revised. In the early years a product or device had not only to be new but also demonstrably useful. From 1880 to 1952 the law was refined to require that an invention constitute a genuine breakthrough rather than a mere modification. By 1952 that definition was held to be too ambiguous and a new standard was adopted. Since then, an invention must merely be ‘nonobvious’.32
From the linguistic point of view, it is interesting to note how seldom inventions were patented under the names by which we now know them. Bell, as we have seen, described his most famous invention as ‘telegraphy’. Hiram Maxim didn’t use the word machine-gun – and quite rightly since all guns were machines – but the more precise ‘automatic gun’. Edison called his light-bulb an ‘electric lamp’. Joseph Glidden showed a small stroke of genius in inventing barbed wire, a material that transformed the West, but rather less in naming it; he described it on the patent application as ‘wire-fences’. The cash register began life as the ‘Incorruptible Cashier’ – so called because every dip into the till was announced with a noisy bell, thus making it harder for cashiers to engage in illicit delvings among the takings. (For much the same reason, early owners discovered that if they charged odd amounts like forty-nine cents or ninety-nine cents the cashier would very probably have to open the drawer to extract a penny change, thus obviating the possibility of the dreaded unrecorded transaction. It was only later that it dawned on merchants that a sum like $1.99 had the odd subliminal quality of seeming markedly cheaper than $2.) The escalator