The History of the Telephone [55]
now nearly twenty thousand groups of farmers, each one with a mutual telephone system, and one-half of them with sufficient enterprise to link their little webs of wires to the vast Bell system, so that at least a million farmers have been brought as close to the great cities as they are to their own barns.
What telephones have done to bring in the present era of big crops, is an interesting story in itself. To compress it into a sentence, we might say that the telephone has completed the labor-saving movement which started with the McCormick reaper in 1831. It has lifted the farmer above the wastefulness of being his own errand-boy. The average length of haul from barn to market in the United States is nine and a half miles, so that every trip saved means an extra day's work for a man and team. Instead of travelling back and forth, often to no purpose, the farmer may now stay at home and attend to his stock and his crops.
As yet, few farmers have learned to appreciate the value of quality in telephone service, as they have in other lines. The same man who will pay six prices for the best seed-corn, and who will allow nothing but high-grade cattle in his barn, will at the same time be content with the shabbiest and flimsiest telephone service, without offering any other excuse than that it is cheap. But this is a transient phase of farm telephony. The cost of an efficient farm system is now so little-- not more than two dollars a month, that the present trashy lines are certain sooner or later to go to the junk-heap with the sickle and the flail and all the other cheap and unprofitable things.
CHAPTER VII
THE TELEPHONE AND NATIONAL EFFICIENCY
The larger significance of the telephone is that it completes the work of eliminating the hermit and gypsy elements of civilization. In an almost ideal way, it has made intercommunication possible without travel. It has enabled a man to settle permanently in one place, and yet keep in personal touch with his fellows.
Until the last few centuries, much of the world was probably what Morocco is to-day--a region without wheeled vehicles or even roads of any sort. There is a mythical story of a wonderful speaking-trumpet possessed by Alexander the Great, by which he could call a soldier who was ten miles distant; but there was probably no substitute for the human voice except flags and beacon-fires, or any faster method of travel than the gait of a horse or a camel across ungraded plains. The first sensation of rapid transit doubtless came with the sailing vessel; but it was the play-toy of the winds, and unreliable. When Columbus dared to set out on his famous voyage, he was five weeks in crossing from Spain to the West Indies, his best day's record two hundred miles. The swift steamship travel of to-day did not begin until 1838, when the Great Western raced over the Atlantic in fifteen days.
As for organized systems of intercommunication, they were unknown even under the rule of a Pericles or a Caesar. There was no post office in Great Britain until 1656--a generation after America had begun to be colonized. There was no English mail-coach until 1784; and when Benjamin Franklin was Postmaster General at Philadelphia, an answer by mail from Boston, when all went well, required not less than three weeks. There was not even a hard-surface road in the thirteen United States until 1794; nor even a postage stamp until 1847, the year in which Alexander Graham Bell was born. In this same year Henry Clay delivered his memorable speech on the Mexican War, at Lexington, Kentucky, and it was telegraphed to The New York Herald at a cost of five hundred dollars, thus breaking all previous records for news-gathering enterprise. Eleven years later the first cable established an instantaneous sign-language between Americans and Europeans; and in 1876 there came the perfect distance-talking of the telephone.
No invention has been more timely than the telephone. It arrived at the exact period when it was needed for the organization of great cities and the unification of nations.
What telephones have done to bring in the present era of big crops, is an interesting story in itself. To compress it into a sentence, we might say that the telephone has completed the labor-saving movement which started with the McCormick reaper in 1831. It has lifted the farmer above the wastefulness of being his own errand-boy. The average length of haul from barn to market in the United States is nine and a half miles, so that every trip saved means an extra day's work for a man and team. Instead of travelling back and forth, often to no purpose, the farmer may now stay at home and attend to his stock and his crops.
As yet, few farmers have learned to appreciate the value of quality in telephone service, as they have in other lines. The same man who will pay six prices for the best seed-corn, and who will allow nothing but high-grade cattle in his barn, will at the same time be content with the shabbiest and flimsiest telephone service, without offering any other excuse than that it is cheap. But this is a transient phase of farm telephony. The cost of an efficient farm system is now so little-- not more than two dollars a month, that the present trashy lines are certain sooner or later to go to the junk-heap with the sickle and the flail and all the other cheap and unprofitable things.
CHAPTER VII
THE TELEPHONE AND NATIONAL EFFICIENCY
The larger significance of the telephone is that it completes the work of eliminating the hermit and gypsy elements of civilization. In an almost ideal way, it has made intercommunication possible without travel. It has enabled a man to settle permanently in one place, and yet keep in personal touch with his fellows.
Until the last few centuries, much of the world was probably what Morocco is to-day--a region without wheeled vehicles or even roads of any sort. There is a mythical story of a wonderful speaking-trumpet possessed by Alexander the Great, by which he could call a soldier who was ten miles distant; but there was probably no substitute for the human voice except flags and beacon-fires, or any faster method of travel than the gait of a horse or a camel across ungraded plains. The first sensation of rapid transit doubtless came with the sailing vessel; but it was the play-toy of the winds, and unreliable. When Columbus dared to set out on his famous voyage, he was five weeks in crossing from Spain to the West Indies, his best day's record two hundred miles. The swift steamship travel of to-day did not begin until 1838, when the Great Western raced over the Atlantic in fifteen days.
As for organized systems of intercommunication, they were unknown even under the rule of a Pericles or a Caesar. There was no post office in Great Britain until 1656--a generation after America had begun to be colonized. There was no English mail-coach until 1784; and when Benjamin Franklin was Postmaster General at Philadelphia, an answer by mail from Boston, when all went well, required not less than three weeks. There was not even a hard-surface road in the thirteen United States until 1794; nor even a postage stamp until 1847, the year in which Alexander Graham Bell was born. In this same year Henry Clay delivered his memorable speech on the Mexican War, at Lexington, Kentucky, and it was telegraphed to The New York Herald at a cost of five hundred dollars, thus breaking all previous records for news-gathering enterprise. Eleven years later the first cable established an instantaneous sign-language between Americans and Europeans; and in 1876 there came the perfect distance-talking of the telephone.
No invention has been more timely than the telephone. It arrived at the exact period when it was needed for the organization of great cities and the unification of nations.