Radio Broadcast (May-Oct 1922)

2o6 Radio Broadcast through his long Hfe, in turning the pages of his Recorder. There are whole volumes — a score of them, each of 500 pages or so — with records of his daily researches, experiments, speculations, all packed with the bounty of an intellectual life in a variety that is incredible. In these volumes, in fact, you find his tremendous energies devoted to the telephone, to kites and aircraft and the scientific breeding of sheep, to the utilization of waste heat, the need of a new acceptance of a metric system, experiments in preserving food, notes on eugenics and The Biologic History of a Cat; oral teaching, a paper on the utility of action and gesture, observations on lip reading, on Hertzian waves, and, among a hundred other subjects, not to mention many pages devoted to glorfying Life in general, his description of his early experiments in transmittingwireless signals through the earth's crust and through the waters of the Potomac. Also, most interestingly, you find his papers on the first of all wireless telephones ■ — the photophone, the light phone. About this first wireless telephone, which of course did not, like the modern radiophone, use a tuned circuit, we wished Doctor Bell to talk; also about his early experiments in detecting and transmitting signals, and the first use of the telephone therefor, without the use of wires. And of course we yearned to have him discuss his invention of the original telephone, and that momentous day, that birth-day of both wire and radio telephonic communication, March 10, 1876. For, clearly, without the use of some instrument as sensitive as the Bell telephone, even Marconi could not have revealed the enormous possibilities of the wireless. The year 1871 found Doctor Bell, at the age of twenty-four, teaching vocal physiology in Boston University. By the by he established his own school, applied his own system of teaching the deaf, and went to live in the home of five-year-old George Sanders, one of his pupils, in Salem. In the Sanders cellar he set to work with tuning-forks, magnets, batteries. For three years he worked. In 1874 he had evolved what he called the harmonic telegraph — a device for sending a number of Morse messages over a single wire at the same time by utilizing the law of sympathetic vibration. That is important because, in seeking to develop it, and to perfect its transmitter and re ceiver, electromagnet, and its flattened piece of steel clock spring, he met Thomas A. Watson, and on June 2, 1875, after months of countless experiments, profited by an accident, one of those accidents that have contributed a vast deal to Science. One of the transmitter springs stuck. The magnetized steel generated a current that sent a faint sound over the electric wire to his receiver. Then he knew that his supreme dream of telephonic speech was within the realm of possibility. So, with his principles established, he went to work on his telephone. On March 10, 1876, the birth-date of the telephone, he applied these principles for the first time successfully. In that attic room of his, at the end of a hundred feet of wire, he put his mouth to his telephone and said, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you." Watson came rushing through the intervening door shouting, "1 heard you; 1 could hear what you said!" Doctor Bell likes to add, by the by, some of the singular incidents that followed. "The Japanese language was the first language, after the English, used over the telephone," he said. " 1 had two Japanese students. One of them asked me if the telephone would speak Japanese. 1 told them to try." On October 9, 1876, over a telegraph line between Cambridge and Boston, Doctor Bell and Mr. Watson held the first telephone conversation over a considerable distance. Soon thereafter the Boston Globe transmitted the first press report, from Salem, Massachusetts, to Boston, by telephone. Still, people were incredulous. Thus Mr. Bell was invited to display his instrument at the Philadelphia Centennial. But there, in his remote corner, he attracted little attention until the Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro, took up the receiver to listen, at the far end of a large room, to the voice of the inventor. He exclaimed, dropping the receiver suddenly, "My God, it speaks!" That was an event which caught popular fancy; still, it was not until sixteen months after Doctor Bell had filed his patent^ he says, when there were already 778 telephones in use, that, in August, 1877, The Bell Telephone Association, the first telephone company ever established, was formed. It had no capital at the outset. It had four members only — Doctor Bell, Gardiner G. Hubbard, Mr. Watson, and Thomas Sanders, Georgie's father, who furnished all the financial backing.