Raising the Vailand Catching the Tube
Alexander Graham Bell's telephone had one great weakness: after a few miles of wire, the voice it carried faded to a whisper. This is the story of the telegraph man who promised to carry that voice from ocean to ocean, and of the glowing glass bulb that kept the promise and named the coming age: electronics.
The tele- century
Two mysterious forces once acted at a distance: the crackle of rubbed amber and the pull of the lodestone. Michael Faraday's experiments, vindicated by James Clerk Maxwell's equations, revealed them to be one. A magnet could become a current, and a current a magnet. The technology that harnessed that union created new kinds of action at a distance, and the Greek for at a distance is tele. The things that start with tele- define the cycle of the human story we now have the good, or ill, fortune to be living through.
Telecommunications and television came later: hybrid mintings of Latin and Greek that annoyed pursed-lipped purist classicists. Never mind them.
Two reminders from earlier episodes, because this one runs on both. Energy is still counted in calories: heat, which is work, which is heat, whether it builds a technology, strings its infrastructure, or keeps it running. The dollar, really, is a calorie token. And Gutenberg's press was, beneath its glories, a radical lowering of the cost of information: it was the staggering cheapness of print that let it spread, in Fry's words, "like a benign version of the Black Death." This episode is about what happens when the cost of sending a word collapses again. And then again.
Between the two mighty figures of the last episode, Volta and Bell, came the electric telegraph: born in Britain with Charles Wheatstone, adapted and greatly improved in America by Samuel Morse and Ezra Cornell. The wires of Cornell's Western Union crossed the continent before the railway did. And what traveled down them was almost laughably simple:
At the far end, the code was gummed onto paper as words: writing at a distance, read as writing from a distance. Telegraph, telegram. Bell would first call his own invention harmonic telegraphy, which is rather charming, before settling on the Greek for voice and giving us the telephone.
Two surnames in the telegraph story matter to this episode. Morse's collaborator on the code was Alfred Vail: his cousin runs the second half of this story. And Wheatstone's nephew was Oliver Heaviside, a self-taught genius in mathematics, physics, and electrical engineering.
Heaviside's moment came with the boldest project of all: the transatlantic cables, begun in the 1860s, whose signals degraded badly over the thousands of miles. Out of that problem he conceived a vital principle. The loading coil:
- an inductor, placed at intervals along a line
- it increases the line's inductance (the term is Heaviside's own)
- and, crucially, it cuts the distortion of the signal
- conceived for telegraph cables. File it away: it returns, trailing money, in Chapter VII.
Western Union charged by the word. So a clipped dialect developed, telegraphese: pronouns went, redundant verbs went, what grammarians call particles went. Ten words was the lowest rate, and many took pride in hitting exactly ten, as early Twitter users were proud of a tweet at exactly 140 characters.
Punctuation was usually one word, STOP, standing in for the full stop, or what Americans call the period. And it counted.
Scenes like that were common for a hundred years. Bandwidth cost money, because it cost electricity, paper, and dividends. Nonetheless, do the math, as Americans like to say:
Gutenberg had made words cheap to print. The wire was the first indication of a suggestion, of a hint of a possibility, of something wholly new: information at the speed of light. And the squeezing of language to fit a costly channel? Not new at all.
Lord Byron was one of the greatest letter writers in history, and every force that squeezed the telegram had squeezed his mail half a century earlier:
- before the penny post, a message meant couriers and horses: a lot of calories to be paid for
- paper was expensive, and a letter was priced by its pages
- exile in Italy made his letters home cost dear
- so yours became yrs, yesterday became yday, and lines ran up the sides of the page. Austen and Pitt the Prime Minister did the same.
But when Byron laid the letter aside and picked up a fresh page for a poem, did he suddenly drivel like an uneducated imbecile? Of course not. Hold on to that whenever the doom-mongers pronounce on the digital age. The past is the best lens on the present, and this has all happened before.
One publication, above all, turned the rationing into an art form.
Its most famous headline ran on July 17, 1935: STICKS NIX HICK PIX. Audiences in rural areas were skipping movies set in rural areas. In Yankee Doodle Dandy, James Cagney, as Broadway legend George M. Cohan, explains that very headline to a huddle of teenagers, who swing it into a song.
Stunningly shiny new, as we think our age, it has all happened before. In one way or another.
Alexander Graham Bell filed his telephone patent on February 14, 1876, the same morning his rival Elisha Gray filed notice of his own. The two papers reached the Patent Office hours apart, and which arrived first is argued to this day. Lawsuits followed. Bell won them and kept the patent. America made him a citizen in 1882.
That America had entered what historians call its Gilded Age. The phrase suggests the Edith Wharton world of new and old money holding balls in New York. What produced it was the peace dividend of a Civil War ended little more than a decade earlier, and a reconstruction headlined by the railroad.
Great fortunes rode those rails, and the age minted a recognizable cast:
The Commodore. One of the two richest men in the world.
Jay Gould, the other of the two.
The immigrant Scot who owned not the roads but the metal they ran on. Sold it all, then gave it all away.
Standard Oil. His kerosene, carried by rail, lit the lamps of America.
Banker, financier, venture capitalist, all rolled into one. Rolled Carnegie into U.S. Steel, and made him, for a time, the richest man alive.
Watch what each fortune did next. Stanford, one of the ruthless, buccaneering Big Four rail barons, poured his into a university near San Jose. Carnegie spent the evening of his years giving his away: libraries, concert halls, universities. Cornell had already run the full circuit:
A pure pattern had emerged. Technologies connect people by moving ideas (the telegraph, the telephone, the stock ticker) or by moving stuff (goods, raw material, labor, along the rails). Either way, the fortunes they throw off can be plowed into the seats of learning that hatch the next leap.
One more Rockefeller habit points at the next chapter. He so hated paying the rail men that he built his own infrastructure to move oil without them: pipelines. That is a whole other story. Right this minute, we have to go to Nantucket and New Bedford.
Nantucket and New Bedford, two Massachusetts whaling towns. For a century and more their ships went out, Moby-Dick fashion, to harpoon, kill, flense, and thoroughly exploit the calories nature had packed into the whale, whose blubber lit, heated, and lubricated the civilized world.
Most prized was the sperm whale, with its long, square-ended head. The head cavity holds a liquid wax, spermaceti, named for what it resembles once air whitens it into gloop. Nothing to do with reproduction. What the whale uses it for is not fully understood: something, it seems, to do with deep diving and echolocation.
To the 19th century, spermaceti was a miracle four times over:
- viscosity so low, a fineness so perfect, that it stayed liquid in extremes of temperature where every other oil congealed
- it burned brighter and cleaner in lamps than anything else, with no unpleasant smell
- it never dried out or gummed: perfect for the precise, watches, clocks, sewing machines
- and its low freezing point suited the mighty too: locomotives, steam hammers, mechanized looms
The price climbed, the hunt grew ruthlessly efficient, and the sperm whale headed for extinction. Then, one of those twists of history that give you pause: in the 1890s, exactly on time, the petrochemical industry worked out how to crack crude oil, at industrial scale, into cheaper substitutes. Down went the price. Up from the brink came the whale.
Cracking, briefly. Petrochemicals are open-chain hydrocarbons. The simplest, CH4, is methane, discovered by our old friend Volta on a hint from Franklin about combustible air. Refining separates crude, the oil from the rocks, into its chains, and every carbon added makes the stuff heavier, thicker, and less eager to evaporate:
The names are a story in themselves. The absolute essence of a thing is its breath (Latin spirare: inspire, expire, spirit), so the British got petroleum spirit, petrol, and the French got essence. The Germans got Benzin, named for the resin of a tree. And here the episode's threads knot: electricity comes from elektron, the Greek for amber, and amber comes from anbar, the Arabic for the gray, stinky, perfume-fixing lump the sperm whale passes. The whale named the amber, the amber named electricity. Trace every strand below.
Cracking also made gasoline abundant, and gasoline had exactly the Goldilocks properties Karl Benz's internal combustion engine needed. Not too volatile, like propane. Not too viscous, like kerosene. Just right.
Which is how the motor car came to save New York. By the late 19th century, manure was piling up in the streets faster than it could be carted away, with carcasses and sickness behind it. Thousands of immigrants arrived daily, and everything they needed moved by horse. Statisticians and public health officials, rightly in their own terms, predicted the end of New York as a viable city.
Carcasses and excrement on every sidewalk, disease behind them. The considered remedy: forced evacuation.
Plenty of trouble came in its wake, and we live with it still: climate change, pollution, plastics in the ocean. But it retired the overworked horse to pasture, as the telegraph had retired the ponies of the Pony Express.
It all looked very good for Rockefeller, who overtook Carnegie as the richest man in the world. His kerosene lit and heated America, his heavier fractions lubricated it, and soon his gasoline would replace steam altogether. Nothing could have made him crosser than the day Thomas Alva Edison produced an illuminating device that ran on electricity instead: the filament light bulb. Some terrible tenement fires did much of Edison's marketing for him. But that is another story.
By gum, what you can get from resin and whales. It really is all very Douglas Adams.
Most of this cast lived at the same time and knew each other, as collaborators, customers, or rivals, through the explosion of innovation that ran from the mid-1870s to 1900. The age sorted its titans into two castes, and admired both:
Notice who is on neither list. Material scientists, chemists, and physicists were not regarded as central to the process, and least of all the theoreticians and mathematicians. If they explained electricity, or announced invisible particles called electrons, fine. But a man like Edison was far too busy to worry about explanations. A feel for materials mattered. The physics behind them: a distraction.
The 20th century, dawning as these figures waxed great, would put paid to that attitude forever. Invention was becoming so complex and technical that a thorough grounding in the physics and mathematics beneath it would soon be essential.
The tousled-haired, rumple-sleeved, stain-fingered eccentric inventor persisted, but increasingly as a costume, and most durably in fiction, where his descendants tinker still. All of them wear the manner and image of the great age of invention, which Fry sets, precisely, at 1818 to 1910:
He was actually proud of the fact that he failed algebra at school, and to his dying day, couldn't explain electricity. Why should he? When he knew how to use it?
Here is the claim at the heart of this episode. The telephone itself was a rather primitive blip: the telegraph before it and the digital signals after were, in a sense, more existentially transformative. What changed the world was Bell putting his 1880 Volta Prize at the disposal of his labs, and the long attempt to make one clumsy invention work across America, which threw up a whole new science that really did transform everything.
Bell was sure that one day there would be a telephone in every town in America. It sounds like a comically dumb underestimation. But he had a problem the telegraph men never had. They sent plain pulses. He was sending the human voice.
Now for the irony of ironies. The instrument is named for its whole ambition, sound at a distance, and distance is precisely what defeated it. Routed from phone to switchboard to switchboard to receiver, the electrified voice arrived far weaker than a telegraph pulse, and attenuated, in the jargon, within mere miles.
So Bell's prize money going into research was no act of sentiment. It was a wise, hard-headed business decision: he needed smart minds to solve distance, and maybe, one day, to let calls cross America the way wires carried telegrams.
A young star of the Railway Mail Service. He would give the Bell System its network, its sanctioned monopoly, and its faith that research pays.
The man who took Bell's ball and ran with it was Theodore Vail: cousin of Morse's collaborator, telegraph expert, and young superintendent of the Railway Mail Service, which is where Gardiner G. Hubbard, Bell's father-in-law and head of the young Bell Telephone Company, found him. The record from there:
By his return, Bell's patents had expired and rivals were sprouting everywhere. Vail's response was unexpected: he stopped the early Bell companies' habitual lawsuits, fired 12,000 employees, streamlined, and turned to face two futures at once.
To prevail across America he needed a vast network, and to justify building one, the whole market: government persuaded to hold antitrust at bay. Smaller Bells could be hived off, New Jersey Bell, Pacific Bell, et cetera, but the system would be one.
A perpetual belief in research and development, injected into the corporate DNA. The labs seeded by Bell's Volta winnings, their founder retired but vigilant, were tasked with solving every problem the system had.
The second front meant investing in people. Crucially, perhaps for the first time outside a university, it meant hiring people who understood the new physics then appearing all over the place:
Vail's engineers had three tools against distance, and they deployed them in order:
- Copper. Stiff, thick-gauge, hard-drawn copper wire replaced the iron that had carried phone signals before. It helped. It was not enough.
- Loading coils. Heaviside's inductors, remember them. After patent wrangling and license paying, AT&T rolled them out by 1901. They doubled copper's reach, which is to say they halved its cost: a saving reckoned at over $100 million in the century's first quarter. Heaviside got not a penny.
- Repeaters. Mechanical amplifiers that boosted the fading signal. But only so many could sit on a line before distortion undid the benefit.
Together they carried a call from New York to the Rockies' doorstep, more than halfway, and far short of the gold standard: New York to San Francisco, the symbolic handshake from sea to shining sea. Vail demanded it anyway.
So, in 1909, Vail made a pledge of the Kennedy Moon-shot kind: fully transcontinental service, in time for San Francisco's Panama-Pacific Exposition. The Panama Canal had shown what willpower, money, and engineering could do to a continent. Let AT&T do something similar, for a city still all but rubble after the earthquake and fire of 1906, and badly in need of a dazzling new connection to the world.
Stringing wire across the Rockies and some of the hottest desert in the world, the engineers could manage. What they were stuck on was the repeater. If the signal could not be amplified cleanly, again and again along the line, the pledge was dead in the mountains.
The physicist Frank Jewett, who would become the first president of Bell Labs, told Vail it could be done anyway. Then came his great insight, his great leap. The golden age had made its inventors world famous. Jewett hired nobody of the kind:
Two of the hires set to work under Jewett, in the labs' meatpacking-district premises, were Harvey Fletcher and Harold Arnold. On their bench: the Audion, an amplification device brought to AT&T by its inventor, Lee De Forest. Quite unlike anything before it, it was a marvelous-looking object, resembling nothing so much as a light bulb.
Feed the weak, dying voice to the grid and it governs the far larger current from hot cathode to cool plate: the whisper redrawn, instantly and faithfully, as a shout. Amplification.
Arnold worked, tweaked, refined, experimented, and produced a far more reliable, manufacturable version. Evacuated glass: the vacuum tube. In Britain, the thermionic valve, for the way it lets current pass one way only. Three electrodes, cathode, grid, and anode: a triode.
Five years, he gave them.
The line, its repeaters now vacuum-tube triodes, was finished in time for the Exposition, which had happily been delayed by a year. On January 25, 1915, before a crowd of press and photographers in New York, the father of the telephone put in a call to his old lab assistant, Thomas Watson, at a desk in San Francisco.
The first words ever spoken down a telephone, in 1876, were Bell's summons to the next room: "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you." Now, with a chuckle, he repeated them across 3,400 miles. Watson's reply: "It will take me five days to get there now."
The "electrical conversazione offices" forecast a century earlier by Francis Ronalds, whose words closed our last episode, were now transcontinental. And none of it could have happened without the triode.
But the tube did far more than complete Ma Bell's network. It opened an entirely new field: electronics, the science of controlling, varying, amplifying, routing, and manipulating electrical current itself, to perform extraordinary new magic.
One adjective clings to the tube and ties the series in a bow: thermionic. Heat, passed from hot cathode to cool anode. And heat, we keep being reminded, means work. Trace the glow backward and you arrive, as ever, at Faraday:
So where did the world find reliable wattage? That is the next story, and it belongs to three giants of generation: Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse. An elephant named Topsy threatens to make an appearance, but at the last minute, doesn't. And we discover how brilliant, award-winning science can make you the most dangerous force in the world, and the most benign. And both.