CHAPTER 1

Early history

‘Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you.’

– Alexander Graham Bell, 10 March 1876

It’s been almost a century and a half since Scottish-born scientist Alexander Graham Bell said those immortal words on the first-ever phone call, to his assistant in the next room. Between then and now, the world has changed beyond recognition. And telecommunications, which has played a fundamental role in this change, has itself evolved into an industry that not so long ago was the sole preserve of science fiction.

Communication across time and distance dates back thousands of years, to the 6th century BCE, when the Persians used pigeons to carry messages across their vast empire. The Greeks invented the hydraulic telegraph, a semaphore system to send messages between Sicily and Carthage across the Mediterranean Sea, in about 350 BCE; and in China during the Han dynasty (200 BCE to 200 CE) a complex system of flag signals was developed, sending messages along the Great Wall and beyond.

It was in the late 18th century, however, that communications took a giant leap forward. In the 1790s French inventor Claude Chappe came up with the ‘tachygraph’ (‘fast writer’), an optical semaphore system that transmitted visual signals over a network of physical high points. In 1795 Spanish scientist Francisco Salva Campillo produced a device that transmitted electrical signals representing individual letters over a network of cables. In 1816 Englishman Francis Ronalds created the first working telegraph over a substantial distance, laying a 13-kilometre (8-mile) length of iron wire between wooden frames and sending pulses down it using electrostatic generators. And in 1832 Russian aristocrat Pavel Lvovitch Schilling created a machine that used a single needle and a system of codes to generate individual characters.

The achievement of producing the world’s first truly commercial telegraph network fell to two Englishmen, inventor William Fothergill Cooke and academic Charles Wheatstone, in 1837. Their telegraph used a combination of five needles, each with its own wire, which could point to some 20 separate characters arranged in a grid pattern on a board. In 1839 the Great Western Railway commissioned a Wheatstone and Cooke telegraph line running from Paddington Station in London out to West Drayton, a small town some 20 kilometres (13 miles) to the west.

This line is famous for having carried the first telegraph used to apprehend a criminal. In 1845 a certain John Tawell poisoned his mistress in her home outside Slough, before boarding a train to London. Tracked by a member of the local constabulary to the station, his destination and appearance were sent ahead to Paddington, where an arrest was made. Large crowds attended the subsequent hanging and the notoriety of the affair helped push the new technology firmly into the public consciousness.

A similar arrest was made 65 years later of an even more notorious criminal, using what was then cutting-edge technology. Having killed his wife and dismembered her body, Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, an American homeopath living in London, booked passage on the SS Montrose bound for Quebec. His attempts to disguise himself didn’t fool the captain, who transmitted the following message by means of Mr Marconi’s new wireless telegraph back to the headquarters of the White Star Line in London: ‘Have strong suspicions that Crippen—London cellar murderer and accomplice—are amongst saloon passengers. Moustache taken off. Growing beard …’ Police were waiting for him in Quebec and, like Tawell’s, Crippen’s life came to an end at the end of a rope.

Across the Atlantic Ocean in the USA, portrait painter Samuel Morse was spurred into turning his attention to electrical communications after his wife died in 1825: he’d missed both her death and the funeral because at the time he was away from home completing a commission and the news had taken too long to reach him. Eventually, in 1837, he patented his invention and in 1844 he sent the first message over an electrical telegraph of his own design.

The first public telegraph line was opened in 1845 in the UK and the first transmission over this network was Queen Victoria’s speech on the opening of parliament. In 1850 the first subsea telegraph was transmitted, from Dover to France, and by 1858 the Atlantic had been crossed, with a cable stretching from Ireland to Newfoundland (although it failed after just a month in operation).

By the middle of the 19th century, telegraph networks were being established in most of the world’s industrialised countries. In Britain, the Electric Telegraph Company was established in 1845 by William Fothergill Cooke and his new partner, John Lewis Ricardo. In 1850 the British Telegraph Company was launched.

In the USA, as in the UK, privately owned telegraph companies, most with limited regional ambitions, proliferated, though none was interconnected. The New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Company, formed in 1851, however, aimed to create a national telegraph network using Samuel Morse’s technology. By 1856 it had acquired 11 other networks and its reach extended to St Joseph, Missouri, a distance of over 1,100 kilometres (700 miles). At this point it decided to change its name to something less regional and more memorable – and became the Western Union Telegraph Company. It dropped the word ‘telegraph’ a few years later.

When Civil War broke out in 1861, Western Union offered to build the government a chain of interlinked telegraph stations. The task began in St Joseph on 4 July 1861 and the line reached Salt Lake City, 2,400 kilometres (1,500 miles) away, on 24 October – a distance of over 20 kilometres (13 miles) a day, every day.

On 14 February 1876, a young Scottish engineer, Alexander Graham Bell, filed a patent in his adopted country, the US, for an apparatus capable of transmitting speech. Hours later a similar application was made by Elisha Gray, a superintendent employed by Western Union. Bell was granted US Patent No. 174,465 on 7 March and went on to achieve universal, lasting fame. (Gray, considered to be the father of the modern music synthesiser, was granted over 70 patents for other inventions.)

Bell’s financial backers, Thomas Sanders and Gardiner Hubbard, offered their rights in the patent to Western Union for $100,000. Western Union declined, saying, ‘We do not see that this device will be ever capable of sending recognizable speech over a distance of several miles. Messer Hubbard and Bell want to install one of their “telephone devices” in every city. The idea is idiotic on the face of it. Furthermore, why would any person want to use this ungainly and impractical device when he can send a messenger to the telegraph office and have a clear written message sent to any large city in the United States?’1

So Bell incorporated his own business, the Bell Telephone Company, in 1877, with Hubbard as president and Sanders as treasurer. Thomas Watson, the man Bell had summoned during that famous first call, took the post of ‘general superintendent’, while Bell himself had the title ‘electrician’.

It didn’t take Western Union long to realise that it had made a huge blunder, and in that same year the American Speaking Telephone Company, a business whose sole purpose was to compete with Bell, was established. Elisha Gray was brought in, as was a young inventor called Thomas A Edison, who brought with him a design for a transmitter that was far better than the one used by Bell.

Bell’s company filed a suit for patent infringement in early 1878. The case would run for the best part of two years, before Bell eventually emerged victorious. The settlement saw Western Union relinquish all of its telephone patents and hand over the 56,000 phone lines it had connected, expanding Bell’s installed base to some 133,000 phones.

In 1879 a new general manager, Theodore N Vail, took up the reins at the Bell company. In 1881 he negotiated the acquisition of Western Electric, a business Elisha Gray had helped establish and which was becoming an increasingly important force in the industry, and renamed the company the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, or AT&T.

By 1900 AT&T’s service covered much of the urban population of the USA. It had 600,000 telephone lines in service, accounting for around three quarters of the national total. This equated to a penetration rate of over 1% of the population – by far the highest level in the world. Most of these lines were still urban, but rural uptake was rising fast, and by 1907 it had increased to 1.4 million lines, nearly half of the company’s total base of 3.12 million subscribers.

Within 10 years of its invention, Bell’s device had sprung up in South America, Europe, Asia and Africa – an incredibly impressive achievement considering that there was no advertising or other media to circulate news of it, and it spread itself around the world on the basis of its own merits alone.

The Brazilian emperor Pedro II apparently saw Bell’s invention at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, tried it, and famously exclaimed ‘Dios! It works!’ By the end of that year he’d installed one in his palace in Rio. His early interest helped establish a huge telephone industry in the country – by 1940 there were over 800 separate telephone operators scattered across Brazil’s vast expanse.

By 1877 telephones were making their first appearance in several European countries, including France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK; and the first public telephone service in China was launched that year too.

Over time, telephone instruments became more reliable, with both transmitter and receiver greatly improved. Bell’s colleague Thomas Watson invented a new ringing mechanism that allowed the instrument to be heard, while Lars Ericsson managed to combine the two into a single handset.

In 1879 British inventor David Hughes transmitted ‘aerial electric waves’ from his home in London to a receiver some 450 metres away. This was the first wireless transmission ever, 14 years before Nikolai Tesla’s first efforts (which some claim to be the first wireless transmission) and some 17 years before Guglielmo Marconi’s successes in the same field.

The first British telephone company came into existence on 14 June 1878, and by the following year the Telephone Company Ltd (Bell’s Patents) had opened what is believed to be Britain’s first public telephone exchange. On 15 January 1880 it issued the first known British telephone directory, listing 250 subscribers connected to three London exchanges.

1 History of AT&T, Cybertelecom.