In appearance, Enos M. Barton closely resembles ex-President Eliot, of Harvard. He is slow in speech, simple in manner, and with a rare sagacity in business affairs. He was not an organizer, in the modern sense. His policy was to pick out a man, put him in a responsible place, and judge him by results. Engineers could become bookkeepers, and bookkeepers could become engineers. Such a plan worked well in the earlier days, when the art of telephony was in the making, and when there was no source of authority on telephonic problems. Barton is the bishop emeritus of the Western Electric to-day; and the big industry is now being run by a group of young hustlers, with H. B. Thayer at the head of the table. Thayer is a Vermonter who has climbed the ladder of experience from its lower rungs to the top. He is a typical Yankee--lean, shrewd, tireless, and with a cold-blooded sense of justice that fits him for the leadership of twenty-six thousand people.
So, as we have seen, the telephone as Bell invented it, was merely a brilliant beginning in the development of the art of telephony. It was an elfin birth--an elusive and delicate sprite that had to be nurtured into maturity. It was like a soul, for which a body had to be created;and no one knew how to make such a body.
Had it been born in some less energetic country, it might have remained feeble and undeveloped;but not in the United States. Here in one year it had become famous, and in three years it had become rich. Bell's invincible patent was soon buttressed by hundreds of others. An open-door policy was adopted for invention. Change followed change to such a degree that the experts of 1880 would be lost to-day in the mazes of a telephone exchange.
The art of the telephone engineer has in thirty years grown from the most crude and clumsy of experiments into an exact and comprehensive profession. As Carty has aptly said, "At first we invariably approached every problem from the wrong end. If we had been told to load a herd of cattle on a steamer, our method would have been to hire a Hagenbeck to train the cattle for a couple of years, so that they would know enough to walk aboard of the ship when he gave the signal; but to-day, if we had to ship cattle, we would know enough to make a greased chute and slide them on board in a jiffy."The telephone world has now its own standards and ideals. It has a language of its own, a telephonese that is quite unintelligible to outsiders.
It has as many separate branches of study as medicine or law. There are few men, half a dozen at most, who can now be said to have a general knowledge of telephony. And no matter how wise a telephone expert may be, he can never reach perfection, because of the amazing variety of things that touch or concern his profession.
"No one man knows all the details now," said Theodore Vail. "Several days ago I was walking through a telephone exchange and I saw something new. I asked Mr. Carty to explain it. He is our chief engineer; but he did not understand it. We called the manager. He did n't know, and called his assistant. He did n't know, and called the local engineer, who was able to tell us what it was."To sum up this development of the art of tele-phony--to present a bird's-eye view--it may be divided into four periods:
1. Experiment. 1876 to 1886. This was the period of invention, in which there were no experts and no authorities. Telephonic apparatus consisted of makeshifts and adaptations. It was the period of iron wire, imperfect transmitters, grounded circuits, boy operators, peg switchboards, local batteries, and overhead lines.
2. Development. 1886 to 1896. In this period amateurs became engineers. The proper type of apparatus was discovered, and was improved to a high point of efficiency. In this period came the multiple switchboard, copper wire, girl operators, underground cables, metallic circuit, common battery, and the long-distance lines.
3. Expansion. 1896 to 1906. This was the era of big business. It was an autumn period, in which the telephone men and the public began to reap the fruits of twenty years of investment and hard work. It was the period of the message rate, the pay station, the farm line, and the private branch exchange.
4. Organization. 1906--. With the success of the Pupin coil, there came a larger life for the telephone. It became less local and more national. It began to link together its scattered parts. It discouraged the waste and anarchy of duplication. It taught its older, but smaller brother, the telegraph, to cooperate. It put itself more closely in touch with the will of the public. And it is now pushing ahead, along the two roads of standardization and efficiency, toward its ideal of one universal telephone system for the whole nation. The key-word of the telephone development of to-day is this--organization.
