THE TELEPHONE.

Globe, Volume IX, Issue 1227, 8 February 1878, Page 3

THE TELEPHONE.

[From the “Times.”] A great change has come over the conditions of humanity. Suddenly and quietly the whole human race is brought within speaking and hearing distance. Scarcely anything was more desired or more impossible. Few, indeed, can fill a room of any size, or even make themselves well heard anywhere; and the ear itself is the weakest and most treacherous of our faculties. The eye enjoyed an invidious superiority over the sister organ. Not to speak of its celestial achievements over other worlds, or of the kingdoms of the earth it could see in a moment of time, it encroached successfully on the domain of the ear, by beacons, and telegraphs, and all kinds of signals. Some of us may remember the line of telegraphs from the Admiralty to Portsmouth, throwing their arms wildly about, ten minutes sometimes, while the bewildered clerks were turning over the leaves of the key or spelling a word. A storm or fog, or nightfall, would interrupt the message, and there it slept till next day, no matter its importance or its urgency. The railway seemed to compensate for this, but with the railway came all the accidents and delays of personal agency. Then, about a generation ago, came the electric telegraph, too great a boon to be lightly spoken of, but even more divested of the charms that sweeten and assist communication than the old letterwriting. The writer might be known and loved in his letter, which could not help being characteristic; but the telegram was the dry bones of correspondence. Gushes, sighs, tears, sallies of wit, and traits of fondness do not stand the ordeal of twenty words for a shilling, and the frigid medium of unsympathetic clerks. All at once the telegram is found to be a barbarous makeshift, fit for business pur* poses, or mere messages, in which names, figures, places, and dates are all that is to be transmitted. For any higher or tenderer purpose the telephone is to take its place. While we are talking about it, and hearing of its performances at scientific meetings, the Americans are bringing it rapidly into use. Already 500 houses in New York converse with one another; 3000 telephones are in use in the United States ; they are used by companies and other large concerns whenever the works are some way from the office, in waterworks, pits, and mines. Friends on the opposite sides of a broad street converse as if in one room. The known tone and inflections of the speaker, a whisper, a cough, a sigh, a breath can be heard. The little incidents of human utterance which it takes a wakeful ear to detect, aided by eye and by familiar acquaintance, are found to pass along miles of wire, many of them under the earth or sea. Silent as the medium may be, and dead as it seems, the sound comes out true. A hundred miles of galvanic agency becomes only one imperceptible link between two human mechanisms. England takes discoveries, when they are not her own, very tranquilly. The telephone is said to be in use somewhere in this metropolis by two scientific friends, but, while Prince Bismarck has already set it to work on German State business, it can hardly yet be said to have emerged for Londoners from the exhibition room or the soiree. Yet it is now plainly nothing more than an affair of mechanism, and, bound as we are to believe in the dominion of man over nature, we cannot doubt we shall master all the material difficulties of this now acoustic problem. The great difficulty at present is the tenuity and feebleness of the result; but it is evident that difficulty has been surmounted in the United States more than it has been here. That may be owing not merely to the density of our atmosphere, but partly also to our imperfect apparatus ; possibly, also, to that indistinctness of utterance that slurring over of important consonants, and that dropping of the voice at the end of a sentence, which all foreigners observe in us. The telephone will prove a severe test of both our speaking and our listening powers. The household wire, it appears, need not be monopolised, or be at the mercy of one inefficient listener. Half a dozen telephones, with their respective wires, can bo attached to the same main wire, and as many ears applied. When it was found, now about fifty years ago, that tubes would convey the human voice sufficiently a hundred yards or more, it was immediately suggested that an honest and attentive body of Christians could stay at home on a rainy Sunday without being deprived of public ministrations. They might sit by their fireside, lend a willing ear to the end of a speaking tube, and hear the sermon delivered at the other end of the street. The voice, however, would not ramify to the desired extent. The electric current will ramify to at least a considerable extent. The very idea of such a use being made of it, improbable and even ridiculous as it ’is, suggests its convenience for many ordinary and secular purposes. The objection to a telegraphic system ramifying itself into every parish and every good house in the kingdom has hitherto been the fact that in very few households is there one who could read or work the instrument. That objection is now likely in time to be entirely removed. Everybody who has ap ear can hear a telephone, and everybody who has a tongue can speak into one. YU that is wanted is a much-required improvement in Pty* Atoning ami speaking poww, wjtb, of

course, some considerable improvements in the telephone. But the last point, however necessary, is simply a case of supply and demand. If wanted, the telephone will be brought to the same pitch of perfection as telescopes, watches, sewing machines, photography, lucifer matches, locomotives, breechloaders, heavy ordnance, and many other things that within living recollection were either very clnmsy affairs or not even yet invented. A time is coming when everybody, we presume, will carry his own telephone about with him. Wherever he goes he will be able to step into a telegraph office, apply his own wire to the public wire, and hold a private conversation with a wife, or a son, or a customer, or a political friend, at the end, without the intervention of a public servant. He will pay by the minute. The wire, it is stated, must be a quiet one, for it is apt to pick up stray sound. On the other hand, it is now announced that a remedy has been found for this, and that a wire thus encumbered can be cleared of strange utterances before it comes to the telephone. Perhaps the use of underground wires, now on other accounts much insisted on, may be found a more effectual remedy. The discovery has come happily just at the time when there had arisen a dreary feeling that we had arrived at the end of original discoveries, and had nothing to do bnt work out our old ones. It is true we have been penetrating continents, sounding the deep sea, hunting matter down to molecules, finding perfume in filth, dyes in dirt, and food in refuse. It is also true that the annual catalogue of new facts in science has been stated to amount to a thick, closely-printed volume. But these are not matters that concern everybody, at least directly. They do not revolutionise the world. What the telephone promises is hardly short of this. There is no reason why a man should not hold conversation with a son at the Antipodes, distinguish his voice, hear his breathing, and, if the instrument be applied as a stethoscope, hear his heart’s throb. Next to seeing—nay, rather than seeing—what would parents give to hear the very voice, the familiar laugh, the favourite song, of the child long separated by a solid mass 8000 miles in diameter? The telescope is only a prolongation of the eye, and the telephone is only a second ear. For some time there has been a prophetic idea that a speech ought to he able to report itself. There is now no difficulty in the matter, except that, the telephone will be only too true, and will serve the orator and the public only too well. Will the telephone be able to convey the singing of our birds to the less vocal tropical regions, the breaking of the surge, or any other of nature’s sweet or wild utterances ? Will it bring to our metropolis the dreadful sounds of the bombardment or the battle-field ? But what next? There is hardly anything conceivable that may not be hoped for, if not, indeed, expected. We have only to look back the length of an ordinary lifetime and consider how much the world has advanced in that period to form a fair estimate of what is in store for our successors. The world has not exhausted itself; mind has not done all its work; Nature teems with fresh wonders; time has more children yet to come. When shall we store and distribute the manifold bounties of nature running to waste ? When shall we counteract the uncertainty of the elements ? When shall we penetrate the mystery of the winds ? Shall we ever cover the whole earth with fertility and verdure P Shall we not only combat, but. extirpate disease, as some diseases have, in fact, disappeared ? To come down to the improvement of existing means, when shall we bring railway travelling to the perfection of speed, comfort, and safety ? All these are mere mechanical problems. The greatest perfection is not so improbable as the railway itself was only fifty years ago. In none of these matters has mankind yet made so serious and persistent an endeavour as to be sure that the failure is not in itself, rather than in the work to be done. They seem impossible ; so did the idea of the telephone but the other day.