Identifier: cu31924007427424 (find matches)
Title: The history of the telephone
Year: 1910 (1910s)
Authors: Casson, Herbert Newton, 1869-
Subjects: Telephone
Publisher: Chicago, A.C. McClurg & Co.
Contributing Library: Cornell University Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
xorable factthat they did not know how to do it. Fortunately, by the time that this problemarrived, the telephone business was fairly wellestablished. It had outgrown its early days ofridicule and incredulity. It was paying wagesand salaries and even dividends. Evidently ithad arrived on the scene in the nick of time —after the telegraph and before the trolleys andelectric lights. Had it been born ten years later,it might not have been able to survive. So del-icate a thing as a baby telephone could scarcelyhave protected itself against the powerful cur-rents of electricity that came into general use in1886, if it had not first found out a way of hidingsafely underground. The first declaration in favor of an under-ground system was made by the Boston companyin 1880. It may be expedient to place our en-tire system underground, said the sorely per-plexed manager, whenever a practicable methodis found of accomplishing it. All manner oftheories were afloat but Theodore N. Vail, who (128)
Text Appearing After Image:
ISllOADWAY AND JOHN SniEET, NEW YORK, IN Iniii), SHOWING THEDENSITY OF OVERHEAD WIRES THE HISTORY OF THE TELEPHONE was usually the man of constructive imaginationin emergencies, began in 1882 a series of actualexperiments at Attleborough, Massachusetts, tofind out exactly what could, and what could not,be done with wires that were buried in the earth. A five-mile trench was dug beside a railwaytrack. The work was done handily and cheaplyby the labor-saving plan of hitching a locomotiveto a plough. Five ploughs were jerked apartbefore the work was finished. Then, into thistrench were laid wires with every known sortof covering. Most of them, naturally, werewrapped with rubber or gutta-percha, after thefashion of a submarine cable. When all were inplace, the willing locomotive was harnessed to ahuge wooden drag, which threw the ploughedsoil back into the trench and covered the wiresa foot deep. It was the most professional cable-laying that any one at that time could do, and itsucceeded

Note About Images