The wire chiefs must detect trouble under a thousand disguises. Perhaps a small boy has thrown a snake across the wires or driven a nail into a cable. Perhaps some self-reliant citizen has moved his own telephone from one room to another.
Perhaps a sudden rainstorm has splashed its fatal moisture upon an unwiped joint. Or perhaps a submarine cable has been sat upon by the Lusitania and flattened to death. But no matter what the trouble, a telephone system cannot be stopped for repairs. It cannot be picked up and put into a dry-dock. It must be repaired or improved by a sort of vivisection while it is working. It is an interlocking unit, a living, conscious being, half human and half machine;and an injury in any one place may cause a pain or sickness to its whole vast body.
And just as the particles of a human body change every six or seven years, without disturb-ing the body, so the particles of our telephone systems have changed repeatedly without any interruption of traffic. The constant flood of new inventions has necessitated several complete rebuildings. Little or nothing has ever been allowed to wear out. The New York system was rebuilt three times in sixteen years; and many a costly switchboard has gone to the scrap-heap at three or four years of age. What with repairs and inventions and new construction, the various Bell companies have spent at least $425,000,000in the first ten years of the twentieth century, without hindering for a day the ceaseless torrent of electrical conversation.
The crowning glory of a telephone system of to-day is not so much the simple telephone itself, nor the maze and mileage of its cables, but rather the wonderful mechanism of the Switchboard.
This is the part that will always remain mysterious to the public. It is seldom seen, and it remains as great a mystery to those who have seen it as to those who have not. Explanations of it are futile. As well might any one expect to learn Sanscrit in half an hour as to understand a switchboard by making a tour of investigation around it. It is not like anything else that either man or Nature has ever made. It defies all metaphors and comparisons. It cannot be shown by photography, not even in moving-pictures, because so much of it is concealed inside its wooden body. And few people, if any, are initiated into its inner mysteries except those who belong to its own cortege of inventors and attendants.
A telephone switchboard is a pyramid of inventions.
If it is full-grown, it may have two million parts. It may be lit with fifteen thousand tiny electric lamps and nerved with as much wire as would reach from New York to Berlin.
It may cost as much as a thousand pianos or as much as three square miles of farms in Indiana.
The ten thousand wire hairs of its head are not only numbered, but enswathed in silk, and combed out in so marvellous a way that any one of them can in a flash be linked to any other.
Such hair-dressing! Such puffs and braids and ringlet relays! Whoever would learn the utmost that may be done with copper hairs of Titian red, must study the fantastic coiffure of a telephone Switchboard.
If there were no switchboard, there would still be telephones, but not a telephone system. To connect five thousand people by telephone requires five thousand wires when the wires run to a switchboard; but without a switchboard there would have to be 12,497,500 wires--4,999to every telephone. As well might there be a nerve-system without a brain, as a telephone system without a switchboard. If there had been at first two separate companies, one owning the telephone and the other the switchboard, neither could have done the business.
Several years before the telephone got a switchboard of its own, it made use of the boards that had been designed for the telegraph. These were as simple as wheelbarrows, and became absurdly inadequate as soon as the telephone business began to grow. Then there came adaptations by the dozen. Every telephone manager became by compulsion an inventor. There was no source of information and each exchange did the best it could. Hundreds of patents were taken out. And by 1884 there had come to be a fairly definite idea of what a telephone switchboard ought to be.
The one man who did most to create the switchboard, who has been its devotee for more than thirty years, is a certain modest and little known inventor, still alive and busy, named Charles E.
Scribner. Of the nine thousand switchboard patents, Scribner holds six hundred or more.
Ever since 1878, when he devised the first "jackknife switch," Scribner has been the wizard of the switchboard. It was he who saw most clearly its requirements. Hundreds of others have helped, but Scribner was the one man who persevered, who never asked for an easier job, and who in the end became the master of his craft.
It may go far to explain the peculiar genius of Scribner to say that he was born in 1858, in the year of the laying of the Atlantic Cable; and that his mother was at the time profoundly interested in the work and anxious for its success.
His father was a judge in Toledo; but young Scribner showed no aptitude for the tangles of the law. He preferred the tangles of wire and system in miniature, which he and several other boys had built and learned to operate. These boys had a benefactor in an old bachelor named Thomas Bond. He had no special interest in telegraphy. He was a dealer in hides. But he was attracted by the cleverness of the boys and gave them money to buy more wires and more batteries. One day he noticed an invention of young Scribner's--a telegraph repeater.
