Ted and the Telephone Read online

  CHAPTER VIII

  DIPLOMACY AND ITS RESULTS

  Laurie, Ted, and Mr. Hazen were in the shack on a Saturday afternoonnot long after the adventure on the river. A hard shower had driventhem ashore and forced them to scramble into the shelter of the camp atthe water's edge. How the rain pelted down on the low roof! It seemedas if an army were bombarding the little hut! Within doors, however,all was tight, warm, and cosy and on the hearth before a roaring firethe damp coats were drying.

  In the meantime the two boys and the young tutor had dragged out somecoils of wire and a pair of amateur telephone transmitters which Tedhad concocted while in school and for amusement were trying to run fromone end of the room to the other a miniature telephone. Thus far theirattempts had not been successful and Ted was becoming impatient.

  "We got quite a fair result at the laboratory after the things wereadjusted," commented he. "I don't see why we can't work the same stunthere."

  "I'm afraid we haven't put time enough into it yet," replied Mr. Hazen."Don't you remember how long Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of thetelephone, experimented before he got results?"

  Laurie, who was busy shortening a bit of wire, glanced up withinterest.

  "I can't for the life of me understand how he knew what he wanted todo, can you?" he mused. "Think of starting out to make somethingperfectly new--a machine for which you had no pattern! I can imagineworking out improvements on something already on the market. But toproduce something nobody had ever seen before--that beats me! How didhe ever get the idea in the first place?"

  The tutor smiled.

  "Mr. Bell did not set out to make a telephone, Laurie," he answered."What he was aiming to do was to perfect a harmonic telegraph, a schemeto which he had been devoting a good deal of his time. He and hisfather had studied carefully the miracle of speech--how the sounds ofthe human voice were produced and carried to others--and as a result ofthis training Mr. Bell had become an expert teacher of the deaf. He wasalso professor of Vocal Physiology at Boston University where he hadcourses in lip reading, or a system of visible speech, which his fatherhad evolved. This work kept him busy through the day so whateverexperimenting he did with sounds and their vibrations had to be done atnight."

  "So he stole time for electrical work, too, did he?" observed Ted.

  "I'm afraid that his interest in sound vibration caused him a sorryloss of sleep," said the tutor. "But certainly his later results wereworth the amount of rest he sacrificed. One of the first agencies heemployed to work upon was a piano. Have you ever tried singing a noteinto this instrument when the sustaining pedal is depressed? Do it sometime and notice what happens. You will find that the string tuned tothe pitch of your voice will start vibrating while all the othersremain quiet. You can even go farther and try the experiment ofuttering several different pitches, if you want to, and thecorresponding strings will give back your notes, each one singling outits own particular vibration from the air. Now the results reached inthese experiments with the piano strings meant a great deal more toAlexander Graham Bell than they would have meant to you or to me. Inthe first place, his training had given him a very acute ear; and inthe next place, he was able to see in the facts presented asignificance which an unskilled listener would not have detected. Hefound that this law of sympathetic vibration could be repeatedelectrically and, if desired, from a distance by means ofelectromagnets placed under a group of piano strings; and if afterwarda circuit was made by connecting the magnets with an electric battery,you immediately had the same singing of the keys and a similarsearching of each for its own pitch."

  "I'd like to try that trick some time," exclaimed Ted, leaning forwardeagerly.

  "So should I!" echoed Laurie.

  "I think we could quite easily make the experiment if Laurie's motherwould not object to our rigging up an attachment to her piano," Mr.Hazen responded.

  "Oh, Mater wouldn't mind," answered Laurie confidently. "She neverminds anything I want to do."

  "I know she is a very long-suffering person," smiled the tutor. "Do yourecall the white mice you had once, Laurie, and how they got loose andran all over the house?"

  "And the chameleons! And the baby alligator!" chuckled Laurie. "Motherdid get her back up over that alligator. She didn't like meeting him inthe hall unexpectedly. But she wouldn't mind a thing that wasn'talive."

  "You call an electric wire dead then," said Ted with irony.

  "Well, no--not precisely," grinned Laurie. "Still I'm certain Materwould be less scared of it than she would of a mouse, even if the wirecould kill her and the mouse couldn't."

  "Let's return to Mr. Bell and his piano strings," Ted remarked, afterthe laughter had subsided.

  Mr. Hazen's brow contracted thoughtfully and in his leisurely fashionhe presently replied:

  "You can see, can't you, that if an interrupter caused the electriccurrent to be made and broken at intervals, the number of times itinterrupted per second would, for example, correspond to the rate ofvibration in one of the strings? In other words, that would be the onlystring that would answer. Now if you sang into the piano, you wouldhave the rhythmic impulse that set the piano strings vibrating comingdirectly through the air, while with the battery the impulse would comethrough the wire and the electromagnets instead. In each case, however,the principle involved would be the same."

  "I can see that," said Ted quickly. "Can't you, Laurie?"

  His chum nodded.

  "Now," continued Mr. Hazen, "just as it was possible to start two ormore different notes of the piano echoing varying pitches, so it ispossible to have several sets of these _make-and-break_ or intermittentcurrents start their corresponding strings to answering. In this wayone could send several messages at once, each message being toned to adifferent pitch. All that would be necessary would be to have differentlykeyed interrupters. This was the principle of the harmonic telegraph atwhich Mr. Bell was toiling outside the hours of his regular work andthrough which he hoped to make himself rich and famous. His intentionwas to break up the various sounds into the dots and dashes of theMorse code and make one wire do what it had previously taken severalwires to perform."

  "It seems simple enough," speculated Laurie.

  "It was not so simple to carry out," declared Mr. Hazen. "Of course, asI told you, Mr. Bell could not give his entire time to it. He had histeaching both at Boston University and elsewhere to do. Nor was hewholly free at the Saunders's, with whom he boarded at Salem, for hewas helping the Saunders's nephew, who was deaf, to study."

  "And in return poor Mrs. Saunders had to offer up her piano forexperiments, I suppose," Ted observed.

  "Well, perhaps at first--but not for long," was Mr. Hazen's reply. "Mr.Bell soon abandoned piano strings and in their place resorted to flatstrips of springy steel, keying them to different pitches by varyingtheir length. One end of these strips he fastened to a pole of anelectromagnet and the other he extended over the other pole and leftfree."

  "And the current interrupters?" queried Ted.

  "Those current interrupters are the things which have since becomeknown as transmitters," explained Mr. Hazen. "Those Mr. Bell made allalike except that in each one of them were springs kept in constantvibration by a magnet or point of metal placed above each spring sothat the spring would touch it at every vibration, thus making andbreaking the electric current the same number of times per second thatcorresponded to the pitch of the piece of steel. By tuning the springsof the receivers to the same pitch with the transmitters and running awire between them equipped with signalling keys and a battery, Bellreasoned he could send as many messages at one time as there werepitches."

  "Did he get it to work?" Laurie asked.

  "Mr. Bell didn't, no," replied the tutor. "What sounded logical enoughon paper was not so easy to put into practise. The idea has beencarried out successfully, however, since then. But Mr. Bellunfortunately had no end of troubles with his scheme, and we all maythank these difficulties for the telephone, for had his harmonictelegra
ph gone smoothly we might not and probably would not have hadBell's other and far more important invention."

  "The discovery of the telephone was a 'happen,' then," Ted ventured.

  "More or less of a happen," was the reply. "Of course, the intelligentrecognition of the law behind it was not a happen; nor was the patientand persistent toil that went into the perfecting of the instrument amatter of chance. Alexander Graham Bell had the genius to recognize thevalue and significance of the truth on which he stumbled and turn it topractical purposes. Many another might perhaps have heard the self-samesounds that came to him over that reach of wire and, detecting nothingunusual in the whining vibrations, have passed them by. But to Mr. Bellthey were magic music, the sesame to a new country. Strangely enough,too, it was the good luck of a boy not much older than Ted to sharewith the discoverer the wonderful secret."

  "How?" demanded both Laurie and Ted in a breath.

  "I can't tell you that story to-day," Mr. Hazen expostulated. "It wouldtake much too long. We must give over talking and put our minds on thistelephone of our own which does not seem to be making any greatprogress. I begin to be afraid we haven't the proper outfit."

  As he spoke, a shadow crossed the window and in another instant Mr.Clarence Fernald poked his head in at the door.

  "What are you three conspirators up to?" inquired he. "You look as ifyou were making bombs or some other deadly thing."

  "We are making a telephone, Dad, and it won't work," was Laurie'sanswer.

  Mr. Fernald smiled with amusement.

  "You seem to have plenty of wire," he said. "In fact, if I werepermitted to offer a criticism, I should say you had more wire thananything else. How lengthy a circuit do you expect to cover?"

  "Oh, we're not ambitious," Laurie replied. "If we can cross the room weshall be satisfied, although now that you mention it, perhaps itwouldn't be such a bad thing if it could run from my room at home overhere." He eyed his father furtively. "Then when I happened to have tostay in bed I could talk to Ted and he could cheer me up."

  "So he could!" echoed Mr. Fernald in noncommittal fashion.

  "It would be rather nice, too, for Mr. Wharton," went on the diplomatwith his sidelong glance still fixed on his father. "He must sometimeswish he could reach Ted without bothering to send a man way over here.And then there are the Turners! Of course a telephone to the shackwould give them no end of pleasure. They must miss Ted and often wantto speak with him."

  He waited but there was no response from Mr. Fernald.

  "Ted might be sick, too; or have an accident and wish to get helpand----"

  At last the speaker was rewarded by having the elder man turn quicklyupon him.

  "In other words, you young scoundrel, you want me to install atelephone in this shack for the joy and delight of you two electricianswho can't seem to do it for yourselves," said Mr. Fernald gruffly.

  "Now however do you suppose he guessed it?" exclaimed Lauriedelightedly, as he turned with mock gravity to Ted. "Isn't he the mindreader?"

  It was evident that Laurie Fernald thoroughly understood his father andthat the two were on terms of the greatest affection.

  "Did I say I wanted a telephone?" he went on meekly.

  "You said everything else," was the grim retort.

  "Did I? Well, well!" commented the boy mischievously. "I needn't havetaken so much trouble after all, need I? But every one isn't such aSherlock Holmes as you are, Dad."

  Mr. Fernald's scowl vanished and he laughed.

  "What a young wheedler you are!" observed he, playfully rumpling up hisson's fair hair. "You could coax every cent I have away from me if Idid not lock my money up in the bank. I really think, though, that atelephone here in the hut would be an excellent idea. But what I don'tsee is why you don't do the job yourselves."

  "Oh, we could do the work all right if there wasn't danger of ourinfringing the patent of the telephone company," was Laurie's impishreply. "If we should get into a lawsuit there would be no end oftrouble, you know. I guess we'd much better have the thing installed inthe regular way."

  "I guess so too!" came from his father.

  "You'll really have it put in, Dad?" cried Laurie.

  "Sure!"

  "That will be bully, corking!" Laurie declared. "You're mighty good,Dad."

  "Pooh! Nonsense!" his father protested, as he shot a quick glance oftenderness toward the boy. "A telephone over here will be a usefulthing for us all. I may want to call Ted up myself sometimes. We nevercan tell when an emergency may arise."

  Within the following week the telephone was in place and although Tedhad not minded his seclusion, or thought he had not, he suddenly foundthat the instrument gave him a very comfortable sense of nearness tohis family and to the household at Pine Lea. He and Laurie chatteredlike magpies over the wire and were far worse, Mrs. Fernald asserted,than any two gossipy boarding-school girls. Moreover, Ted was now ableto speak each day with his father at the Fernald shipping rooms and bythis means keep in closer touch with his family. As for Mr. Wharton, hemarvelled that a telephone to the shack had not been put in at theoutset.

  "It is not a luxury," he insisted. "It's a necessity! An indispensablepart of the farm equipment!"

  Certainly in the days to come it proved its worth!