Telephone in 1904
Today, we look under the hood. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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No, not the hood of our automobile. I speak of telephones. Alexander Graham Bell received his famous telephone patent in 1876. Now I open a lovely old book published soon after – in 1904: Telephone Principles and Practice. And here I feel the arc of history closing out the era of the wired telephone – the now-vanishing one that sits, or once sat, on our desk or table.
My father, a child in the eighteen-nineties, told of coming home one day to find his aunt shouting into a box newly mounted on the wall. His family was more with-it than most, owning such an early telephone. And we still had neighbors without phones when I was a child in the thirties. [Wall-mounted telephone]
My parents had a so-called candlestick model. A tall black post with a receiver on the side. We’d pick up the receiver and tell a switchboard operator where to place the call. That phone already appears in this old book. Along with those big wall installations. [Candlestick telephone]
I’m struck by how straight-forward the insides of those early phones were. These are phones that we might, ourselves, make, given skill and a well-equipped shop. He begins by describing tin cans with string stretched between them. The voice causes the bottom of one tin can to vibrate. The taut string then carries that vibration over to another person holding the other tin can. He calls that a Lover’s Telephone. (The lovers being next door neighbors.) [Tin can telephone]
These early telephones actuated magnets that modified an electric current. It traveled a wire and turned back into air vibrations, or sound, on the other end. Of course, they all needed an operator to receive, then pass on, our call.
The author begins with Bell’s telephone (giving credit to his competitors). Then he goes on to show all the improvements that’ve taken place in a short time. In the course of it, we learn the physics of magnetic forces. We study cross-sections of a dizzying variety of improved phones. But there is no mystery.
[Receiver and Transmitter images]
This old book is so unlike anything we might see today. Can we imagine being told exactly how our cell phones work? Who, if anyone, involved in making them knows every facet of their construction? The lengthy instructions that come with them deal only with their functions. Their construction, like most of today’s technology, remains far beyond any one person’s grasp.
This book was not just one of a kind, by any means. For it came from a time before our technologies appeared to have lives of their own. Before so much of the equipment around us moved into black boxes whose contents none of us now fully grasps.
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
(Theme music)
The book that I talk about is: George Walker Wilder, Telephone Principles and Practice, 3rd ed., The Cantwell Printing Co. Madison, WI, 1904. All images are from this source.
History of the telephone - Wikipedia
This Episode first aired on August 17, 2026.