650 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS plained : "When the phial is well electrified and you apply your hand thereto, you see the fire flash from the outside of the glass wherever you touch it, and it crackles in your hand." This was the first storage battery. But it contained mere static electricity, and was unmanageable, being discharged all at once like a flash of lightning from a cloud. Benjamin Franklin, who has been called "the first civilized American," demonstrated the identity of electricity and lightning—previously suggested by Newton—with his famous kite experiment in Philadelphia in 1748. It may be just as well not to repeat the details of this experiment, to tempt modern boys. Franklin himself came off unscathed. Some of his imitators were electrocuted. He proved that by means of the "electric fire" drawn from storm clouds by his kite, string and key, Leyden jars could be charged and other electrical experiments performed. Next came Alessandro Volta, an Italian professor, who gained immortality by having his name given to the unit by which electric potential is measured. His masterpiece was the "Voltaic pile." This invention, announced in 1800, consisted of an equal number of zinc and copper discs separated by circular plates of cloth, paper or pasteboard soaked in salt water or dilute acid, all properly connected to develop the "electrical fluid." Thus was produced "galvanism," a new manifestation of electricity in manageable form. With galvanic batteries of lower tension but greater power than the Leyden jar, the force could be kept and used as it was wanted. He likewise made a "crown of cups," set in a circle, each containing a saline liquid and strips of zinc and silver, the cups connected by wire, zinc to silver. He found that the power increased directly with the number of cups, twenty cups decomposing water and thirty giving a distinct shock. Galvanism was named for Galvani, an Italian Franklin, who experimented electrically with frogs, connecting them with lightning rods and noting convulsions in their bodies during electric storms. We now enter the period of the electric arc experiments which culminated in Brush's lamp. "The whole history of THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 651 civilization," says Ernest Greenwood, "has been characterized by the desire of man for more and more light." Science, without knowing it, was now committed to a quest that was to satisfy that desire. An arc, one of the most wonderful of electrical discoveries, might be described as an electric current crossing a luminous bridge, the current both creating the bridge and being carried by it. Sir Humphrey Davy in England had produced such an arc shortly after Volta's invention of the multiple cell battery, and others had observed it in their experiments. Davy made a public display of it, by means of a 500- plate battery, in 1813. In Paris, several years before that, E. G. Robertson, inventor of the magic lantern—ancestor of our moving pictures—using zinc and silver plates, had produced a brilliant white spark by connecting two carbon sticks with the poles of a battery and bringing their ends together. Davy himself used "well calcined carbon," which he said he found to have the same property as metallic bodies for making a spark when used in an electric circuit. But Davy and his fellow-experimenters did not realize that a mere spark and an arc light are not the same thing—that the steady light is not made by sparks jumping the gap between carbon electrodes, but comes mainly from a vapor column, which often takes an arc form, between the ends of the sticks. In practice, two rods of carbon, forming opposite poles in a circuit, are brought together for a moment, then separated about one-fourth of an inch. The resistance-heat produced in contact vaporizes some of the carbon, which immediately serves as a conductor itself when the ends are separated, setting up the so-called arc. Thus the light might have been called a carbon vapor light. It was essential for the experiments to obtain better carbon. Wood carbon was used first. In 1844 a French physician substituted "gas retort carbon," obtained from the coke produced in distilling coal for artificial gas, developing so strong and steady a light, so much like sunlight in quality, that he was able to take photographs with it. Scientists at Yale University obtained pictures with similar light, using a 652 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS battery of 500 cells. In 1845 a carbon lamp was devised in England with carbons automatically adjusted. An arc light was used several times in the Paris Opera House and elsewhere, but was not commercially successful. The batteries were too expensive and inconvenient. It was a task for dynamos. Many men were working on dynamos, too, in many places, and in the 'sixties and 'seventies there were some practical "electrical machines" built, chief among them being those of Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1866, the Belgian engineer Z. T. Gramme in 1870 and Von Hefner Alteneck in 1872. It is to the glory of Brush not that he produced a wholly original idea or contrivance, but that, in a race with the world's scientists and inventors, he produced at one stroke the best arc light and the best dynamo devised up to that time, and combined them in a system which he put to immediate and practical use. The carbon arc, as has been said, works by incandescence, turning solid carbon into luminous gas. The term "incandescent light," however, was reserved for a quite different form of illumination destined to supplement the arc light. Here enters Thomas A. Edison, supreme inventor, spurred to the race by Brush's success and soon to contest with him in the world's market for light; Edison who, born at Milan, Ohio, came near being a Clevelander himself, and whose middle name came from Captain Alva Bradley, the famous Cleveland shipmaster. These two inventors have lighted the world. Arc lights were good for outdoors and for large halls and theaters. Indoor lighting in general called for lamps of softer light and less power. Here, too, there was a long, slow growth. Sir Humphrey Davy, the English Edison, who had observed the principle of arc lighting at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was likewise acquainted with incandescent lighting. In 1802 he showed in a lecture that an electric current would raise thin strips of metal to a white heat, giving off light until they burned up. Platinum, he found, THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 653 lasted longer than most metals because it did not oxidize so rapidly. The first lamp of this type seems to have been made by a Frenchman named De La Rue, with a coil of platinum in a section of glass tubing, the ends capped with brass and the air partly exhausted to reduce oxidation of the metal. Sir William Grove, in a lecture in London twenty years later, exhibited an incandescent platinum lamp, working in a pan of water, so elaborate and using so much battery current that his experiment cost several hundred dollars per kilowatt-hour. The first patent for an incandescent lamp was granted by the British government in 1841 to Frederick de Moleyns. His device, too, was extremely complicated, with a glass globe containing in the upper part a glass tube of powdered charcoal, the tube open at the bottom and a platinum wire coiled inside, with another platinum wire extending from the bottom up through the tube. A Cincinnati man, J. W. Starr, invented two lamps about the year 1845, one using a strip of platinum whose active length was adjusted to fit the strength of the battery, and the other a carbon rod in a vacuum above a column of mercury. Both were impractical, but they helped along the movement. Starr boasted that he would "enable a light to be diffused all over Cincinnati equal for practical purposes to daylight." There were lamps by scores of inventors, most of them mere toys. Sir Joseph Swan's, using carbonized strips and spirals of paper which when heated in a partial vacuum left carbon filaments, were promising but soon broke down. In 1865 Herman Sprengel produced his efficient mercury vacuum pump, so that the air could be more nearly exhausted from a glass bulb. Swan then succeeded better, using slender rods of carbon sealed in the bulb. But the vacuum quickly failed from production of carbon gases. Hiram S. Maxim, Professor Moses G. Farmer and William E. Sawyer all produced pretty good lamps, but none of them was quite practical. So it was when Edison started working on the problem. He had invented ,he stock ticker and got $40,000 for it in 654 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS 1868, set up an inventor's shop in Newark, New Jersey, made valuable improvements in telegraphy, perfected the typewriter, invented the phonograph and made Alexander Graham Bell's telephone receiver commercially practicable. He set about to produce a lamp that would compete with Brush's. The carbon arc lights were of high candle power, working in series—all the lights on one wire, all burning or all dark. Edison sought a light of lower candle power and greater flexibility. It was a question of "subdividing the electric light." It was also a question of a suitable dynamo to operate a flexible string of lights,—if not Brush's, then some other. Many scientists had held that the "commercial subdivision of electric lighting" was impossible. Edison neatly solved that problem by connecting his lamps with two parallel wires, supplied with cross-wires, so that any of them could be turned on or off without interfering with the others on the circuit. For his lamp, all experimental progress pointed to an incandescent film in a vacuum bulb. It was a question of the best material for the filament and the best method of exhausting the air and sealing the bulb. The filament offered the greatest difficulty. After hundreds of experiments he chose carbon, and after much labor he succeeded in making a lamp burn two days with a carbonized piece of sewing thread. This was too fragile. He tested several thousand species of bamboo, cane, grass and other vegetable materials, then found that carbonized paper, in the form of thin slivers of bristol board, would burn with a steady glow and give several hundred hours of life. On December 21, 1879, he announced that he had a practical lamp. He gave a demonstration at Menlo Park, mounting sixty lamps on poles lighting the grounds and country roads near by, with additional wires run to several houses and lamps installed to show their domestic use. Great throngs came in special trains from New York and elsewhere to see the exhibit. Gas stocks slumped. Stock in the company formed to back Edison jumped to $3,500 a THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 655 share. The wizard had succeeded again. Swan, in England, turned back to carbon filaments, produced an improved lamp, gave a demonstration of it and applied for a patent. The lamp, however, was a small part of Edison's task. Like Brush, he had to create an entire system of lighting. He built a dynamo which astonished the engineering world by giving constant voltage with ninety per cent efficiency. Brush's problem of conveying and controlling his power throughout the circuit was simple, because he had a few big lamps on a single string. Edison's plan called for many lamps on many circuits, mostly for interior use, with a far more complex system of wiring. He had to invent nearly everything from the ground up as he went along—dynamos, switchboards, meters, means of maintaining the current strength at every outlet, methods of wiring, lamp holders, fixtures, insulation, sockets, underground conductors, service boxes, and so on. He proved equal to the task, building several factories for the purpose. On September 4, 1882, the power was turned on at Edison's power station on Pearl Street in New York. The light was called by the New York Times "soft, mellow and grateful to the eye, without a particle of flicker and with scarcely any heat to make the head ache." Those old carbon filaments are gone. When one is still discovered occasionally in an old house, we wonder at its dimness and inefficiency. Tungsten is generally used now. But the carbon filament in its day was like a gift from heaven. DYNAMO Edison's power plant was the first generating station producing electric current for commercial distribution by means of dynamos driven by steam engines. He had six of these electric machines, of which the largest was 125 horsepower. He proposed to furnish current generally for lighting houses, stores, offices and factories. There were as yet no electrical appliances to serve, no motors to provide with electric power. There were now two highly efficient types of dynamo in practical use, the Brush and the Edison. Here was a bigger 656 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS fact even than the utilization of electricity to make light. For the dynamo was destined to have a myriad uses. It is probably true, as Ernest Greenwood remarks, that "every invention produced, from the days when primitive man found out how to make rude weapons, to the wonders of present-day life, pales into insignificance when compared with the dynamo." It is time to consider the development of this supreme machine of civilization, with which Cleveland has had, and now has, so much to do. Chemical electricity as a source of industrial light and power was economically hopeless. Storage batteries were too heavy, bulky and expensive. About the beginning of the nineteenth century scientists and inventors began seeking some way to convert mechanical energy into electric energy which, in turn, could be utilized for mechanical work. But they were groping in the dark. Then occurred a scientific revelation, one of the sort of which it is hard to say whether they come from intelligent de-sign or accident. In 1820 Sir Humphrey Davy discovered that a piece of soft iron could be magnetized by running an electric current around it through a coiled wire. His pupil, Michael Faraday, had his imagination stirred and began experimenting. In 1822 he wrote in his notebook, "Convert magnetism into electricity." On that quest he labored for nine years. Then one day he, too, discovered something wonderful. He had a cylindri-cal bar magnet about eight inchs long. He had also a coil of insulated copper wire, wound in the form of a hollow cylinder a little larger than the magnet, with a galvanometer attached, to register any electric current that might develop. He was testing the behavior of the coil in various positions with rela-tion to the magnetic field. When he brought the magnet close to the wire coil, there was no movement in the galvanometer. On a sudden impulse he pushed one end of the magnet inside of the hollow coil, and the needle moved. That moment the dynamo was born and the electric power era began. The secret was mechanical movement of an elec-tric conductor in a magnetic field ; or more accurately, move- THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 657 ment of either conductor or field in relation to the other. It takes power to produce such motion, and the motion in turn transmutes that power. The electric current is not generated by the mere presence of the magnetic field, Faraday observed, but by changes in its strength and in proportion to the rate of change. The faster a loop of wire or other conductor moves into and out of the field, the more electricity is generated. Every dynamo-electric machine, no matter how complex and powerful, is merely an extension of this simple combination—a magnet and a loop of copper wire. The wire may be of many turns and great length. It may be wound in many ways. There may be many coils and many magnets in one machine. The mechanical power may be applied by shuttle motion or rotary motion; it may come from a steam engine or a water turbine or any other source; the result is the same. All our electric systems date from that lucky day when Faraday, using manual power, poked his little magnetic rod into his little copper coil. He, with those elements in his hands, was the first dynamo. From that experiment come our great power stations and our generators of 70,000 horsepower and our currents of 220,000 volts. Faraday continued his experiments for many years, learning more about the handling of his mysterious force, frequently using copper discs rotating between magnetic poles, but accomplishing little of a practical nature. Another Englishman, Sir Charles Wheatstone, produced the first continuous current machine in 1841. He patented later the use of electro-magnets, armatures of soft iron cores electrically magnetized, instead of permanent magnets. Progress was made by Jacob Brett with his self-excited machine, by Werner Siemens with his drum-wound armature about 1850, and Gramme's ring-wound armature a little later. It was not until the 'seventies that engineers began seriously trying to adapt the dynamo to commercial uses. Toward the end of the decade many were working on the problem—Farmer, Brush, Weston, Thomson, Houston, Edison and others. As we have seen, Brush and Edison were the first really successful ones. 658 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS Those first dynamos, used for lighting and producing direct current, were limited in range. With only 100 to 125 horsepower and low voltage, they could not serve lamps more than a mile away. The next big step was made by George Westinghouse, with his invention of the transformer, by which the voltage of the current could be raised or lowered at will, and the range of service extended with the rising voltage. Nikola Tesla perfected this system. Rapid and vast development followed. TELEGRAPH Before the dynamo had come the telegraph, which could be operated on storage batteries. This was the first important use of electricity. Men wanted rapid communication long before they felt the need of industrial power. The first telegraph or "far-writing" was in the form of signal flares from hilltops. Thus, says Homer, the news of Troy's fall, one of the greatest war dispatches in history, was carried home to Greece. The word itself was first applied in France to a system of semaphore communication used between Paris and Lille during' the Revolution. The dispatches, after a little practice, were sent 148 miles in two minutes. Such messages were purely visual. As electric phenomena became more familiar, inventors sought visual systems of communication through sparks caused by interrupting an electric circuit. La Place and Ampere, the former a great mathematician and astronomer, the later father of the instruments in our automobiles that measure the battery-charging rate, both worked on the problem. Many experimenters early in the last century succeeded in sending telegraphic signals for short distances, perceptible by sight or sound at the receiving end of the line. It remained, as so often in electrical science, for an American to provide the best practical solution of the problem. The successful man was Samuel Finley Breese Morse, a scholar, geographer and artist, who painted portraits for a living and whose real interest was electro-magnetism. Morse had studied chemistry and electricity at Yale under THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 659 Professor Benjamin Silliman, who was destined later to make a report on the latencies of rock oil that would start drilling in Pennsylvania and refining in Cleveland. Morse became obsessed with the idea of rapid far-writing. On his first visit to Europe in 1811, writing home to his mother of his safe arrival, he added : "I wish that in an instant I could communicate the information ; but three thousand miles are not passed over in an instant." Later he changed his opinion about that, and said : "If I can make it go ten miles without stopping, I can make it go around the globe." Morse was determined not merely to transmit messages, but to make them self-recording. Various others, especially Wheatstone and Cooke in England, were working with similar aim but different methods. Morse lost interest in everything but this quest. For years he sacrificed even his family life, living mostly in his studio, buying food at the grocery and bringing it furtively to his room in the evening, saving money to put into his invention, making trips to Europe when he could, to learn what was being done there. Finally on the way home from such a trip in 1832 the design took definite shape in his mind. It was a telegraph system as complete as Brush's and Edison's lighting systems, comprising not only sending and receiving instruments, batteries and transmission line, but an original dot-and-dash alphabet suited to the simple magnetic impulses sent over a wire by a make-and-break mechanism. His code was so satisfactory that, in its original form as used in America and in the slightly modified form that constitutes the "continental" code, it is used to this day, outliving all rival systems. There were still several years' work required. In 1837, the year of Cleveland's first city directory, he was ready to show it to a few friends in New York. One of them, invited to write the first message ever to be self-recorded by telegraph, phrased it in military style in honor of a general who was present. It was adequate to the occasion. It said : "Attention, the Universe ! By kingdoms, right wheel !" The following year Morse gave a demonstration before the President and his cabinet. His patent was granted in 1840. 660 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS Private capital was wary of such a novelty, and Morse sought public assistance. After discouraging delays, Congress in 1843 appropriated $30,000 to make a practical test of a device which, if it would do what was claimed for it, had obvious public usefulness. A line was to be constructed from Washington to Baltimore. The work started, the wire being enclosed in a pipe laid in the ground. Morse was assisted in this job by Ezra Cornell, founder of Cornell University, who had invented a pipe-laying machine. When they had covered only half the distance, most of the money was spent. So Morse suggested using the cheaper method of stringing the wire on poles, which subterfuge became the almost universal practice. Then came the well-remembered triumph on May 24, 1844, when in the chamber of the United States Supreme Court Morse slowly tapped out the words, "What hath God wrought !" and his assistant, Alfred Vail, at the other end of the line forty miles away, not knowing what message was coming, instantly caught and returned it to Washington. The government nevertheless failed to buy Morse's telegraph, which it could have had for $100,000, thereby determining the American policy of leaving this form of public utility in private hands. With private capital now interested, a system was immediately established connecting Washington, Baltimore and New York. England in 1846 established a public telegraph company, initiating the general foreign telegraph policy. Half a dozen years later there were fifty companies using the Morse invention in the United States. By the beginning of the Civil war the system had been adopted in France and half a dozen other European countries. England preferred her own Sir Charles Wheatstone's automatic needle system, but the Morse system has since been almost universally adopted except on railroads. Edison, who began his career as telegraph operator, soon invented the telegraphic stock ticker, also the duplex telegraph sending two messages over a wire at once. Eventually, improving on a device brought to America by an Englishman, he was able to increase sending speed to 3,500 words a minute. THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 661 As wires covered the land, ocean cables came inevitably. Various Englishmen had sent signals for short distances through insulated wires under water. Morse, shortly after his invention had proved successful, laid a cable in New York harbor between Castle Garden and Governor's Island, and concluded that "a telegraphic communication on his plan might with certainty be established across the Atlantic." An experimental line was laid across the English Channel in 1850 and a permanent one the year after. Cables quickly followed in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. America and Europe were joined in 1858. That first cable broke, but it had proved that wires could be laid and messages sent over the sea bottom for 3,000 miles. Morse's romantic wish, expressed to his mother forty-seven years before, was fulfilled. Other lines were stretched in 1865 and 1866, as business energies were released by the close of the Civil war. When the World war began in 1914, with its tremendous demand for communication, the equipment was ready. There were seventeen cables operating between the United States and Europe and the world-ocean was a telegraphic network. So much for what Lowell, when this marvel was new, called "the flame-winged feet of trade's new Mercury, that dry-shod run through briny abysses dreamless of the sun." And there were greater wonders to come. TELEPHONE Moses G. Farmer, one of America's electrical pioneers, has said that "if Bell had known anything about electricity, he would never have invented the telephone." His success was a lucky accident. Alexander Graham Bell, like his father and grandfather, was an elocution teacher, but he wanted to be a musician and was especially interested in the musical quality of speech. His father had worked out an ingenious system of recording vocal sounds by means of simple symbols, to use in correcting faulty speech. Alexander continued this system, applying it in the instruction of stammerers and deaf mutes, though people objected that his efforts to make the dumb speak were im- 662 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS pious, because God had made them so. He sought to produce a machine that "would make visible to the eyes of the deaf the vibrations of the air that affect our ears as sound." He failed, but out of his failure came the telephone. Bell borrowed a book written by Hermann von Helmholtz, the great German physicist, who had analyzed vocal sounds and reproduced them with three forks made to vibrate by electro-magnets and a voltaic battery. Bell, knowing no German, read the illustrations, and then tried to reproduce the experiments. As he understood them, Helmholtz had sent vowel sounds by telegraph. If this could be done with vowels, Bell decided, it could be done with consonants. He went cheerfully ahead until, in 1870, he discovered that he had misunderstood the pictures. So Bell, while conducting his school of vocal physiology in Boston, returned to his own method, spending hours singing notes into a piano and listening to the answering vibrations, and working on a "phonautograph" or "sound-writer" which would reproduce them. His machine would not work. Thereupon a bright friend suggested that, as the human ear seemed to be a pretty good mechanism for transmitting sound waves, he should use as a model the ear of a dead man, copying the drum and the little bones connected with it. Bell obtained from an accommodating doctor a complete human ear, attached a bit of hay to the diaphragm, made elocutionary sounds into it and studied the vibrations it registered on smoked glass. At the same time he was working on the problem of transmitting musical sounds by telegraph, using an intermittent current. He believed there were undulations in electric current, like those in the air, which would convey sound. He used a membrane modeled on that of his dead man's ear, fastened to a piece of soft steel, which he made to vibrate in front of an electric magnet. A quarter of a century before, Charles Boursel had said : "I have asked myself if the spoken word could not be transmitted by electricity—in a word, if what was spoken in THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 663 Vienna could not be heard in Paris. Suppose that a man speaks near a movable disc, sufficiently flexible to lose none of the vibrations of the voice; that the disc alternately makes and breaks the connection with the battery; you might have at a distance another disc which would simultaneously execute the same vibrations." Boursel lacked inventive talent equal to his vision. Philip Reis of Frankfort, Germany, acting on the suggestion, actually built a telephone whose receiver produced sounds, and came very near to success. He merely failed to turn a screw a tiny bit tighter in his transmitter and to connect two particular binding posts with wire. Bell may not have known about either of these men. He probably knew something about the experiments of Elisha Gray of Chicago, who was now working independently on the problem and getting "warm." Bell's interest in the telegraph was second only to his interest in the telephone. When Edison was sending two messages on a wire at once, Bell wanted to send six or eight. His friends urged him to stick to multiple telegraph work as something practical. Nevertheless he dropped it, and confined himself entirely to "electric speech." In June, 1875, just about the time when Brush was building his first dynamo, he got his clue by mere chance. It came from the fusing of a loose contact on his electric circuit. He was tuning the springs of his "harmonic telegraph," as he called it, with the aid of a friend, Thomas Watson, in an adjoining room. A spring had stuck, and the friend touched it to loosen it. There came to Bell's ear, over the wire, instead of the customary clicks, a musical. sound. He bounded into the other room, shouting, "What did you do then? Don't change anything!" The make-and-break points had become welded together, so that when the spring was struck the circuit remained unbroken, and the strip of magnetized steel vibrating over the pole of the magnet was generating exactly the sort of thing that Bell wanted, "a current of electricity that varied in intensity precisely as the air was varying in intensity within hearing distance of the spring," This current, passing over 664 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS the connecting wire to Bell's receiver, was transformed into a faint repetition of the sound. "That moment," Watson has said, "the speaking telephone was born. Bell knew that the mechanism that could transmit all the complex variations of one sound could do the same for any sound, even that of speech." They mounted a small drum-head of a goldbeater's skin over one of the receivers, joined the center of the drum-head to the free end of the receiver spring and made a mouthpiece to talk into. And it functioned, though crudely. Bell called quietly to his assist-ant on a wire running through a wall, and the latter answered. Bell had his "sound-shaped current of electricity." Sound waves were changed into electric waves, capable of go-ing faster and farther, and back into sound waves again. "Trade's new Mercury," with his winged, tap-dancing feet, gained a voice. Bell tried to patent his telephone in England, but it was laughed at as "another American humbug." Finally he filed at Washington on February 4, 1876. A few hours later on the same day Elisha Gray filed papers for his telephone. Al-most the same ground was covered by both. But the two, worked out independently, were different in important respects. Gray used a current of varying strength which reproduced not only the pitch of the various sounds, but their relative loudness. Bell had introduced an entirely new de-vice. His instrument was purely magnetic, employing no battery or other generator in the circuit, and consisting simply of a transmitter, a receiver exactly like it, and connecting wires. Sound waves from the speaker's voice agitated the metal disc of the transmitter, acting on a horseshoe magnet whose poles were wound with wire, thereby inducing a current which traversed the wire and, by acting on the magnet al the other end, reproduced the sounds in the receiver. These currents naturally were very weak. It was soon found necessary to use batteries and vary the current strength. The telephone, like the electric light, was first shown to the general public at the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876 THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 665 Bell offered to sell his patents to the Western Union Telegraph Company, and was refused. The company bought Gray's instead, and called in Edison to make them workable. Bell got a company organized and soon had several thousand telephones in use. In 1878 Edison brought out his new transmitter. Carbon was found to serve telephony and lighting equally well. Instruments of the Bell type came to be used, in modified form, merely as receivers. From Edison's contribution came, in time, the microphone and loudspeaker. Bell sued the Western Union, which had organized the American Speaking Telephone Company to compete with him, Settlement was made, and the patent rights of both groups were pooled, four-fifths of the stock going to the Bell company. It jumped immediately to $995 a share. Growth was rapid. In 1892 toll lines ran from New York to Chicago. It took until 1911 to reach Denver. Four years later Boston was linked to San Francisco, giving vocal communication for 3,650 miles. Service across the Atlantic was started in 1925. Now there is service to every civilized country. At the end of 1930 there were more than 20,000,000 telephones used in the United States, with more than 82,000,000 miles of wire, and the Bell system was connected with 30,- 000,000 of the world's 35,000,000 'phones. Investment in the Bell system was $3,700,000,000, personnel numbered 365,000 and daily calls were 63,000,000. All this multiplication and expansion only half a century from the time when Alexander Graham Bell said over a wire to his assistant in the next room : "Mr. Watson, come here—I want you!" Cleveland was one of the first cities to adopt the new invention. It came in the same year as the arc light, service beginning. September 23, 1879, with seventy-six subscribers. The first page of the original subscription list had this interesting preamble : Cleveland Telephone Exchange The undersigned hereby agree to take a full set of tele-phones, to consist of an Edison Transmitter, a Receiving Tele- 666 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS phone and a Call Bell, with a Private Telephone Line, to the Central Office of the Cleveland Telephone Exchange agreeing to pay therefor the sum of Seventy-Two Dollars per year, payable quarterly in advance. This agreement not to be binding until one hundred subscribers are obtained. The Exchange is to be operated in connection with the Western Union Telegraph Co., E. P. Wright, Division Superintendent ; American District Telegraph Co., Fayette Brown, President; Telegraph Supply Co., G. W. Stockly, Vice Presi7 dent and Manager. The subscribers seem to have been all business institutions or public officials. They included the Standard Oil Company and the sheriff. The idea of a telephone for private, personal and social use would have been considered foolish and extravagant. RADIO If one electrical wonder is more wonderful than another, it is probably radio communication, developed since our present college students were born. It is considered as having begun with the discoveries of Guglielmo Marconi in 1896, when Cleveland was holding. its centennial. But like every other important innovation, its first beginnings were far back. All electric progress had been leading up to it. Michael Faraday, who discovered the principle of the dynamo, had thought of using the ether of space as a con-ductor of electro-magnetic force. James Clerk Maxwell, the famous Scottish mathematician, proved mathematically the theory of light and electric waves carried in such a medium. He predicted from calculation, as Einstein has done with other things, that electrical discharges send electro-magnetic waves through space. Heinrich Hertz, a German, proved it by experiment and gave his name to the waves. Ever since 1837 there had been experimenters in Europe and America trying to transmit telegraph signals without wires. Their efforts, however, were all based on the principle of electro- THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 669 magnetic induction, not of electro-magnetic waves as now used. Professor Amos E. Dolbear of Harvard, in 1882, got a patent for communication by the induction method, but was able to transmit only for short distances. It was in 1886 that Hertz produced and detected electro-magnetic waves and proved that they were the effect of propagating electric waves. From then on, it was a scientific race with many entrants. Sir William Crookes said in 1892 : "Here is unfolded to us a new and astonishing world, one which it is hard to conceive should contain no possibilities of transmitting and receiving intelligence. Rays of light will not pierce through a wall, nor, as we know only too well, through a London fog. But the electrical vibrations of a yard or more in length will easily pierce such mediums, which to them will be transparent. Here, then, is revealed the bewildering possibility of telegraphy without wires, posts, cables or any of our present costly appliances." Marconi, son of an Italian father and an Irish mother, began his experiments on his father's farm near Bologna, Italy, in 1895. Soon he was transmitting signals for a quarter of a mile. His chief contribution to facts already known was the use of an elevated wire and an earth connection at the transmitting station. Thus he obtained longer and more powerful waves than any previous experimenters, and was able to gather more energy from passing waves. He also made a more sensitive "coherer." Like so many other continental scientists, he went to England to consummate his work, demonstrating it to British postal officials. By 1898 he was sending signals eighteen miles, penetrating buildings and brick walls. In another year he had increased the distance to eighty-five miles. In December of 1901 he sent a signal, the letter S, across the Atlantic, and in two years more the London Times was getting some of its American news by wireless. The Marconi Wireless and Telegraph Company of America was formed in 1901, the De Forest Wireless Company of America in 1908. During the next dozen years various wireless patents were granted to De Forest, Stone, Armstrong, Logwood and others. Lee De Forest is the best known 670 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS American name in this field, as an inventor and business man. In radio transmission an aerial or antenna is fed with high frequency alternating currents, and electro-magnetic waves are automatically radiated thence into space in all directions. They flow to and fro at the rate of a few thousand to many million times a second, varying with the design of the transmitter. High frequency means short waves, and vice versa. The waves travel outward until exhausted. Start and stop the currents, and you can obtain the dots and dashes of ordinary telegraphy. Control them with the microphone or the telephone transmitter, and you can radiate the "acoustical undulations of speech and music," or in fact almost any other sounds. At the receiving station a wire, preferably elevated, absorbs some of the energy of the passing wave in feeble alternating currents of the same frequency, which are transformed and amplified to operate a telephone receiver or a loud speaker. These mysteries of two decades ago are now commonplace facts hardly worth repeating to school children, so rapidly has knowledge of the most mysterious and difficult of electric science permeated our life. The first use of this new electric servant was in telegraphy, where its freedom from wires and poles meant economy and rapid extension over long distances. It was hurried to maturity by the opportunities of the World war. Shortly afterward Owen D. Young organized the Radio Corporation of America, with which the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, the Western Electric Company, the United Fruit Company and the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company joined in order to pool the principal radio inven-tions and research resources of the United States. It acquired the property and rights of the American Marconi Company. It aimed at American supremacy in radio communication, and is said to have had a greater development in one decade than the great British cable system had in six. Radio telegraphy now covers all the continents and seas. Its importance for newsgathering and commercial use is matched by its value for navigation. All important shipping THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 671 is now directed by radio, and the mariner's magnetic compass is supplemented by the radio compass from which accurate bearings may be obtained when in trouble. The Great Lakes fleet were among the first to adopt this equipment. The telephone principle followed the telegraphic, as it had done with wire communication. There was little use made of it, however, until after the World war. Then all at once ap-peared a new race of amateur electricians, making and toying with sending and receiving sets, operating private broadcasting stations, speaking an outlandish jargon, holding interminable conversations with each other over the air and otherwise conducting themselves like a crossbreed of medieval magicians and scientific fanatics. This phase led quickly to professional broadcasting, started by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company of Pittsburgh with its KDKA station in 1920. The matter broadcast was of little value, but the experiment gave business men and the public an inkling of the possibilities in this new field. Here were means through which countless people might be addressed, appealed to, instructed or entertained, if they would only provide themselves with receivers. The public responded enthusiastically. In two years the radio audience numbered perhaps 100,000. In two more years it was several millions. Stations increased, spreading over the whole country. Better programs multiplied the listeners, and more listeners called for better programs. Amateur talent gave way to professionals, phonograph and player-piano records to performers in person. Reception improved along with transmission ; amateur receiving sets, whether of the primitive crystal type or of many vacuum tubes, gave way to factory-built receivers. A great, new industry was developing with amazing rapidity. A serious question had quickly arisen. Broadcasting was business, not philanthropy. Who was to pay for it, and how? This problem is not yet solved. Foreign countries, already in the game, though not so deeply as America, had started on the plan of making the audience pay, as it would be expected to pay in a theater or concert hall, collecting a tax in the form 672 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS of a license fee on every receiving set, and keeping commercialism out of the programs. Broadcasting here was started free, being paid for by the business institutions owning the stations, which were content with the public good will they might gain. If sending stations were in the radio manufacturing business, there was an obvious incentive in creating a market for their products. Thus an element of commercialism en-tered from the beginning. It grew rapidly as the fact dawned upon broadcasting companies that here was a great, new, promising field for advertising in general, from which radio might derive a considerable part of its support. So came, by a natural process, the "sponsored program," with manufacturers, merchants and propagandists paying for broad-casting "time on the air" as they might pay for newspaper or magazine or billboard space, and providing the public with music, drama and other entertainment or information in order to win a favorable reception for the special publicity they had in view. By the year 1927 the technical radio situation in the United States was chaotic. The ether was crowded with the various communications of about 20,000 pieces of transmitting apparatus, including broadcasting stations, telegraph stations, ships and amateurs. After an international radio conference, Congress enacted a law setting up a Radio Commission and establishing a license system. There was loud protest; but available wave-bands were limited, public rights had to be preserved, and control was necessary to protect private broadcasting itself. Stations were soon reduced to less than 700. The next development was national broadcasting chains, appearing. with the inevitability of chain stores and reaching an audience running into tens of millions. In this era radio may be said to have combined the qualities of Homer's Stentor and Shakespeare's Ariel with a good deal of Barnum's ballyhoo and the art of the old-fashioned medicine-vendor. The mechanical technique of broadcasting improved immensely. It brought music, drama, news, humor, oratory THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 673 and varied instruction into countless homes. Less could be said for its artistic side. Despite frequent programs of high quality, the broadcasting business was accused of flooding the country increasingly with trivial and trashy entertainment, underestimating the public taste and neglecting a great opportunity for cultural service. The strongest criticism has been directed against the interweaving of advertising appeals with otherwise artistic programs in such a way as to destroy their charm. Foreign critics have been especially severe, declaring that such procedure is not permitted in any other civilized country. National consolidation has also had in radio much the same tendency to standardization of output as appears in mechanical industry. Entertainment, though better at its best than ever before, because of the ability of great national chains to hire the best talent, has lost correspondingly in variety and spontaneity. For these reasons, perhaps, there has seemed to be growing indifference to an art and industry regarded with vast enthusiasm a few years ago. In 1932 David Sarnoff and other radio leaders were looking forward to another magical achievement which might revive jaded interest-television, combining visible with audible broadcasting. THE UNIVERSAL SERVANT While electricity las thus brought the outer world into the home, enriching domestic life, it has also extended and enriched the general social life. This is accomplished espe-cially through lighting improvements, which make possible public gatherings and activities by day or night, in the open or under roofs, on an unprecedented scale. Cleveland's Public Hall, with its magnificent lighting system, lending itself to all sorts of exhibitions, games and assemblies, is the best local example. What would Moses Cleaveland have thought of football games at night in the city Stadium? Modern theaters would be impossible without modern lighting. Stage mechanism and music are largely electrical. The 674 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS "legitimate" stage depends upon electricity almost as much as the moving pictures. Our play, like our work, is now electrified. The home itself becomes a sort of factory, where many industries meet, to facilitate housekeeping. Here the "universal servant" is seen at its best. A domestic "plant" utilizing electric appliances now commonly available may have, along with its elaborate lighting equipment, telephones and radio set, a completely electrified kitchen and laundry, an oil or coal furnace electrically operated, electric fans and. portable heaters, electric clocks and cigar lighters and electric door-bells, with the list steadily growing. APOLLO In no phase of modern life does electricity go further or accomplish more for human welfare than in our hospitals. Such an institution as the great Medical Center of Western Reserve University might be called an electro-medical industry in itself. Without electricity it could hardly function for five minutes. The first important electric contribution to the art of healing, as to our life in general, was light. Our hospitals have lost their gloom and the evils that go with it, and are places of cheerfulness, cleanliness and sanitation. The operating room, more than any other, is transformed in appear-ance, spirit and method. After adequate illumination came the X-ray, discovered by accident in 1895 by Wilhelm Konrad von Roentgen. Its use is now mere routine, especially in the care of teeth, bone fractures and internal injuries or diseases. This invisible ray provides photographs from which physicians and surgeons may proceed with certain knowledge. With the variation of the ordinary X-ray machine known as the fluoroscope they can observe internal bodily conditions directly with their own eyes, study the functioning of deep-seated organs and set difficult fractures with certainty that every bone-edge is placed where it belongs. No less marvelous is the comparatively new surgical in-