Inventive Hellos and Economic Goodbyes

TRACING THE PATH PODCAST

This episode is about the cyclical nature of technological upheaval by tracing the intertwined histories of the telephone, recorded sound, and the music industry. It highlights how the innovations of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison fundamentally collapsed space and time, transforming music from a participatory household activity into a commercial product for consumption. 

The story illustrates the inevitability of automation through the transition from human telephone operators to mechanical switches, a shift driven by the need for privacy and efficiency. Ultimately, the story uses these historical milestones to provide perspective on modern anxieties regarding AI, suggesting that every era eventually finds a new normal following the disruption of its traditional job markets and social customs.

Alexander Graham Bell, someone we all learn about, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1847, one year before the potato famine. He was a curious child who loved learning how things worked. And his mother was deaf, giving him an extra curiosity about sound.

His inventive side began as early as 12 years old when he created a wheat dehusking machine that was so good a local mill used it for several years. His curiosity included music as well. He taught himself to play piano, thus becoming the family pianist, providing regular evening entertainment.

His mother’s deafness piqued in him an interest in sound that was mirrored by his father and grandfather’s occupation as they were elocutionists. It is for that reason Alexander dedicated his life to speech and sound. 

In 1865, his family moved to London where in college he installed a telegraph line from his room to the room of a friend where he began experimenting with the idea of using electricity to convey sound. A few short years later, he and his family moved to Canada, which led him to becoming a professor at nearby Boston University.

While he loved his professor position, the commitment it required didn’t give him much time to work on his experiments. So he found himself working late at nights – many, many nights. In 1873 his ideas and dedication inspired a wealthy individual to invest in him giving him free room and board plus a workshop.

So he quit his job and brought two students on board to help him.

By 1874 telegraph machines and wires connected the world. Western Union had declared the telegraph to become the nervous system of commerce. They had even contracted Thomas Edison to help them grow by figuring out how the existing lines could carry multiple messages at once so they didn’t have to build twice as many lines.

For Alexander, this had been the crux of his experiments.

After the Western Union announcement, Alexander found founded himself the subject of new wealthy financiers as others found out about his experiments. It was in 1876 that Alexander finally created a tool that sent a human voice over electric lines that could actually be heard clearly on the other end.

His first successful transmission was sent to his partner who was in a different part of the building and the first words uttered over this very first telephone was, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.”

It was the moment that would change the world, but also such a simple and small success. Alexander didn’t even know how successful it was until Watson came to his office and told him how clearly he had heard his words.

As he tested the machine over various telegraph lines, he got the idea to sell the invention to Western Union, themselves. He didn’t have quite the confidence to feel like he could build a global phone network on his own.

But Western Union declined, saying voice over telegraph lines was just a novelty.

Later that year, to bring attention to his invention, he showed it at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. It was there at the exposition that many declared it to be the greatest of all marvels of the electric telegraph.

Alexander then started Bell Telephone Company in 1877 with the goal of making phone lines clearer and faster.

That year, he also married one of his students he’d brought with him on this inventive journey. Mabel had become one of his business partners, and she happened to be deaf like his mother.

Interesting that a man surrounded by the deaf invested so much of his life into sound.

The one thing the telephone did not change was music.

Perhaps it allowed someone far away to hear you play, but the role of music was the same. Which brings us to the next hero of our story, Thomas Edison.

At the same time Alexander Graanbell was working on the telephone, Thomas Edison was trying to answer a simple question.

Is it necessary to have a person listening on the other end?

He liked the idea of transmitting voice over telegraph lines, but thought there had to be a way you could capture that sound.

But before we go on, a very important point must be made. The invention of the telephone is always thought of as one of the 19th century’s biggest achievements, but that is shortsighted and sadly a very academic view of the invention.

The ability to transmit sound over wire is a feat that is indescribably powerful. The telephone actually collapsed space. It did something that had never been done in the history of the earth. Not for Ghengis Khan, Charles Darwin, or President Lincoln.

Space always defined communication. If you were more than 100 ft away, communication didn’t happen instantly.

The phone collapsed that space.

And what Thomas Edison wanted to do in recording sound was to collapse time.

No voice had ever outlived the person who spoke it.

The world will never hear a single voice prior to 1877. And perhaps more importantly, music. No. No one will ever hear Mozart play the piano.

Thomas Edison would change that reality forever when he figured out how to take what Alexander Graham Bell had invented one step further.

He knew what was happening when voice was transmitted over telephone lines. But instead of a speaker, could something exist that transferred the vibrations to something permanent? His idea was to use a diaphragm and needle to imprint the tone’s vibrations onto parchment paper or foil or wax, all of which he tried.

And after months of experiments, his idea worked.

The first words to ever be recorded were, “Mary had a little lamb.” Something Abraham Lincoln would have actually been proud of.

That was the first moment in the history of the world that a voice would outshine its speaker. But Thomas Edison’s work only paved the way. It was actually Alexander Graham Bell who picked up where Edison left off and improved the recording so it could become a commercially available product.

His work wasn’t finished until 1886, at which time few could even afford their own photograph record player.

It would actually be another 20 years before the phonograph record player would enter the culture.

Which brings us to the next hero of our story, sheet music.

Back in 1842, Charles Dickens made a special trip to the United States to make the case that the world needed better copyright protection. As it was in the United States, anyone could copy Charles Dicken’s books, print them, put them in bookstores without paying Charles Dickens one penny because the US didn’t have good copyright laws.

And believe it or not, America snubbed its nose at Charles Dickens’ request.

Publishing foreign works was very profitable for the United States.

The same thing happened with music producers. To avoid paying any copyright fees, American music publishers would simply create the sheet music for foreign songs.

But then the waves Charles Dickens started came through in 1870 when the US Copyright Act was actually passed.

For musicians, this act was a godsend because it specifically added works of art, not just books.

And then in in 1874, the courts added the specific language that needed to be put on each book or piece of sheet music to show it was protected.

And the final piece was advances in printing that would allow fast mass reproduction of a document.

Those combined events created the moment that would make sheet music the first mass market music product.

That spurred musicians like J.N. Pattison to publish sheet music of his own songs, not European songs,  like his song The Pattison Waltz.

Moreover, several music producers saw the opportunity and moved to New York City to set up shop in the Flower District just down the street from Broadway. These publishing houses knew if they could get their songs onto Broadway, they’d sell a lot of sheet music.

So, they’d set up upright pianos right on the street and they would play the songs for people who are walking by. The people who played and sang, they were called pluggers. Among the songwriters and pluggers who would frequent the area were Irving Berlin, George M. Cohan, Dorothy Fields, Scott Joplin, and Fats Waller.

One of the more aggressive tactics of pluggers was a strategy they called ‘booming’. A publisher would buy a chunk of tickets to a race, a fight, a show, or an event, and then they’d show up, set up a piano where their seats were, and a plugger would sing the songs over and over and over to get into the heads of the audience.

This area of town where the publishers set up shop and had pianos outside, it sounded like someone was clanging pots and pans according to a New York Herald article. Thus, the area got the name Tin Pan Alley.

The reason Tinpan Alley was important is the very crux of this story.

Alexander Graham Bell’s photograph didn’t actually get popular until the 1900 teens. Before that, music was not what it is today.

Music wasn’t something you consumed.

There wasn’t any recorded music, so you had to play it to enjoy it.

Music wasn’t consumed. It was made.

Because of that, Every middle-class household had a piano they kept in their parlor and every home had a piano player just like Alexander Graham Bell was in his home.

Pianos themselves were a most important household appliance with 25,000 being sold in 1869 and then 261,000 in 1891.

It became one of the symbols of the middle class and sales of sheet music were the measurement of success of a song. The music charts showed sheet music sales.

Songs like Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” sold over a million copies of sheet music.

Without recorded music, families would sit together in the parlor where they’d play and sing songs, now known as parlor music.

The phonograph would change that, but not yet.

Instead, what was being added to homes was the telephone and the wires that connected them. Incidentally, the introduction of the phone was not easy.

A new culture had to be created and taught. It was a bit like the Wild Wild West when the phone came out.

Phone installations grew from 48,000 in 1880 to 1 million in 1895. And with phones came new rules, new standards, new ethics, and even a new word.

In the beginning, when a phone line was connected between two people’s homes, it was a bit like a water hose without a nozzle. If one person turned it on, the water would just flow out the other side. But instead of water, it was a voice. Phones had no ringer.

So once you picked up the handset, the user would have to yell, “Are you there? Is someone there?” Until someone in that house heard the yelling, and came to respond.

But this seemed very inelegant, according to Alexander Graham Bell. He needed there to be a word or a thing that you said when you answered the phone. Alexander thought that “Ahoy” would be a good word.

It was the greeting a ship captain gave.

But the Influential Thomas Edison had another idea. He liked the word “hello”. It was the word you used when something surprised you, but it was rarely used. So rare it had only been recorded once back in 1827.

But this greeting included a component that hadn’t existed before. Every other term of greeting, such as smiling, waving, saying good day, or tipping your hat, was was a visual ritual, including the hat tipping that often accompanied the word “Ahoy”.

Not only that, but most greetings were time based, like “good morning” and “good evening”. But the phone was going to allow you to speak to other time zones, meaning the greeting need to be not time-based.

This would be the world’s first disembodied and time insensitive social cue.

So, “hello” became the term of greeting.

And because it was so new, it was included in the instructions when you got your phone installed.

But saying “hello” wasn’t the only part of phone culture that needed to be learned. When the phone network started to grow, it used the telegraph lines that were already in place from town to town. Typically, the people in a town could pick up their telegraph at the post office or the railway station or government office. lines weren’t taken to people’s homes.

Phones would change that, which meant an exchange or a hub was necessary, so each call could be routed to the right home.

At first, this job of operating the line switcher seemed ideal for a teenage boys. They were the ones that worked at the telegraph stations. But this job did involve a bit more than telegraph.

To make a call, a person would lift the receiver and would immediately tell the operator, the operator of the phone exchange switcher, which line they wanted to be connected to. But using teenage boys did not work. They operated the exchange like it was a playground, hanging up on callers, making jokes, and even arguing with them.

So on September 1st, 1878, Boston Telephone decided to make a bold change.

 They were much better representatives of the phone company.

And the job wasn’t easy. It was long hours. It was saying “number please” 120 times per hour. It required absolute focus for 8 hours. And women nailed it.

By 1910, 88,000 women held the job of operating.

By 1920, 180,000 and

by 1930, 235,000 women had jobs as operators.

But there’s a saying that one bad apple can ruin it for everyone. Or perhaps it was just the march of progress.

Laura Ingalls Wilder explained the problem that was created in her book series “Little House on the Prairie”, which was an autobiography of sorts of life in the early 20th century. She wrote about the time phones were installed in her town and how the matriarch of the town became the operator by default.

And being a person who was already nosy and in everyone’s business, she’d connect the caller’s line to its destination, but then she would stay on the line and eavesdrop.

It wasn’t the only place that the privacy and ethics line was crossed.

Almond Stowger was an undertaker in Kansas. city, Kansas, when he noticed his business was beginning to decline without explanation. He started asking questions and came to the realization that the phone exchange operator’s husband ran a competing undertaker’s business, and the operator was taking the calls meant for him and connecting them to her husband instead.

He was furious this was happening, but felt like complaining might backfire.

Though he wasn’t an engineer, he thought there had to be a way to connect a call without an operator intermediary. He thought he’d create a device that automatically would move the connector to the right position.

So, he built a prototype using spare parts, collar buttons, and anything else he could find.

And he succeeded.

His new Stowger Switch responded to each digit by sending an electric pulse to move the mechanical selector.

And this undertaker turned inventor sold his first Stowger Switch to the city of Leport, Indiana in 1892. Leport had 75 phone lines to which the switch worked perfectly.

Soon it began expanding and because of that one bad apple, the job of phone exchange operator, the most common job for women, completely disappeared.

And while Stowger didn’t become famous, the switch changed the world.

Businesses no longer held on to the belief that human labor was necessary. It was the first step in the 20th century’s push to automate wherever possible, removing the gatekeepers and moving control to the user.

Which brings us back to the music and Tin Pan Alley.

 At 17, Joe fell in love with a young singer named Ida Emerson.

They played the Vaudeville circuit and wrote songs under the name Howard and Emerson. While waiting at a train station once, Ida overheard a train porter talking to his girlfriend on the phone, flirting to keep her attention.

She thought it made a good idea for a song.

Their popularity and success on the Vaudeville circuit got them an engagement at Tony Pastor’s Music Hall in New York City, very near Tin Pan Alley.

Their engagement was a huge hit in 1898, and they decided to turn some of their songs into sheet music. The song about the porter on the telephone to his girlfriend was a mega hit, selling 1 million copies of sheet music in 1899.

The crazy thing about that song was that it was riding on the excitement about this new phone invention and it was making fun of this new word “hello” and how everyone was suddenly using this word.

The lyrics included, “hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my Ragtime gal.” The songs that came out of Tin Pan Alley would continue to be some of America’s most popular and top selling sheet music songs.

But technology once again would change that.

The rise of radio and the phonograph records would change American culture forever. Music would no longer be something you had to make. It became something you would consume.

Radios and record players would fill America’s parlors and pianos and sheet music would be pushed out.

Just like the Stowger Switch, technology would take the place of people.

Who needed a family piano player when you just had to put the needle on the record?
Who needed a telephone operator when a switch could do it?

Think about the music of the roaring 20s and the big bands of the 1930s. You don’t hear about musicians from the 1890s or the 1910s because that culture didn’t exist yet. And while the musicians of the 20s and 30s were good, part of their success was people’s excitement that they could hear this in their homes for the first time in human history.

Prior to Glenn Miller, it had been little Alexander Graham Bell playing “Give My Regards to Broadway” on on the living room piano.

Any music would have created the Roaring 20s.

Today, it is AI that is creating the worry that automation will replace jobs, which is true, it will. But just like every stage of life before us, there will become a new normal, new jobs, new experiences, just in time for more upheaval.