Fatal Induction, page 4
“A subscriber must be able to enjoy the service by listening on a standard telephone headset. That’s what would be included with the cost of service for a subscriber.”
“Would it be against the rules to provide upgraded equipment that would represent something available for a separate fee to those who desire it?”
“Not at all.” Mr. Fisher’s eyes twinkled, and Bradshaw knew he wasn’t the first to ask. “Mind you, the majority of our subscribers will likely choose to listen on their telephones. This must be an affordable service. And I’ve never heard a decent quality sound come from any telephone connected to a horn.” Here, Mr. Fisher’s brow lifted hopefully. Bradshaw remained silent on the superior loud talker he intended to supply, but he was beginning to feel a trickle of excitement despite himself.
“The test will include listeners in one hundred homes who will rate the quality of the sound delivered. One of those listeners will be outfitted with any upgraded premium receiver a contestant provides. In fact, we announced the lucky one hundred last week—we held a drawing, thousands put in their names—and the wires are being strung as we speak.”
“You’re using a dedicated line?”
“Much easier to control quality. I don’t want to be at the mercy of the telephone company. I have big plans if this is successful. I’ll start a new business, a newspaper without the paper, just like they have in Budapest, with news and entertainment flowing all day long to subscribers. They’ll want a dedicated line for that. In London, subscribers must ring up central and ask to be connected, and then they can’t make or receive calls until they ring off.”
“You’ve done your homework, Mr. Fisher. You are familiar with the details of all the services around the world.”
“Indeed I am! The way I see it, the telephone is now a necessity of the home, and its many uses shouldn’t conflict. No one will be hampered by a subscription to my service. It’s a marvelous age to be living in, isn’t it, Professor?”
Oh, yes, he did agree, but even with his enthusiasm mounting, he couldn’t bring himself to say something so lighthearted on this somber day.
“Might it be possible to have my house connected to the line for testing purposes?”
“Yes, of course, the other two entrants have been given the same. If you win, I will allow you to keep the service free of charge for an entire year.”
A lifetime of free service seemed the more suiting offer to Bradshaw, but Fisher’s profits were not to be shared, not even with the inventor responsible for them.
Under Mr. Fisher’s pleased and watchful eye, Bradshaw took a notepad, pencil, and spring tape measure from his pocket. “I should like to take some measurements and also see your building plans, if you have them.”
“Certainly, certainly. Whatever you need. Would you like to hear something from the stage? Miss Darlyrope is in her dressing room. I’m sure I could entice her to perform a number or two. We canceled yesterday’s performances, naturally, but we’re on schedule today. Unless we hear…has there been any news?”
The smile had vanished from Mr. Fisher’s plump face. His eyes crinkled with concern, and even his jowls sagged with sorrow.
“The president is resting comfortably. The prognosis is still uncertain.”
“I heard the shooter’s name wasn’t Fred but Leon, with some foreign sounding last name.”
“Leon Czolgosz, I believe.” Bradshaw pronounced the last name “chol-gosh” as he’d heard it at the newspaper office. News was beginning to emerge about him. His parents had been found in Ohio.
Mr. Fisher shook his head with a look of disgust. “However you say it, he’s ruined my business. No one will want to come as long as the president’s health is in question. Who knows how long it will be until our audiences return in full?”
“Damned inconsiderate of McKinley to keep us on tenterhooks like this.”
“You’re being sarcastic with me, Professor, but there’s truth to what you say. I’ve no patience for politics meddling in my profits. Well. I’ll just go get Miss Darlyrope. She’s my best singer, you know.”
Mr. Fisher scurried off and Bradshaw got to work sketching and measuring. He’d forgotten about the promised singer by the time she appeared on stage with Mr. Fisher. A tall, full-figured young woman draped in blue fabric that looked suspiciously like a dressing gown, Miss Darlyrope wore her shining black hair piled high like an Egyptian monument. She snatched her hand from Mr. Fisher’s grasp. He stepped away with an ingratiating apology and pleaded, “Just a few stanzas, that’s all.”
The actress’ angry gaze swept over the empty seats until colliding with Bradshaw.
“Is that him?”
“Yes, that’s the professor.”
She took a deep breath and began to sing a familiar tune about lost love. She did have a lovely voice that carried well and filled the air with an angry resonance. Before she was more than a minute into the tune, her anger trembled, her voice cracked. She paused, raised her chin as if to compose herself, but she could not go on. A sob escaped her.
Mr. Fisher came hurrying from the wings, reaching out to her. She rebuffed him, wrapping her arms about herself protectively. “I’m just too upset, Mr. Fisher. Daisy—oh, Daisy!” She ran from the stage. Mr. Fisher climbed down to Bradshaw.
“I’m sorry about that, Professor. One of the chorus girls has taken ill. It’s a pity. Has the women all in a tizzy.” He tossed up his hands. “I must admit, it’s shaken me a bit, too. The poor girl has gone blind.”
Was it the girl he was concerned with, or losing her talent? “Scarlet fever?” Bradshaw felt a small prick of fear, thinking of that dread disease and the possibility of his carrying the germs home to his son.
“No, no, it was nothing contagious, thank goodness. It was poison. She’d become addicted to a tonic she bought from a street peddler. You take your life in your hands when you drink any medicine that doesn’t come from a trusted chemist.”
Bradshaw’s fear had not abated. “What was the name of the tonic?”
“Ralph’s Restorative.”
Chapter Five
“Dad, how does a telephone work?”
Bradshaw handed his son a round metal disc about the size of a silver dollar. “Drop it,” he said.
Justin, perched on the three-legged stool before Bradshaw’s basement workbench, lifted his hand high and let the disc drop. It hit the cement floor with a clang.
“Did you hear that sound?”
“Yes.”
“Know why you heard it?”
“Because I have ears?”
“Yes. And because when that disc hit the floor, the impact carried through the metal, making it vibrate. Those vibrations traveled through the air up to your ear, making the inside of your ear vibrate.”
“Oh. But how does a telephone work?”
“Much the same as your ears. There are metal discs, diaphragms they’re called, inside of telephones, along with batteries, magnets, coils, and tiny carbon beads. When you talk into a telephone, the sound strikes the diaphragm and causes it to vibrate in and out. Whenever the diaphragm moves inwards, it squeezes the beads. The carbon flexes a little bit, like rubber balls pushed together.” He quickly sketched a diagram to illustrate.
“All the tiny contacts between the beads are like electricity valves that slightly open and close. They change in time with the sound waves, which alters the battery’s current. Our battery now isn’t pumping just any old current, but a very clever current which contains the vibrations of the sounds that created it. That signal travels along the telephone wires you see strung up on poles. At the distant telephone, the changing current is turning an electromagnetic coil slightly on and off. It pulls a metal diaphragm in and out, which then moves the air with the sound waves of your voice.”
Justin cocked his head thoughtfully. “But why? Why does that all happen?”
“The same reason flowers grow when you plant their seeds. It’s their nature. It’s how metal and magnets and electricity interact.”
“But this isn’t a flower, it’s all made up stuff. People made them. How did they know to make them?”
“By experimenting. Alexander Graham Bell is the man who experimented and figured out this particular relationship between sound vibrations and electric current. A doctor friend gave him the ear from a cadaver—that’s a dead body.”
Justin’s eyes got huge. “A dead ear!”
“Yes, still attached to part of a skull. Bell examined it and experimented with it to see how it recognized sound waves.”
“Do you experiment with dead ears?” He looked around the basement, as if hoping to spot a gruesome display.
“No need, thank goodness. Did I ever tell you about the day I met Mr. Bell?”
“Did you see the ear?”
“No, the ear had been buried years before I met Mr. Bell. He lived in Boston, where I grew up. When I was a boy, just a year or so older than you, I went to one of his lectures with my father. That was when the telephone was so new, some people doubted it even worked. I got to go up on stage and put my ear to the receiver and hear a voice coming all the way from New York. That might not seem much to you since you’ve grown up with telephones, but I’d never heard a live human voice coming from a machine before. No one had. I was amazed. I was so impressed by Mr. Bell, I knew one day I wanted to be an inventor, too.”
He looked at his son’s eager blue eyes and wondered if the magic of science was taking hold. He didn’t want to force his passion on his son, but he secretly hoped the boy would one day share his interests.
Justin jumped down from the stool and ran for the stairs.
“Where are you going?”
“To tell Paul about Bell’s dead ear!”
A smile lingered for a good long while in Bradshaw’s heart as he began to work. From delight in his son his mood eased into the complete immersion of invention. The news of McKinley had been hopeful. The doctors had operated, and the president still lived, and so Bradshaw felt safe, and guilt-free, in allowing the world and all its troubles to recede. Ideas that had been simmering in the back of his mind came forward to find action in his fingertips, in the drawing of diagrams, the tightening of screws, and the fine tuning of various sensitive devices.
His subconscious had been busy. Actually, he’d been stewing on telephonic ideas since his senior year of college when Edward Bellamy’s book, Looking Backward, was first published. Oh, he and Henry Pratt had spent countless hours speculating on fantastic inventions that would revolutionize the world. Henry had been, and still was, too argumentative, independent, and impulsive to actually pick up a pencil to draft any of those ideas, let alone build them. His impulsive nature had given a breadth to his educational pursuits, but no depth, and no degree.
While Bradshaw had applied himself purposefully to a degree in electrical engineering from the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, Henry Pratt had enrolled in a wide variety of courses that took his fancy, argued with each and every professor, and eventually dropped out to unsuccessfully pursue easy money through very hard labor. Yet he continued to be a happy carefree man, content with a beer in hand, a pretty girl in view, and a good friend to argue with.
Recalling those days, Bradshaw experienced a welling of joy. For an instant, he was filled with the same enthusiasm he’d felt as a boy, a young man, when the world was his to explore, to invent, to achieve. He stood still for a moment, relishing the feeling, breathing in the scent of his basement, metals and oil and the sweetness of cut grass drifting through the transom window. He was almost afraid to move, lest the moment vanish. He wanted to share the feeling. He wanted to tell Missouri. She would understand. He probably wouldn’t even need to explain. She would look at him and know.
If only…if only he had met Missouri back in college. Missouri instead of Rachel.
But when Bradshaw was in college, Henry’s niece had been a child Justin’s age. And without Rachel, he would not have Justin. He could never fully regret Rachel because of Justin.
His smile had vanished.
With a sigh, he cleared a space on his workbench and laid out a crisp, clean white sheet of paper. He sharpened three dark pencils in the steel sharpener clamped to the bench, easing back into the haven of mechanical action. He opened a fine leather pocket case, revealing his German silver drawing instruments: compasses, rulers, ruling pens, and spring dividers.
He stood back and took a deep, expectant breath. The vision of his invention was clear in his mind, carefully crafted, functioning perfectly. He could almost hear the orchestra playing.
Getting this vision to appear in reality would take much work, trial and error and setbacks. He thought of Alexander Bell, a man of wild temperament compared to Bradshaw’s conservative nature. But they had this in common, this fascination with invention and discovery. This project before him now, which utilized Bell’s most famous invention, gave him a pleasurable feeling of connection.
He divided his sheet of paper into four sections. In the upper corner, he sketched the approximate shape of the auditorium. The theater had been designed to project sounds from the stage and pit out to the audience. He’d noticed that his competitors had already installed devices in the footlights; such placement was typical of other systems. But that location came with inherent problems, including the amplifying of footsteps on stage and the possible drowning of voices by the proximity of the orchestra. The best location for his transmitters would be near the center seats of the dress circle, where all the sounds from stage and orchestra blended harmoniously.
Mr. Fisher would not want to sacrifice any of his best paying seats, and he certainly didn’t want any theater-goer interfering with equipment. So why not hang the transmitters above the seats? Suspended from the ceiling. This would have the added benefit of protecting them from accidental bumping while picking up the exciting buzz of pre-show conversation, and thus prove an even more realistic theater experience for the home listener. A few additional microphones could hang above the stage, to be sure every articulation was captured.
A small tingle radiated up Bradshaw arms, a sign that always meant he was moving in the right direction. Already, he’d stumbled upon something he was sure would set his system above the other entries.
In the square adjacent to the theater drawing, Bradshaw drew a rough sketch of his microphone transmitter with the components separated and labeled. The third space, he filled with a map, showing the theater-phone lines leaving Mr. Fisher’s well-equipped “central station” room, and carrying music to subscribers’ homes. He also added a line to the Sunset Telephone Company’s central office. This would provide a backup for Mr. Fisher’s service, as well as provide an inexpensive method of delivering a trial service to prospective subscribers.
In the final square, he depicted the inside of a parlor with the horn of a loud-talker centrally located. This was the crucial piece. This was the piece that would put a smile on Mr. Fisher’s greedy cherubic face. This was the piece that would change the world. Bradshaw laughed aloud. No, a competent loud-talker with minimal distortion and maximum fidelity would not greatly change the world. However, it would certainly enhance it, and put his system a notch above any other currently in existence. If he could manage, in just one month, to improve the amplified loud-talker he’d been working on intermittently for more than a year.
He drew a neat box in the corner of this section and sketched in the required headphone receiver.
He stood back and analyzed his plan, his brow furled, his heart smiling. The world had disappeared again: his dream was on paper.
He sketched his microphone transmitter, fine-tuned to the specific task of gathering theater sounds, from music to soft human voices, to sound effects and applause. Someday, he hoped to create a transmitter as acoustically adept as the human ear, and a receiver with the musical range of the human voice.
Should he, like Bell, get himself a cadaver ear? Vocal cords? He shuddered, but was intrigued. The human ear was so very small and efficient at gathering sounds, the human throat and mouth so adept at reproducing them. Could a mechanical equivalent be designed?
One major difficulty lay in the distance between the transmitting and receiving devices. The human ear was directly connected to its receiver, the brain, while Bradshaw’s electric ear would be many blocks, or miles, away. Those myriad vibrations would need to be preserved in ordinary telephone wire and reanimated into sound waves once they reached their destination.
Well, for now his transmitter would do the job. As with nearly all inventions, he could not claim it to be entirely his own. He’d built upon the knowledge and discoveries of every man before him. Still, his variation of the arrangement of the components, his use of mixed-sized carbon beads to prevent packing, and the internal cone that focused and concentrated every bit of sound were unique enough to qualify as new.
He’d recently filed a patent, but hadn’t yet heard if it had been approved. He quelled the instinct to panic. What if someone else was even now being approved for a similar transmitter?
No. He would not let the panic infect him. He no longer played that mad game. The world would not end if someone beat him to the patent office. If he repeated this thought often enough in his mind, he might get his gut to believe it.
Now, the receiver, the device that would require every spare moment of his time. He reached for a small screwdriver and heard the door at the top of the basement stairs open, heard Mrs. Prouty in the kitchen tell Justin to check the mouse traps but mind he didn’t touch them, heard the light tap of feminine footsteps coming down the stairs.
He looked at the screwdriver in his hand, unable to think of what he intended to do with it.
