AT&T's savior was Theodore Vail, who became its president in 1907, just a few years after Millikan's friend Frank Jewett joined the company. In appearance, Vail seemed almost a caricature of a Gilded Age executive: Rotund and jowly, with a white walrus mustache, round spectacles, and a sweep of silver hair, he carried forth a magisterial confidence.
But he had in fact begun his career as a lowly telegraph operator.
Thoughtfulness was his primary asset; he could see almost any side of an argument.#6444•
One of Vail's first moves was to temper its aggression in the courts and reconsider its strategy in the field. He fired twelve thousand employees and consolidated the engineering departments (spread out in Chicago and Boston) in the New York office where Frank Jewett then worked. Meanwhile, Vail saw the value of working with smaller phone companies rather than trying to crush them.
He decided it was in the long-term interests of AT&T to buy independent phone companies whenever possible.
And when it seemed likely a few years later that the government was concerned about this strategy, Vail agreed to stop buying up companies without government permission.
He likewise agreed that AT&T would simply charge independent phone companies a fee for carrying long-distance calls.#6445•
He saw that a possible route to monopoly—or at least a near monopoly, which was what AT&T had always been striving for—could be achieved not through a show of muscle but through an acquiescence to political supervision. Yet his primary argument was an idea. He argued that telephone service had become "necessary to existence." Moreover, he insisted that the public would be best served by a technologically unified and compatible system—and that it made sense for a single company to be in charge of it.
Vail understood that government, or at least many politicians, would argue that phone subscribers must have protections against a monopoly; his company's expenditures, prices, and profits would thus have to be set by federal and local authorities#6443•
14 As a former political official who years before had modernized the U.S. Post Office to great acclaim, Vail was not hostile toward government. Still, he believed that in return for regulation Ma Bell deserved to find the path cleared for reasonable profits and industry dominance.#6441•
AT&T'S ENGINEERS HAD BEEN VEXED by distance from the very beginning. The telephone essentially converted the human voice into an electrical signal; in turn-of-the-century phones this was done by allowing sound waves produced by a voice to vibrate a taut diaphragm—usually a disc made of thin aluminum—that was backed by another thin metal disc.
A mild electric current ran between the two discs, which were separated by a chamber filled with the tiny carbon granules Edison had invented.
As sound waves from a voice vibrated the top diaphragm, waves of varying pressure moved through the granules below it.
The varying pressure would in turn vary the resistance to the electric current running between the metal discs.
In the process sound waves would be converted to electric waves.
On a simple journey, the electrified voice signal would then travel through a wire, to a switchboard, to another cable, to another switchboard, and finally to a receiver and a distant eardrum.
But a telephone voice signal was weak—much weaker and more delicate than a telegraph's simple dot-dash signal.
Even worse, the delicate signal would grow thinner—or "attenuate," to use the phone company's preferred term—after even a few miles.#6447•
In the telephone's first few decades, AT&T's engineers had found that different methods could move a phone call farther and farther. Copper wire worked better than iron wire, and stiff, "hard-drawn" copper wire seemed to work even better. Best of all was extremely thick-gauge hard-drawn copper wire. The engineers likewise discovered that an invention known as "loading coils" inserted on the wires could extend the signal tremendously.
Finally, there were "repeaters." These were mechanical amplifiers that took the sound of a weakening voice and made it louder so the call could travel many miles farther.
But you could only install a few repeaters on a line before the advantages of boosting a call's volume were undone by distortion and the attenuation of the signals.
And that left the engineers at a final disconnect.
The tricks of their trade might allow them to conquer a distance of about 1,700 miles, roughly from New York to Denver#6448•
But there were also profound challenges of science. "The crux of the problem," Jewett wrote in describing his conversations with Carty, "was a satisfactory telephone repeater or amplifier":
Did we know how to develop such a repeater? No. Why not? Science hadn't yet shown us the way. Did we have any reason to think that she would? Yes. In time? Possibly. What must we do to make "possibly" into "probably" in two years?
And so on night after night without end almost#6440•
Carty and Jewett eventually told Vail they would do it—and the task soon came to be Jewett's personal responsibility. That was risky on a number of counts. Jewett's talents were as a manager and social sophisticate; he was quick to apprehend technical problems but not necessarily equipped to solve them. On the other hand, he knew someone who could help.#6439•
Within two years Arnold came up with several possible solutions to the repeater problem, but he mainly went to work on improving an amplifier known as the audion that had been brought to AT&T in 1912 by an independent, Yale-trained inventor named Lee De Forest. The early audion was vaguely magical. It resembled a small incandescent light bulb, yet instead of a hot wire filament strung between two supporting wires it had three elements—a metal filament that would get hot and emit electrons (called a cathode); a metal plate that would stay cool and attract electrons (called an anode); and between them a wire mesh, or "grid." A small electrical current, or signal, that was applied to the audion's grid could be greatly amplified by another electrical current that was traveling from the hot cathode to the cool anode.
Arnold found, through trial and error, the best materials, as well as a superior way to evacuate the air inside the audion tube.
(He suspected correctly that a high vacuum would greatly improve the audion's efficiency.) Once Arnold had refined the audion, he, Jewett, and Millikan convened in Philadelphia to test it against other potential repeater ideas.
The men listened in on phone conversations that were passed through the various repeaters, and they found the audion clearly superior.
Soon to be known as the vacuum tube, it and its descendants would revolutionize twentieth-century communications.#6442•