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Early TransmittersA glass telephone? a gas-powered phone? a cork phone? Why not? Please note: this page contains many illustrations and will take a while to load. Please be patient. Part 1: Carbon Pencil Transmitters In the earliest days of telephony, Bell and Western Union challenged each other in the U.S. courts over just who had invented the telephone. The legal fight ended in victory for Bell, who received all Western Union's patents as part of the settlement deal. These included Edison's carbon transmitter, the basis for most future transmitters. Bell now had to defend these patents against the many small companies that had sprung up to service the new industry. To avoid the legal problems, inventors worked tirelessly to produce new devices to get around the Bell patents. This essay examines some of them, from the technically interesting to the downright silly. Transmitters were covered by two main patents - Bell's, which described a permanent magnet; coil and diaphragm assembly, and Edison's , which used lamp black (fine carbon powder) or other substance whose resistance varied with pressure, and a metallic diaphragm to apply that pressure. Most of the alternate transmitters used variations of these, just different enough to avoid patent infringement.
The drawback of the Crossley and Gower was their size. A large sounding board was needed, and generally it was mounted horizontally, so the phones were quite large. It must have been an odd feeling for the user, talking down to a flat piece of wood on top of a box. For this reason most inventors concentrated on building phones with a vertical diaphragm. Mr A C Swinton devised an improved transmitter which did away with a diaphragm. A number of carbon pencils were strung on a taut platinum wire through holes at one end of the pencils.The other end of the pencils rested lightly against a horizontal carbon block, and the assembly was mounted in a lead frame. The pencils and wire vibrated with the voice. This device could be "tuned" for quite respectable performance by adjusting the angle of tilt of the frame, and therefore the pressure of the pencils on the block. It was rather fragile and susceptible to temperature change.
An interesting variation was the D'Arsonval transmitter, which had a thin iron sheath over each pencil. A horseshoe magnet behind the pencils could be adjusted by a screw to vary the pressure of the pencils against the blocks. By this means a very sensitive long distance transmitter could be obtained.
DeJongh produced a rather complicated arrangement where the pencils were mounted horizontally on brass pins set into the backboard. The pins sloped down at the front so the pencils rested against carbon blocks glued to the back of the diaphragm. The arrangement was very delicate and expensive and needed to be isolated from the phone case by rubber mounts. The expense of construction made it less practical than other models , although it was also refined by Allsop in the late 1890s.
It also turned up in the United States, where carbon balls were substituted for the pencils. They were mounted in cutouts in a carbon back block and rested lightly against the diaphragm. The design was possibly from Holzer-Cabot but this is unconfirmed. The illustration shows an "Acousticon" transmitter from the Dictograph company using this principle. Its construction is quite simple, but the machining would need to be rather precise. Dictograph's transmitters achieved a high reputation for their sensitivity, and were built into some of the earliest desktop handsfree intercom systems. Excellent photos and technical details are available at Mike Schultz's website at http://www.uv201.com/Microphone_Pages/dictograph.htm
The Johnson Telephone Company in Britain improved the original Hughes model by using two carbon pencils and including a resistance coil in the circuit. This ensured that the circuit would not be broken even when the carbon pencils were quite active. It also eliminated the buzzing and humming that the Hughes was prone to. A thin sheet of mica acted as waterproofing on the diaphragm. It was reasonably sensitive on short lines, and inexpensive to build, but was not introduced in time to make large sales . It also solved one other problem. The coil allowed a standard resistance to be presented to the line, a worthwhile improvement in view of the wide range of transmitters now in use.
This was about the peak of carbon pencil technology. Once Bell's patents expired , manufacturers returned to the Edison carbon transmitter and worked on improving it into the carbon granule transmitter that was to last through most of the twentieth century. Part 2 : Carbon Button Transmitters Edison's patent on a carbon-powder transmitter effectively locked other manufacturers out of this style for seventeen years until his patent expired. It was the most efficient transmitter, but other types were explored in the interim. One alternate style was the single-carbon-contact transmitter. The transmitter was delicate and required careful adjustment, but it worked well on short lines. It was not particularly sensitive, because of the single contact, but at least the coil prevented total dropouts. Its size required that it be mounted in a separate box, and this gave rise to the large three-box phones of this period. In spite of these shortcomings it was produced in large numbers, simply because Bell could not afford to develop anything else. Gent's transmitter was a much simpler idea. It had a wooden diaphragm with a carbon button glued to it. The rear contacts were carbon buttons mounted on weighted pivot arms. Adjustment of the weights varied the pressure on the buttons. The wooden diaphragm worked around Edison's patents. Although reported to give very good results, it would have been delicate and subject to dropouts. It quickly faded into history. It is interesting to note that Crossley and others used much the same arrangement with carbon pencils instead of carbon buttons, and achieved some commercial success.
f one diaphragm is good, two must be better. Burnley's transmitter split the mouthpiece into two tubes which fed sound to two diaphragms. Each had a carbon button glued to it and the two buttons rested against each other to provide the necessary carbon contacts. Technically it probably made sense, but it was bulky. These last three transmitters showed the main weakness in the single-contact design - they were usually not very sensitive, and multiple diaphragms or a large single one were usually needed. Only the Blake made it into large scale production, for the reasons mentioned. Even it was soon replaced as better transmitters became available. L M Ericsson, for instance, produced a replacement carbon granule unit which neatly fitted into the mouthpiece cavity of a Blake box, and many Bell/Western Electric phones were upgraded this way. As a result, Blakes are now rare. All these transmitters disappeared as the new HunningsCone carbon-granule transmitter established its superiority. They are now interesting, if rare, technical oddities.
Part 3: Carbon Granule Transmitters Early research on carbon-pencil transmitters showed that an improvement was made by adding more carbon-to-carbon contacts. The size of the pencil was less important. If the pencil was replaced by carbon granules, more contacts could be fitted into the same space. Unfortunately Edison's patent on carbon powder transmitters covered this pretty well, so for some years any developments in this area could only be used by the Bell company who owned the patent.
Eventually Berliner patented the transmitter in Europe and it went into production there.
Berthon in France improved the Berliner by mounting spherical carbon granules between two carbon plates separated by a rubber ring. Adjustment, as in the Berliner, was by screwing the two plates closer together . One plate had concentric grooves machined into it. These and the carbon spheres greatly reduced packing and made the transmitter much less clumsy. Adjustment was critical and the carbon balls were expensive to make and rather fragile, so the design never went into wide use. The idea was good, though, and it was improved on later in the Solid Back transmitter. A number of similar British transmitters were marketed with small carbon balls instead of granules. They were known as "Manchester Shot" transmitters.
It is particularly interesting to note that all these developments took only about ten years to the mid 1890s.
Part 4: The Strange Ones The principle of varying an electric current by passing it through some compressible carbon medium was well understood, and most alternative transmitters to the Bell designs used some variation of this principle. But there is always an inventor somewhere who wants to do it the hard way. Some of these people should have known better. Amos Dolbear almost got it right in 1880 with a Condenser Receiver. It consisted of two thin metal plates, one fixed, isolated by a narrow air gap, with a high voltage applied between them. By varying the voltage, the distance between the plates varied and sound could be produced. In a neat bit of reverse engineering, this principle was used to produce a highly workable condenser microphone in the 1890s. The movable plate became the diaphragm, and the voltage varied with the distance between the plates. It turned out to be impractical for telephone use because of the high voltages needed. It was mainly used for early radio work, where high voltages were readily available and were needed for the early unamplified radio transmitters. In the 1970s the idea was revived to produce high fidelity ribbon loudspeakers by Wharfedale in Britain, among others.
Tainter, not a man to leave a bad idea alone, then went on to produce the Radiophone. In construction it was similar to the Photophone, but used focussed heat from a gas flame instead of light, and lamp-black to absorb the heat instead of selenium. Carbon's resistance decreases as it heats up, generating a variable resistance in much the same way as the Photophone. It was thoroughly ignored, as a gas-powered telephone deserved to be. A simple solution to making a more powerful carbon transmitter was to increase the voltage through it. A number of experimenters tried this, but at more than three volts the carbon granules tended to heat up and fuse together or jerk apart violently as they expanded. The arcing and burning generated a lot of noise on the line, and eventually would render the transmitter useless. Some experimenters tried air cooling in the carbon chamber, but a more successful version was Prof. R A Fessenden's Trough Carbon Transmitter. This circulated water through a jacket around the carbon, and allowed up to 15 amps to be carried through the transmitter. Although impractical for telephony it also found its niche in the early radio transmitters where such high currents could be used. Majorana's Hydraulic Transmitter combined the condenser microphone with water cooling to produce what sounds like the most dangerous transmitter ever built. A jet of pressurised acid water was passed between two platinum plates, one of which acted as the diaphragm. The varying distance between the plates varied the electrical current carried through the water. The acid water acted as a conductor , coolant, and a way of removing air bubbles caused by electrolysis. Again, it could carry massive currents, so it also finally found its application in radio telephony. Unamplified it could reputedly carry a voice transmission over 500 kilometres. I cannot imagine how a microphone carrying high voltage and current and filled with acid under pressure would be regarded in Occupational Safety circles these days. It was finally made redundant by De Forrest's invention of the amplifying valve. This allowed the signal to be built up at the receiving end, removing the need for such high power at the transmitter. These transmitters were simply impractical compared with the cheaper, more reliable carbon transmitters. In spite of this, they are noteworthy for the way they exploited obscure scientific principles and sometimes found their own niche.
Telephony - McMeen & Miller, 1923 The Practical Telephone Handbook- J Poole, 1912 Telephones - Their Construction & Fitting , F C Allsop 1917 A Manual Of Telephony - Preece & Stubbs , 1893 Telephone - The First 100 Years -
John Brooks 1975 The Practical Telephone Handbook - J Poole 1891 Electric Bells and Telephones - B E Jones, Amateur Mechanic & Work Handbook, 1926 Popular Guide to Commercial and Domestic Telephony - M Byng andF G Bell1898
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