Death of Watson

In March 1876, two young scientists worked hard, fast and eagerly in their shop in a Boston boardinghouse attic. One was Thomas Augustus Watson. The other was Alexander Graham Bell. Following Bell's instructions Watson had constructed the first crude telephone, but the results were disappointing. Sounds came over the wire, but no intelligible words.

A new transmitter was made in which a diaphragm of goldbeater's skin was attached to a wire which in turn was dipped in dilute sulphuric acid. With no idea whether the transmitter was good or bad, the two experimenters installed a line connecting the front and back rooms. Watson went to the front room, took up his post at the receiver. In his excitement, Bell in the back room drenched his clothes with acid spilled froma battery. He called into the transmitter: "Mr. Watson, come here; I want you." Trembling with jubilation Watson rushed to the back room crying, "I heard you! I heard you!" Then Alexander Graham Bell lost all thought of his ruined clothes.

Thomas Augustus Watson was a livery stableman's son, a shy boy who roamed the woods declaiming poems to trees and stones. He got a job in a machine shop where young inventors brought their work. His interest in voice culture brought him to the attention of Bell, who was teaching deaf-mutes in a Boston school. At the time Bell was tinkering with a "harmonic telegraph" by which he hoped to send several messages at once over the same wire.* The two men accidentally discovered that the tones and overtones of a vibrating transmitter reed could be carried electrically over a wire, reproduced at the end. Bell at once laid down his plans for the telephone.

In the years following that dramatic first success, Watson toiled away in Boston, made improvements, took out patents, kept the books, while Bell went off on lecture tours to raise money. As a climax Lecturer Bell would let his audiences hear Watson singing "Do Not Trust Him, Gentle Lady" over the telephone. While Bell was abroad Watson took charge of their enterprises at home. In 1881 he retired, hungry for new experiences. He tried farming, married, became interested in marine motors. A one-room shop with two helpers grew into the Fore River Ship & Engine Co. which employed 4.000 men and built the Navy's first destroyers. He lost control in the depression of 1903. He prospected for gold in Death Valley and Alaska. In his old age he turned to painting, scurried around Europe studying old masters. The first transcontinental telephone conversation in 1915 was between Bell in Manhattan and Watson in San Francisco. The words were familiar, epochal: "Mr. Watson, come here; I want you!" Bell died in 1922. Last week, in St. Petersburg. Fla., Thomas Augustus Watson's 80-year-old heart stopped dead.

*The quadruplex message problem was solved by Thomas Alva Edison in 1874.

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