A CST PUBLICATION

HOW IT WORKS

THE
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BY NAVKALA ROY
DESIGNED AND ILLUSTRATED BY
SUBIR ROY
 I-
THE
CHANGING 1875
SHAPE - The first telephone instrument made
OF by Alexander Graham Bell in 1875
SOUND I

1879 1880 1880 1905

This device required the user .... The Gower-Bell telephone of The candlestick The telephone t-
An Edison receiver (1879) to speak into the box with the the early 1880's with two today
telephone of 1905
receiver to his ear (1880) listening tubes
I I I

R. Watson, come here, I want to see
you," shouted an angry Bell.
Watson jumped out of his chair. There was
no one in the room. Yet he'd heard a voice.
It was a familiar voice and it was loud and
clear. Then suddenly it hit him. The
telephone. It had come alive at last. The
miracle had happened.
Watson rushed to Bell's room, breathless
with joy. "I could hear you. It works," he said.
That was March 10, 1876. More than a
hundred years ago.
From ship to shore; from air to land; from
car to car; from just about anywhere to
anywhere today you can speak to someone
by just dialling a number. In fact, you have
the world at your finger-tips. And when
Astronaut Rakesh Sharma calls up Mrs. Indira
Gandhi from space you just take it in your
stride. So dramatic has been the development
of the telephone. And only forty years before
the telephone was invented, man was patting
himself on his back for having perfected the
methods of communication.
That was when the electric telegraph was
used. It was in 1838 that the American,
Samuel Morse, patented his single wire
telegraph. His design used the famous Morse
code in which combinations of short and long
signals - dots and dashes - indicate letters.
Messages were sent at up to ten words a
. minute with a hand-operated key and were
received as marks made by a pen on a paper
tape. These signals had to be decoded and
written out by hand.
In 1855 Professor David Hughes invented
a printing telegraph. The operator sent
messages from a keyboard, each key of
which represented a letter. The machine
turned the letters into electric signals
automatically and, at the other end, another
machine printed the message.
These were major breakthroughs in the
field of communication, but still not the same
as 'talking' to someone, and nowhere near
having a cosy chat with someone.
o

It was at this time that Alexander Graham
Bell, the young professor of speech, began
his experiments with electricity. Often
he would visit the mills and factories located
near his house and observe how the
machines were operated. Once he called on
Charles Wheatstone, the inventor of the
. magnetic needle telegraph. So impressed
was he by this mail that he determined to
follow in his footsteps.
Bell was keen to develop a telegraph·
system that would allow multiple transmission
of messages at once. He felt that this could
be achieved by transmitting each message
on a separate, specially tuned steel strip, or
reed. Each reed would vibrate a different
number of times per second and so produce
a different musical note.
It was while one such experiment was
being carried out, on June 2, 1875, that a
receiving reed, which was being watched
closely by his assistant, Thomas Watson, in
another room, failed to vibrate. Watson
thought the reed was stuck and pulled at it.
When he did that. a similar receiving reed
vibrated in Bell's room.
"What's this!" said Bell astonished, but
realized almost immediately that he had hit
upon something great. He had discovered
that a tiny electric current caused by one
vibrating reed was powerful enough to cause
another reed to vibrate audibly. He also
realized that instead of a single note the reed
had reproduced several notes. Human
speech, as Bell knew only too well, is also
made up of a mixture of sounds of different
frequencies and Bell believed that he could
use this system to transmit the human voice.
Lo and behold, a month later, Bell produced
a pair of simple telephones.
Bell had made a deep study on sounds as
he had always wanted to help deaf and dumb
children. He, therefore, knew that a stretched
membrane would be more suitable for sound
 .-
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. Bell demonstrating
the first telephone

I
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reproduction than a reed. He finally decided
to use an iron diaphragm. On March 10, 1876,
when he accidently discovered that his phone
worked, he was delirious with joy.
It was the first time in the world that people
could talk to each other over long distances
and feel that they had almost met the person.
After all there can be no substitute for a
human voice.
Bell was keen to promote the idea of this
new device and travelled extensively in the
United States and Europe to spread the word.
He even demonstrated how one could talk to
someone under water.
But most people pooh-poohed the idea. In
London, a post office official said it would
never catch on because there were sufficient
messenger boys.
Finally on January 24, 1878, Bell carried
out a demonstration for Queen Victoria at
Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight. So
impressed was the Queen that she asked
Bell to supply her with telephones
Immediately.
••
.. ••
•
. ...
......
Number, please
As news spread, a keener interest was
created in the telephone, though it was
restricted to small areas until the 1890's.
Individual subscribers were connected to
each other by exchanges that were controlled
by operators.
When somebody wished to make a call all
he did was lift the receiver and wait for the
operator's response.
"Number, please," the operator would say
and connect you to the number you wanted.
In fact, so personal was everything those
days that on some exchanges all you did
 was lift the receiver and ask for the person
An 1879 hand-operated switchboard
you wished to talk to. Only one had to shout
in order to be understood by the other person.
Early models resembled a box camera with
a round projection at one end. This served
• as the transmitter and receiver. So anyone
making a call had to be extremely careful
while moving his ear and mouth. Bruised lips
and ears were not an uncommon sight. In
fact, one model carried the notice: "Do not
listen with your mouth and talk with your ear!"

•
•Do Not Li~ifN
With YWR
Mouth A~d 1ciJk
with
• OUI" Bo.Y'! •

------------------~ 0

As Bell's transmitters had poor sensitivity,
calls were limited to a few miles. It was at
this time that Thomas Alva Edison, the
famous American inventor, stepped in.
Edison was the next best thing that
happened to the telephone. He produced a
telephone with a separate mouthpiece and
a much superior transmitter with a carbon
component. When spoken into,it changed the
sound of the voice into a varying electrical
signal which was converted back into speech
by the ear-piece at the other end.
By the beginning of the 1900's, the
telephone had grown in popularity, especially
in the United States. Some exchanges were
so large that there were long lines of
operators seated at switch boards made up
of hundreds of plugs and sockets.
India, believe it or not, was one of the first
countries in the world to have a telephone
exchange. And Calcutta was where it all
started.
In 1881, barely five years after Bell made
his discovery, a 50-line exchange was set up
in Calcutta. Then came the automatic
telephone exchange with 700 lines, which
was established in Shimla in 1913. But it was
only after 1951 that the Indian telephone
service made rapid progress. Subscriber
Trunk Dialling (STD), first introduced between
Kanpur and Lucknow in 1960, now operates
on practically every route in India and many
outside the country too.
'Tele' literally means 'at a distance' and
'phone' is an instrument using sound. Thus
'telephone' would imply 'an instrument that
carries sound from a distance.'
 Today telephone users in most parts of the
world can dial 80% of the world's subscribers
directly. Telephone 'hot-lines' keep world
leaders in contact with each other to avoid
the accidental outbreak of a nuclear war.
Even on the battlefield it is now possible to
link soldiers to the international telephone
network and a person from the most isolated
oil platform in the sea can make calls
throughout the world.
Your parents can hold international
business meetings by merely going to a
closed circuit television studio and talking to
executives in similar studios in other countries
while the television pictures and the sound
are being carried over the telephone network.
The telephone network has also been able
to link computers in many countries to vast
information networks. It can transmit
television programmes such as the Olympic
Games to more than a 100 countries. It can
be used to turn a television set into a terminal
connected to a computer, providing vast
amounts of information through videotex.
In the future this could form the basis of
an electronic mail service with people sending
private messages from one television set to
another via the telephone network. It would
be cheaper and much faster than
conventional post.
With so much happening around us it is
hard to believe that once upon a time
messages were sent by using a line of
bonfires on hill-tops, by beating drums or
tying notes to carrier pigeons speci.ally trained
to fly home quickly from a distance.
Few of us realize how complex and
ingenious is the mechanism that is set in
motion the moment one dials a telephone
number. How does your voice get carried
through miles and miles of wire? How is it
that you can hear even kids crying in the
background, doors slamming and music
playing through the wires of the telephone?
Without the telephone today, business and
social life would be seriously disrupted. This
was demonstrated in 1979 when a strike by
telephone workers halted the telephone sy-
stem in Ireland for several weeks. Millions
of pounds worth of orders were lost because
companies could not reply quickly to requests
and their business was won by competitors.

In order to understand this let's first
understand sound. Air helps sound to travel.
If there was no air we would not hear any
sound. You can prove this by placing a bell
under a glass bowl and ringing it. You'll be
able to hear it clearly. Now if you draw the
air out with a suction pump, the sound of the
bell will disappear. This is because there is
nothing to carry the sound.
Air is something quite real, even though
we cannot see it. Just as ripples are made
in water, they are made in the air too and
How sound travels
are called sound-waves. Let us take for
instance, a sheet of metal and see what
happens when we hit it. The force of the blow
makes the metal tremble. The to and fro
motion so caused is called vibration. A guitar
string vibrates when we pluck it. As the metal
sheet vibrates it pushes the air forward and
backward quickly, so that little ripples or
waves are made; which travel away from the
metal in all directions.
These waves in the air are so tiny that you
cannot feel them, yet they are strong enough
to make another sheet of metal vibrate when
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Smoke signals .•.. carner pigeons horses. man has used all
these to fulfil a vital need-eommunlcatlon.. so rapId has been the
progress that today. thanks to the telephone. we literally have the
world at our fingertips
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they hit it. This you can tryout by hanging
two sheets of metal of the same size and We know about sound and sound-waves.
shape facing one another. Hit the first and Now let us follow these sound-waves as they
make it ring. Then put your hand on it to go into a telephone.
stop the vibrations. If you listen carefully, you Inside the telephone mouthpiece is a thin
will hear the second sheet of metal vibrating. circular piece of metal- the diaphragm. This
This is how we hear a noise. The first sheet vibrates whenever any sound hits it. Behind
is like the vocal cords in our throats, which it is a container which contains tiny grains of
we move while speaking and set vibrating.
The second sheet is like the tight ear-drum 1. Carbon grains loose. Little flow of current
in our ears. When the air waves strike our
ear-drums we hear a sound.
A telephone works basically on the same
principles - the carrier of the sound being
electricity. When you want to talk to a friend
you lift the receiver and dial a number. Your
line is then connected to your friend's at the 2. Carbon grains tight when flow of current increases
telephone exchange. Electricity flows through
the wires. The sound-waves of your voice
make the electric current stronger and weaker
as the case may be. In your friend's phone
the current is changed back into sound-
waves.

specially prepared carbon The lead of your
pencil is also a form of carbon. Through this
container of carbon and through the wires of
the telephone flows an electric current.
The moment sound-waves hit the thin piece
of metal it bends a little - so little that you
cannot notice it. When it bends (or vibrates)
it squashes up the carbon. The grains thus
get tightly packed. When there is no pressure
on the diaphragm the grains are let loose
again. This too you would not be able to
detect with the naked eye.
What Edison discovered was that an
electric current will pass through grains of
carbon more easily when they are tightly
packed than when they are loose.
So, when you speak, your voice causes
vibrations in the metal disc. These vibrations
compress the carbon grains according to the
intensity of your voice, which, in turn, causes
different amounts of electricity to pass
through the telephone wires, until it reaches
the receiver of another phone.
Tran8lYlitter
3
Receiver
1. Diaphragm 2. Carbon granules 3. Diaphragm
4. Electromagnet
In the receiver of a telephone is a thin
metal disc or diaphragm, just as in the
mouthpiece. But the receiver does not have
the little container of carbon grains. Instead
there is an electro magnet, that is, a magnet
worked by the electricity coming through the
wires. The more the electricity coming
through, the more powerful the magnet
becomes. This magnet pulls on the thin metal
disc in the receiver and makes it vibrate.
These vibrations will sound exactly like your
voice talking into the mouthpiece at the other
end, a long long way away.
 The ice-cream cup telephone

Do' ou e
To understand this better, you can make
yourself a very simple telephone. When
you've eaten your favourite ice-cream don't
throw the cup away. In fact, get hold of two
ice-cream cups. Pierce a hole in the centre
of each. Take a long piece of fine thread and
pass each end through the two cups. Knot it
well so that it doesn't come out. And that's
it. As long as the thread is stretched out tight,
you have your telephone. One person talks
into one ice-cream cup the bottom of which
functions as a diaphragm and the other
person puts his ear to the other cup. When
you speak into the cup you make t~e b~ttom
vibrate_ The thread carries the vibration by
little tugs and makes the other diaphragm
vibrate in exactly the same way. That makes
new waves of the same kind in the other cup
and so the other person hears what you say.
You'll be able to hear each other as long as
the thread is kept tight.
••
••

Wherever there are telephones there must
be wires. These wires are special as they
have to pass over different lands, under water
and over mountains too. Their job is to carry
the electric currents from phone to phone.
If you call up someone who is just a few
miles away from you, this is what happens.
You speak into the mouthpiece and the
electrons or particles of electricity in the
mouthpiece start bouncing against the other
electrons that form the electrical current in
the wire. The current varies according to the
vibrations of your voice and in a fraction of
a second the person you've called can hear
you. So fast does electricity travel that before
you can snap your fingers the current passing
through a telephone wire can flash all round
the world.
When the electrons at one end of the line
start to pass the current along, they are very
strong. If the current were to travel a long
distance it would gradually reduce in strength
and would not be strong enough to work the
The world's longest submarine telephone
cable is the Commonwealth Pacific Cable
(COMPAC) which runs for more than 14,480
kms. from Australia via Auckland, New Zea-
land and the Hawaiian Islands to Port Alberi,
Canada. It cost about £35,000,000 and was
inaugurated on December 2, 1963.
magnet at the receiving end. Therefore,
where telephone wires extend over long
distances, there are special stations along
the way. These are called "repeaters". They
have equipment similar to amplifiers in a radio
set. This equipment helps to boost the current
carried by the wires.
The transatlantic telephone cable, for
instance, carries 120 two-way telephone
circuits. For this, special undersea repeater
equipment was designed. Every 35 miles
along the cable there is a bulge that contains
the equipment to boost the signals. These
undersea repeaters are sealed in containers
that withstand pressures upto 8000 pounds
a square inch so that they cannot be crushed
by the tremendous weight of water above
them.
And, what happens, if something goes
wrong with these cables? It's precisely for
this reason that an accurate map has to be
made of where the cable is, so that it can
easily be located when repairs are needed.
You may wonder how we are able to talk
to so many different people when our
telephones have only one set of wires. At the
same time think how difficult it would be if
you were to have a different wire for every
house you wanted to talk to. To avoid this
each telephone has its own set of wires
running to a telephone exchange or central
office.
When you pick up the receiver and dial the
number you want, your phone is immediately
connected to the exchange.lt is then that the
next step of the journey is determined. If you
At the exchange
00
want to speak to someone in the
neighbourhood, the switchboard at the
The first telephone exchange which was
exchange lets the current from your p~one
opened in January 1878, in New Haven,
flow to the wires of the phone you are calling.
Connecticut served only 21 customers, and
If the person you are calling is very far
had precisely eight individual telephone lines
away, the exchange in your area switches
which were shared by two or more customers.
your line onto a line that leads to other
It was around this time that someone declared
exchanges. Sometimes the call may have to
that phones shou Id be answered with a brisk
pass through several exchan~es, if you are
"Ahoy! Ahoy!" But thank God for Edison who
ringing someone abroad. In a dial phone all
is supposed to have been the first man to
this is done automatically and, therefore, a
say "hello" into the phone. Almost overnight
call may take only a few seconds to
telephone girls became known as "hello
materialize.
girls". As there was nothing to indicate the
end of a conversation, the operator had to
listen to the call from time to time. What a
time the operators must have had!
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 In 1889 Almon Brown Strowger devised an
automatic telephone exchange which
eliminated the human operator. He called it
the 'girl-less', 'cuss-less', (out-of-order-Iess~
'wait-less' telephone. His associates later
devised a rotary dial which produced
electrical pulses according to each number
dialled. The pulses travelled down the
telephone line to the exchange and
automatically connected the caller to the
number he wanted.
Strowger exchanges, while automatic, were
slow and clumsy. For long distance calls
operators were still required. Significant
improvements were made with the
development of an electro-mechanical
exchange known as crossbar.
Let us see how the automatic telephone
works. When you lift the receiver the switch
that connects your phone to the telephone
exchange is activated. Your phone is then
connected to a line switch, also called a
'hunter'. This is an automatic rotating switch
which will search along a row of contacts
until it finds a disengaged path to the
automatic selector mechanism. The moment
this happens you hear the familiar 'trrr' of the
dial tone. This is a signal for you to start
dialling.
Let's suppose that the number you want is
634520. The first two digits, that is '63'
represent the exchange. When you turn
number 6 to the dial stop you are only winding
up a spring in the dial mechanism. The
moment you let go, the dial returns under the
tension of the spring and transmits six
electrical 'kicks' along the line. The number
of 'kicks' correspond to the number dialled,
o0 0 () Ie) 0 0 C) IC) () K.)
9 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 10
80 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
7 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 10 0 0
60 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 p
50 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
40 0 0 0 0 0 0 u u 0
3 0 0 0 0 0 I. 0 0 0 0
2 Ie 0 0 0 0 IC D0 0 0 0
except in the case of zero. When dialling
zero, ten impulses are transmitted. You then
1:0 0 0 0 0 ( 0 0 0 0
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dial number 3 and the process is repeated.
At the exchange the chain of impulses
1 2 3 4 5 ~ 7 8 9 10 transmitted by dialling '63' is fed to an
apparatus known as a 'director'. This

o I- An automatic exchange
recognizes from the impulses which
exchange is required and its 'memory' tells
it that in order to get from one exchange to
the other the call must be routed through '63' exchange and you can dial the rest of
several other exchanges. the numbers.
All this is done in a matter of seconds and The switches that locate the other numbers
before you know it you are connected to the are known as 'selectors'. They move in two

1. Exchange 2. Satellite 3. Exchange 4. Earth

 In some countnes the telephone system
provides children with bedtime stories. It ta-
kes a message for you if you are ill and
gives you the latest news too.
directions and are activated by
electro-magnets which follow the pulses
transmitted by the telephone dial. They move
vertically and in a sweeping circular
movement.
When number 4 is dialled, the contact arm
on the selector moves up 4 lines and then
sweeps round the row of contacts on line 4
until it finds a route that will connect it to the
next, number 2, and finally O. The whole
process, that is, dialling the exchange and
then the rest of the numbers, takes hardly
any time. Your telephone line is connected
to the line of the person you are calling almost
instantly.
Now an automatic calling system, known
as Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD), operates
in nearly all the major cities of the world. It
is slightly more complicated than the local
dialling system as it needs electronic
equipment which operates in much the same
way as an electronic brain. Not only is STD
able to pick the particular route for a long
distance call, but it can choose an alternative
path if the first is busy. Additionally it works
out the cost of a call and transfers that
information to a meter which ticks up the
amount to be charged to the subscriber's bill.
£tTl) ita 3001 I

The system of charging for calls is
interesting. A meter connected to the
subscriber's line is arranged to mark up one
unit of charge each time it receives six pulses
from the exchange equipment. The rate at
which it ticks up the money depends on the
speed of the pulses reaching it. The charge
for a call depends on two factors, time and
distance. So, for long-distance calls the speed
at which the charging-up pulses are fed to
the meter increases and for short-distance
calls it decreases.
The latest in electronic components is the
'Command Dialer' a - programmable phone
that can recognize words.
If you want to make a call with the Com-
mand Dialer, all you do is utter two words.
The first tells the machine whose number to
Relief, fear, joy, anxiety, shock! A telephone
ring can convey all these and more. It is no
wonder then, that the great poet, Tagore,
was inspired to write this about the telephone:
"Kauto aujaanare janaile tumi,
Kauto ghore deele thhain,
Door ke koreele nikat bandhu,
Paur ke koreele bhai. ..... "
(You have made me known to friends
whom I knew not. You have given me an "
entry into homes not my own. You have
brought the distant near and turned strangers
into brothers of mine.)
look up while the second tells it to go ahead
and dial. And this could be anywhere in the
world, provided the same person speaks
each time, because the Command Dialer is
a one-man-machine and it will not respond
to different voices.
This book, one of a series of information
books, introduces the child to the marvels of
the telephone-how it works and how it
developed.

Others in this series include:

• The Television
• The Motor Car
• The Aeroplane
• The Clock
• The Ship
• The Railway Train
.

I;

© by CST 1986
Reprinted 1989, 1990, 19"93, 1995, 1997, 1998, 2001, 2003.

Published by Children's Book Trust, Nehru House,

4 Bahadur Shah Zalar Marg, New Delhi-110002 and printed
at its Indraprastha Press. Ph: 23316970-74 Fax: 23721090
e-mail: cbtnd@vsnl.com Website: www.childrensbooktrust.com

RS.15.00 E 184 ISBN 81-7011-316-4