How much of these supplies does the USE need? Consider the simplest network that the USE would want to set up as soon as possible. Grantville to Jena. Grantville to Saalfeld. Grantville to Rudolstadt. It is silly to consider going to the work to put up poles and maintain them, and make insulators and so on for a single wire that might be broken or otherwise fail. I presume we will put four wires on a cross bar on each pole. The distances needed are about 39 KM, 10 KM, and 15 KM. Call it forty miles. So, we need a thousand telephone poles, thirty tons of #8 iron wire, a half ton of zinc for galvanizing wire, four thousand insulators, five thousand gallons of creosote or coal tar to paint poles with, a thousand cross bars, four thousand lathe turned insulator spindles (wooden dowels) to screw the insulators onto. Three main line stations need four hundred battery jars, a ton of zinc crowfeet, two hundred fifty pounds of copper crowfeet, one hundred gallons of sulfuric acid, a ton of blue vitriol, and the various sorts of telegraph equipment for each station.
What about the next logical line to Magdeburg? The ground path distance following modern rail lines is 225 KM or 135 miles. This will require thirty-five hundred poles, a hundred tons of iron wire, fourteen thousend insulators and dowels, thirty-five hundred cross beams, two tons of zinc, twenty thousand gallons of creosote, and four more main line relay stations. AT&L will need some serious investment.
Prior to the appearance of Grantville annual European iron production was around 17,000 tons a year, and production in "the Upper Palatinate" (the part of Europe comparable to where Grantville showed up) was in the neighborhood of 2200 tons per year. Zinc production was, of course, zero.
Venice is a thousand kilometers away. A four-plex telegraph line to Venice would consume half the annual production of iron of the area around the USE. Clearly, no such expansion of the telegraph can rely on only down-time extant metals production.
Fortunately, iron production can be scaled rapidly. Consider the following chart of the growth of steel production in the U.S. in the post-Civil-War era:
The reality is, of course, that telegraph use of iron disappears as a blip in the curve resulting from the introduction of railroads. Forty-pound main line rail uses more than a hundred tons of iron per mile. The demand for a third-of-a-ton of wire per mile to run alongside the railroad is scarcely noticeable. Between 1830 and 1861 more than thirty thousand miles of railroad were built in the United States. The authors and tech-team of the 1632 series project European iron and steel production to jump one hundred fold over the first ten years after the ROF.
Why the excursion into metallurgy then? The team working on background to the 163x series refers to this as the "Tools to make tools" problem.
• We know how to make a telegraph.
• We know how to make wire for a telegraph.
• We know how to make iron to make wire for a telegraph.
• We know how to make a blast furnace to make iron to make wire for a telegraph.
• We know how to make a Bessemer converter to make steel from the pig iron from the blast furnace to make iron to make wire for a telegraph.
• We know how to make an air pump to pump air into furnaces and converters to make iron to make wire for a telegraph.
• We know how to make a steam engine to power the air pumps to feed the converters and furnaces to make iron to make wire for a telegraph.
• We know how to make boilers to make the steam for the steam engine
• We know how to make the rolling mill to roll the iron plate to make the boiler
• We know how to make the lathe to turn the rolls to make the rolling mill...
•
However, making each of these things takes time. Furthermore, this is not the only chain of need. For example:
• Finding the fire-clay so that you can
• grind the raw materials
• to make the raw brick
• to place into the kiln which you must make
• to make the fire bricks
• to line the blast furnace takes time...
The telegraph has many such chains of need. Zinc, tool steel for machinists, bluestone, sulfuric acid, magnet coils, brass for keys and sounders, springs, insulators, poles, creosote, and battery jars each have their own chains, or in some cases webs of need. Thus the phrase, "Tools to make tools to make tools..."
Assuming you have no better use for the up-time resources, we could extend Grantville's telephone system into Rudolstadt, and run a single line to Jena or Suhl using up-time wire. The first long-distance circuits will be run using salvaged wire that originally led out of the Ring of Fire to places that no longer exist. Many miles of insulated up-time hard copper wire can be salvaged from dead-ended lines.
Depending on your funding, you can build a handful of other telegraph lines using wire made from iron bought in Nuremberg or elsewhere in Europe. You can also produce a spider's web of government telephones in Prague (See Eric Flint's story in Ring of Fire, "The Wallenstein Gambit.")
Beyond that, landline telecommunications will have to participate in, or wait for the expansion of iron production in Europe that will follow the demand for rail and wire and telegraphs and telephones. This is why all the discussion in the various 1632 books to date about long-distance telecommunications rely on radio. Up-time radios are a limited resource, but they are more available than the wire to build a telecom network across Europe.
Telephones in 1632
What then of Prague? Why did Wallenstein go to the trouble of building Europe's second telephone exchange? Only Eric can be sure. The tools-to-make-tools discussion allows us to understand why the owners of AT&L said "Yes!" to a project that was a major distraction from setting up the European telegraph network. They needed the money.
We can't do much to help understand the "why" of the telephone network in Prague, but we can pursue the "what." What was done, and how was it accomplished?
A telephone exchange has three major advantages, and a host of disadvantages over a set of telegraphs.
The advantages are simple enough:
• Anyone can learn to use a telephone in about one minute.
• Telephones send messages as fast as one may talk.
• Using a telephone exchange, any telephone instrument can be attached to any other.
Telegraphs require trained operators, they are "line" instruments, one attached to the next to the next, you can't "dial" a telegraph, and they are comparatively slow. Average commercial operators transmit twenty to forty words per minute. Try speaking one word every two seconds, and see how slow it feels.
But these advantages come at a substantial cost. Telephone exchanges are complex, as are telephone instruments.
Consider a two telephone circuit. A set of batteries provides current in a loop. The action of sound waves acts on a diaphragm that compresses carbon granules and creates electric waves that mirror the sound waves. This causes the receiver at the other end to be magnetized in a waving manner, which attracts and repels the diaphragm that vibrates air so that you can hear the sounds at the other end.
Note, however, that BOTH receivers are in the circuit, and BOTH microphones are in the circuit. In early telephones, much of the power was wasted in producing sound at the receiver of the person speaking. To avoid this requires a bit of electronics called an anti-side tone circuit. How those work is beyond the scope of this discussion but they are the reason you don't hear yourself when you talk on the phone.
There is, of course another problem. You don't want to sit all day with the phone pressed to your ear just in case someone might speak to you. (Unless you're a party-line snoop but that, too, is a subject for another day.) We need a way to signal that someone wants to talk. So, our phone just became more complex.
This diagram outlines the circuits in a classic three-box crank wall phone like you have seen in movies and television:
This phone has three important elements. The transmitter and receiver (on the left in the diagram, and in the middle
of the phone pictured below), the ringer and magneto (on the right in the diagram and at the top in the phone below) and the local battery, which is a Daniell Cell battery in the slope topped box at the bottom of the phone below, in the middle of the diagram above.
When the phone is "on hook" or hung up, the magneto and ringer are connected to the line and the battery is disconnected. If you crank the magneto, 100V signals are sent to the central office. If the central office cranks THEIR magneto, 100V signals are sent to this phone, and the bell rings.
Here's a view inside the top box showing the magneto, and the back of the ringer:
The magneto consists of three horseshoe magnets with a finely wound coil of wire (more of that silk-covered wire) inside, with a gear arrangement to cause the magneto to turn twenty times for each turn of the crank outside the box. The ringer has two coils (more silk) which alternately push and pull the bell clapper as the AC ringer current pulses through the phone.
Silk importers are going to be doing a bang-up business huh? Why silk? Because it's thin, allowing the wires to be placed very close to each other, and because prior to the invention of rayon, silk was the only monofilament thread. Silk thread is not "spun" from bundles of short fibers. It is a single long fiber produced by a silkworm and uncoiled from a cocoon. The silk thread does not have any holes in it. It isn't "lumpy" at a microscopic level. It is smooth and covers the wire evenly. Cotton, or linen, or hemp thread can be used to cover wire, but the coils are more loosely spaced, and occasional shorts occur where the lumps in the thread line up and open a gap in the insulation.
One of the tools to make tools Grantvillers and their allies desperately need to invent is a machine to wrap silk thread around thin copper wire, or a chemist needs to reconstruct how to make flexible enamel.
We now have a telephone, and the mechanism to ring a bell at need. But there is still an element missing. One telephone, or two telephones does not a phone system make. It is necessary to wire up many phones together. However, it would be bad if all phones' bells rang any time any phones' bell rang. Further, it would not work. The ringing impulse would be wasted. We need a way to connect together JUST the phones of interest. Hello Central!
Pictured above is a small magneto ringing central office exchange cord-board. Each socket in the board has a small metal flag above it that is usually black
The process of operating the board is not complex. To pick up an incoming call, the operator hears her bell ring, and notes which signal flag has fallen (and turned red) in the socket array. She plugs into that socket, resets the flag and talks with the caller on her handset. Once she is told who the caller wishes to be connected to, she rings out to the target caller.
To ring a customer, an operator inserts a plug from the right hand bank into a customer's socket, and spins the crank, ringing the customers phone. Pulling the switch in front of the plug towards the operator connects the operator's handset so that she can talk with the person who answers. When she has an answer, she flips her switch forward, connecting the pair of plugs. When the callers hang up, the flag on the socket falls again, and the operator knows to unplug them. On this board, up to nine simultaneous calls can be wired. This board also supports three "long distance" trunks to connect to OTHER exchanges elsewhere. (It is universally the case, even today, that no phone system can support more than a small fraction of its phones having a call at the same time.) This board supported 150 lines. A single line can have up to eight phones attached to it. This saves metal, but is inconvenient for the subscribers since anyone can snoop on their neighbors' calls on the "party" line. Calls for different houses on a party line are distinguished by a different pattern of ringing. (My grandmother's house was long-short-short.)
Fortunately, once we have built phones, the plugboard requires nothing but down-time craftsmanship and patience. No inventions or tools are particularly needed excepting, of course, insulated wire (more silk.)
Each plug has wires running to it, each socket has a "flag" which is dropped by a pin retracting when ringer voltage is applied, so there has to be a coil of (silk-covered) wire behind the flag to pull the pin on each socket. Then, each plug has to have a (probably wooden) insulating handle, and a cord of braided copper wires (two of them) covered individually with—you guessed it—silk, and then covered together with a fabric tube to keep them from binding. The switches are simple brass levers and contacts. Oh, more zinc. Oh well.
This magneto exchange is "local." The telephones have a limited range of a few dozen miles. "Long Distance" telephones require balanced lines, impedance matching, and amplifiers, all of which are beyond the capacity of the USE's engineers for the short-term future. For the time being, communication between cities will have to be handed over to Morse code operators be they radio or wire line operators.
For the short term, that is the state of telecommunications in the USE and the 1632 series. There will be a few "local" telephone exchanges, in Grantville, in Magdeburg, and Prague. There will be "long lines" telegraph between cities as the money becomes available and as the pressure of the railroads increases steel production, and there will be radio.
I hope this brief introduction to telecommunications helps with an understanding of the difficulties and opportunities facing AT&L, and other telecom developers in the world after the Ring of Fire.
References
The photos of western electric phones and the telephone circuit diagrams above are from:
OLD TELEPHONES How to Repair and Rebuild Them by
Jeffrey Race
Cambridge Electronics Laboratories
20 Chester Street
Somerville, Massachusetts 02144 USA
Telephone +1 617 629-2805 Telefax +1 617 623-1882
[email protected] www.camblab.com
The best source for information on telegraphic practice prior to 1900 is probably Pope, from whose work the drawings above come.
http://www.insulators.com/books/mpet/
Excellent site detailing telegraphy during the American Civil War
http://www.unitedstatesmilitarytelegraph.org/
and another
http://www.civilwarhome.com/telegraph.htm
A good general history of telecommunications can be found at
http://www.privateline.com/TelephoneHistory/History1.htm
I can't believe you don't know the story of Joseph Henry, but just in case
http://www.si.edu/archives//ihd/jhp/index.htm
(Yes, this has two slashes in the middle.)
More than you ever wanted to know about insulators at
http://www.insulators.com
An excellent phone museum
http://www.woodstelephonepioneers.org/museum/
The last central office magneto hand crank phone system in the U.S. to go dial.
http://www.privateline.com/TelephoneHistory5/History5.htm
Mente et Malleo:
Practical Mineralogy and
Minerals Exploration in 1632
By Laura Runkle
One of the advantages that the people of Grantville have in the novels 1632 and 1633 is their technology. With their tools, the people of Grantville can turn out cannon, rifles, and steam engines. With their chemical knowledge, they can create antibiotics, aspirin, and DDT. With their electronics, they can create diplomatic and broadcast radios. Everything's a piece of cake, right?
Need for Strategic Minerals
Everything is very far from a piece of cake. After making many cannon, the cutting edges of their machine tools will be worn out. There is no Hi-Speed (TM) tool steel in the 1630s. It wasn't even invented until the late 1890s. In order to keep a cutting edge, the people of Grantville need some form of tool steel. Early tool steels contained iron, tungsten, and a small amount of carbon. Better tool steels also contain chromium and vanadium, and even more tungsten. Tungsten, chromium and vanadium weren't known in the 1630s. The people of Grantville have no easy way of purchasing them.
Things get worse. In
order to make pharmaceuticals, the people of Grantville need stainless steel, or glass-lined vessels. To make stainless steel, they will need chromium, nickel, and perhaps vanadium. Nickel wasn't known in the 1630s. (Yes, Nickel ore was known. So were the ores for zinc and tungsten. The metals weren't known. More about those later.) For the proper glass, they will need borates. Borates were imported from Turkey and Italy.
There are many strategic minerals for Grantville that are necessary to gear down up-timer technology. Grantville has not brought the idea of strategic minerals to the seventeenth century, however. Already people are making a fortune in the creation of war-related brass and bronze. Gunpowder production was a booming industry.
The table below shows some of the resource needs to gear down Grantville's technology.