Chapter 288: Manual Telephone Exchange
The car exhibition achieved tremendous success, with car sales volume on the day of the exhibition exceeding 100 vehicles, which also allowed the Royal Mercedes-Benz Automobile Company to obtain over 300,000 pesetas in net income on that day.
This was not all; the exhibition lasted a total of three days, with an average of over 100 cars sold each day.
After the exhibition ended, although car sales volume experienced a cliff-like decline, it could still maintain a speed of around 10 vehicles per day.
As 1881 came to an end, Benz sent Carlo the automobile company’s development situation for the entire year.
It was actually the sales situation for the month after the car exhibition. Although it was only one month, the Royal Mercedes-Benz Automobile Company managed to sell over 600 cars in that month.
Calculated at a net profit of 3,000 pesetas per car, the net profit from over 600 cars was at least 8 million pesetas.
If calculated at a selling price of 15,000 pesetas per car, the Royal Mercedes-Benz Automobile Company had already amassed over 9 million pesetas in funds in that short month.
Although half of this was due to the merit of the car exhibition, it was undeniable that Benz’s Mercedes-Benz automobile company had achieved tremendous success.
Even if only a few cars were sold per day afterward, the automobile company’s net income could still reach over 10,000 pesetas.
There are 365 days in a year, so the annual net income would be a massive figure of three or four million pesetas.
As for whether the Mercedes-Benz automobile company could achieve sales of a few cars per day, it might be impossible relying solely on Spain, but factoring in the entire European market, reaching this level would absolutely be a piece of cake.
Although the Royal Mercedes-Benz Automobile Company’s guaranteed annual income of millions seemed like a lot, for Carlo at this time, this amount of money was no longer anything significant.
Unless car sales volume could surge dramatically, or the Mercedes-Benz automobile company could research and develop a new generation of even more excellent cars, Carlo had no energy to pay further attention to the automobile company’s situation.
As time moved to 1882, a new technology caught Carlo’s attention, namely wired telephone technology.
Wired telephone technology, like the car, was an invention capable of changing the world. Although the wired telephone technology of this era was still very cumbersome and relied on manual telephone exchanges for calls.
But it was undeniable that it was through the step-by-step exploration of these cumbersome technologies that telephony in posterity became so advanced.
Without the efforts of these pioneers in this era, the technology of posterity would not be able to stand on the shoulders of giants and continue forward.
It was worth mentioning that the so-called wired telephone was not the effort results of Spanish scientists, but the research and development results of Alexander Graham Bell.
This renowned Mr. Bell was precisely the scientist who developed a metal detector for the assassinated US President Garfield.
In posterity, there were various claims about who exactly invented the telephone. However, in this era, Bell, as the first person to apply for a telephone patent, was naturally considered the undisputed inventor of the telephone.
After he applied for the telephone patent, wired telephone technology quickly swept across the entire United States and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to Europe.
Carlo naturally knew the changes wired telephone technology brought to human life. As early as after Bell applied for related telephone technology, Spain’s Royal Academy of Sciences had contact with Bell, wanting to introduce Bell’s wired telephone technology.
It was undeniable that the wired telephone technology at this time had significant defects. Connections between telephones relied entirely on wires, and to call different people, manual telephone exchanges had to connect to different lines.
This also meant that the telephone at this time was ultimately only usable by a small portion of people. If the number of telephone users increased, manual telephone exchanges would face frequent issues due to excessive busyness.
In addition, current telephone technology had distance limitations. Although inter-city telephone communication was possible, due to the greater distance, it would affect the sound quality of the telephone playback.
What was said would definitely be transmitted, but whether the person on the other end of the telephone could hear clearly was uncertain.
Although it had such and such defects, for people who relied only on wired telegrams for communication, the wired telephone technology at this time was absolutely an important milestone.
After all, telegrams required converting spoken words into codes, which were then received by other stations via cables.
While the telephone only needed a line for the other party to hear the content in real time, without needing to decode the content.
After introducing Bell’s wired telephone patent, Spain decided to establish a manual telephone exchange in Madrid and first connect telephones within the government.
Residences and offices of cabinet ministers, offices of several important government departments, the upper and lower houses, the royal palace, and such places would have telephones installed.
Because the number of people using these telephones was limited, Madrid’s manual telephone exchange faced no significant efficiency pressure.
Basically, just over a dozen employees could guarantee telephone communication for important places like the cabinet government, royal palace, and parliament.
Connecting telephones in important departments like the government had the most obvious effect of making communication between various departments faster, and the cabinet government’s speed in handling news would also be quicker.
It was precisely because countries saw such benefits that they vigorously supported the development of telephones.
On January 2, 1882, Spain’s first manual telephone exchange was formally established in Madrid and quickly put into use.
Carlo also curiously became the first user of Spain’s telephone, having a brief exchange with Prime Minister Canovas over the telephone.
The Royal Palace of Madrid was located on Byron Street in the city center, while the government building was on Castile Street north of Madrid City Center, with a straight-line distance between them exceeding eight kilometers.
If using telegrams for communication, even if the sending and receiving locations were only a few kilometers apart, it would still take one minute or even two or three minutes to complete the entire process of sending and receiving the telegram.
But for wired telephones, such extremely short-distance communication had almost negligible delay.
Carlo and Prime Minister Canovas’s watches were calibrated, with even the second hands aligned. It was through the time on their watches that Carlo confirmed the delay for short-distance wired telephone was less than one second.
Such delay was quite exaggerated, which also meant that in short-distance communication environments, the telephone had a broader role and influence than telegrams.
Of course, for longer distances, the advantages of telegrams were also quite obvious.
Telephones required both parties to be online simultaneously for calls, while telegrams did not. Additionally, telegrams could conduct secret communications via encrypted codes, while telephones basically could not achieve encrypted communication.
Because Madrid’s telephone communication system had just been established, detailed testing of telephone communication in various places was still needed.
After several days of testing, the data reported by the Madrid Telephone Company to the government also proved Carlo’s guess.
Current wired telephone technology had no significant delay in short-distance calls, that is, within 20 kilometers.
The call delay within this distance was at most one second, which was already quite brief compared to telegrams.
Because other cities had not yet opened manual telephone exchanges, mid-to-long-distance telephone delay testing could only be conducted by temporarily using telegram lines.
According to the Madrid Telephone Company’s test results, when the call distance exceeded 20 kilometers, the call delay would gradually begin to rise.
When the call distance exceeded 50 kilometers, the call delay would rise to 3-5 seconds, and the calls would become extremely unstable.
As for long-distance calls over a hundred kilometers, they were very difficult to achieve with current technology. Even if achievable, it would severely affect call quality, and the delay would be hard to control.
This also caused current wired telephone technology to be limited to intra-city communication, making it difficult to achieve inter-city long-distance communication.
It was difficult to achieve long-distance communication, which was the biggest shortcoming of telephones at present and the problem that wired telephones urgently needed to solve.
After confirming that current wired telephones had a certain role, Carlo increased investment in the Madrid Telephone Company and established a research group for the wired telephone project at the Royal Academy of Sciences, appointing several experts in related fields to further research wired telephones.
Carlo issued several orders to this research group. First, Spain’s wired telephones must achieve inter-city communication within the next few years.
If inter-city communication could be achieved, whether for improving communication efficiency between various levels of government or for military purposes, the role of telephones would greatly increase.
Second, seek automatic telephone exchanges that could replace manual methods. If telephone connections could only rely on manual operation, it would extremely test the efficiency of telephone exchanges.
At this time, there were not many wired telephone users, so manual methods were acceptable for telephone communication between cities.
When such a convenient technology as the telephone spread to civilian use, relying solely on manual telephone communication would no longer meet the needs of city telephone communication.
It was necessary to explore a machine capable of automatically performing telephone exchanges, which would not only save labor but also allow wired telephone technology to develop faster.
Carlo’s such requirements were not proposed blindly, but based on his memory of telephone development.
Neither long-distance telephone communication nor automatic telephone exchanges were complex technologies.
In Carlo’s memory, within the next decade, these two technologies would gradually mature. With Carlo investing large funds in research and development at this time, it was highly likely to advance the time of their emergence.
As the country controlling these two technologies, Spain could also achieve longer-term development in telephones.
In addition to putting forward his requirements, Carlo also allocated 2 million pesetas in funds to the telephone research group and promised to provide at least 1 million pesetas in research and development funds annually, allowing the research group to focus on the research.
These research and development funds were already considerable; when Bell developed the telephone, it did not consume so much funding.
The reason Carlo was willing to invest so much research and development funds in the telephone research group was precisely to hope that with sufficient financial support, they could faster discover more mature technology related to telephones.
In addition to funding support for telephone technology research and development, Carlo also planned to establish a manual telephone exchange in Barcelona as well, allowing Spain’s two major cities to have telephone communication technology.
When wired telephone technology could achieve inter-city communication in the future, the first thing Carlo would do was to merge the telephone communication systems of Madrid and Barcelona and connect the telephone communication system to important cities in various regions.
If Madrid and all cities on the Spanish Mainland could achieve second-level communication, it would also allow government orders to reach various regions and municipal governments at faster speeds.
At the same time, any unexpected events in various regions and municipal governments could be known to the cabinet government more quickly, thereby devising coping and solution methods earlier.
Spain’s Madrid Telephone Company and manual telephone exchange did not attract attention from European countries, after all, wired telephone technology was not unfamiliar to European countries.
As early as two years ago, in 1880, Britain, France, and Germany had already established telephone bureaus and laid telephone lines in some of their important cities.
Spain was instead behind some European countries in this aspect, of course, the main reason was that Carlo had higher requirements for Spain’s wired telephone technology.
Although both were wired telephone technologies, European countries’ telephone communication was implemented two years earlier, resulting in their telephones being magneto telephones that required users to provide their own power sources.
Whether battery-powered or wire-powered, such telephones needed to be connected to a power source to be used anyway.
While Spain’s telephones adopted the latest technology, common-battery telephones that did not require users to provide additional power sources, as the telephone lines came with power.
Although there was not much difference between the two types of telephones, not needing a self-provided power source would obviously be more convenient for some usage scenarios with limitations.
After all, Europe’s electric power industry was still in the earliest development stage, with not many cities connected to electricity. Even in cities already connected to electricity, there were many areas not covered by electricity.
Even in Europe’s renowned Madrid Nightless City, aside from the suburban industrial zone, only some bustling streets in the city center were electrified.
Most citizens’ homes did not have electricity, and without a power source, they naturally could not use magneto telephones.
The greatest role of common-battery telephones was to eliminate power source restrictions; aside from that, there was not much improvement in call quality or distance.
After establishing telephone communication in important government departments, reports from various departments after using it for a period showed that they were quite welcoming of such wired telephones.
With wired telephones, communication between government departments became more convenient. As the national ruler, Carlo could also contact the cabinet government or important cabinet departments more quickly, Prime Minister Canovas could contact all cabinet ministers, greatly reducing the time needed for communication.
Even in some cases, officials only needed telephone communication to discuss matters that originally required in-person meetings.
This was something telegrams could not achieve, after all, telegrams required encoding and decoding, and the content in telegrams would be seen by more people.
