Quick note — I’m launching Next Question by Life Story Magic tomorrow! (If you’re taking notes, I’d hoped to do it today but ran into an issue. It happens!)
If you’d like to try it out, sign up here.
See you there — and here — tomorrow!
One thing led to another
This is a newsletter about how you can spend your entire life devoted to something really great — and never come to learn the positive results of what you’ve done.
On the one hand, that’s kind of sad, right? Never knowing how it mattered?
But on the other hand — I find it inspirational.
With that, meet Daniel Davis.
Well, meet him via history, since he’s been dead almost a century and a half.
Daniel Davis
Born in 1813 in Princeton, Massachusetts, Davis was a manufacturer of electrical apparatus in Boston.
He was known in his day as a self-taught craftsman with great understanding, and worked as a consultant for Samuel Morse on the telegraph and Elias Howe on the sewing machine.
In 1842, he published a catalog with the wonderfully 19th-century title:
It included descriptions of all of the things he was building and selling out of his electrical products lab at the time, but with the breadth of the era’s understanding of electricity and magnetism interspersed.
The book quite influential, and if you’d been alive back then and into electricity, you probably would have bought a copy — 75 cents, maybe the equivalent of $25 today.
Davis retired six years later, in 1848 — age 35! — and apparently moved back out to the country and spent the rest of his life farming. When he died in 1887, he was obscure enough that his obituary in Scientific American noted he’d died “comparatively unknown.”
Thomas Watson
Here’s the twist. About six years after Davis retired, Thomas Watson was born in Salem, Massachusetts.
If you don’t know who Thomas Watson is yet, I love how this is going to turn out.
Thomas’s family was poor enough that he had to drop out of school at age 13 and find work.
“I realize now what a lucky boy I was,” Watson later said, “although I didn’t think so at that time.”
He tried a number of trades — bookkeeper, carpenter — but he eventually found a job in 1872 as an apprentice in a machine shop owned by a man named Charles Williams for $5 a week.
“There was no specializing in these shops at that time,” he explained years later. “Each workman built everything there was in the shop to build, and an apprentice also had a great variety of jobs, which kept him interested all the time, for his tools were poor and simple and it required lots of thought to get a job done right.”
Charles Williams
A great perk of working for Charles Williams was that he kept copies of most of the books on electricity published at the time in his showcase, and his young workers would read them at lunch.
Once more from Watson’s later account (and you might guess that Watson is in fact an important person in history, since people wanted to hear his life story during his life and we still have access to it):
“The book that interested me most was Davis’ Manual of Magnetism, published in 1847, a copy of which I made mine for 25 cents.
If you want to get a good idea of the state of the electrical art at that time, you should read that book.
I found it very stimulating and that same old copy in all the dignity of its dilapidation has a place of honor on my book shelves to-day.”
OK, let’s solve the puzzle. “To-day,” when Watson wrote and delivered this account, was October 17, 1913, as he addressed the Third Annual Convention of the Telephone Pioneers of America in Chicago.
And Thomas Watson was Watson, as in Alexander Graham Bell’s famous “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you” — the first words ever spoken over an experimental telephone.
Mighty Lucky
Watson was seven years younger than Bell. The two met in the winter of 1874, when Bell came into Williams’s shop to have Watson fix a part for a prototype of what he thought might be his greatest invention: a “harmonic telegraph” that would allow multiple Morse code signals to be sent over the same telegraph line at the same time.
“All this was, as I have said, theoretical,” Watson wrote, “and it was mighty lucky for Graham Bell that it was, for had his harmonic telegraph been a well behaved apparatus that always did what its parent wanted it to do, the speaking telephone might never have emerged …”
Watson became Bell’s right-hand man on the harmonic telegraph, which was also how he happened to be the skilled craftsman at the ready when Bell decided to pivot, and try to send voice over wire.
The idea behind the harmonic telegraph was that each Morse operator’s transmitter would hum at its own pitch, and the receiver on the other end would have a steel spring tuned to that same pitch, so it would respond only to its own signal — no matter what other noise was also coming down the line.
The telephone grew out of a happy accident with those instruments.
On June 2, 1875, a spring on one of Watson’s transmitters got stuck, and when he plucked it, Bell heard the twang on a receiver in the next room.
Bell realized the vibrating spring was creating an electric current that rose and fell exactly the way the sound did — which meant a current could carry not just one pitch, but any sound at all, including a human voice.
Three hours on the phone
I think we all learn in school about the first brief phone call: March 10, 1876, when Bell, in one room of their Boston lab, said, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you,” and Watson heard him in another.
But it was Oct. 9, 1876 — 150 years ago this week — that they had the first actual real-world phone call, talking between Boston and Cambridgeport — across the Charles River — using telegraph wires.
The two men talked for three hours.
Remarkable, though, that this was just two and a half years after Bell and Watson first met — and only about four years after Watson started working for Williams and was introduced to Daniel Davis’s book, which sparked his entire career and specialization in 19th-century electrical applications.
Maybe even wilder: by 1881, Watson was out of the telephone business altogether, although he’d become rich as a result of having been there at the beginning.
He went on to build a massive shipyard.
If you’d like to go further down a rabbit hole, he was apparently a very amusing and self-effacing speaker; the speech from which I got a lot of this info is online right here.
Back in August, I wrote about a new study on loneliness and mental health — and how the simplest thing any of us can probably do, both for other people and for ourselves, is to pick up the phone and make a call you’ve been putting off.
If you do that today, you have Bell, Watson — and Davis — to thank!
Also: I’ll bet you’ve done something that led to a tremendous result for other people, and you might not even be aware of it.
If not … there’s still time!
7 other moments from history this week
Sunday, October 4: “No more war, war never again.” — Pope Paul VI, addressing the United Nations General Assembly on this day in 1965, the first pope ever to visit and speak at the U.N. He spent about 13 and a half hours in New York, becoming the first pope to set foot in the Western Hemisphere.
Monday, October 5: “Good evening, liberated Serbia.” — Vojislav Koštunica, speaking from the balcony of Belgrade City Hall on this day in 2000, after protesters stormed parliament and ended Slobodan Milošević’s 13-year rule. The uprising is called the “Bulldozer Revolution” because a heavy-equipment operator named Ljubisav Đokić drove his wheel loader at the state television building.
Tuesday, October 6: “It’s been my life, for 13 years, I’ve put everything into this.” — Jason Lewis, after pushing his pedal boat across the Prime Meridian at Greenwich on this day in 2007, completing the first circumnavigation of the Earth by human power alone. Along the 46,505-mile route he walked, cycled, roller-bladed, kayaked, swam and pedaled, surviving a collision with a car in Colorado and a crocodile attack in Australia.
Wednesday, October 7: “This is a palpable tremor of delight for me.” — Toni Morrison, after learning on this day in 1993 that she had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first Black woman to win a Nobel in any category. She was also the first American to win the literature prize since John Steinbeck in 1962.
Thursday, October 8: “No sir. I got only 132.” — Cpl. Alvin York, after Brig. Gen. Julian Lindsey joked that he had captured the whole German army, following York’s fight in the Argonne Forest on this day in 1918. The Tennessee farmer and former conscientious objector received the Medal of Honor, and Marshal Ferdinand Foch called it the greatest feat by any private soldier in the armies of Europe.
Friday, October 9: "This morning I came, I saw and I was conquered, as everyone would be who sees for the first time this great feat of mankind." — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, at the dedication of Boulder Dam, later called the Hoover Dam, which on this day in 1936 first transmitted power 266 miles across the world's highest-voltage transmission line to Los Angeles.
Saturday, October 10: “The exploration and use of outer space … shall be the province of all mankind.” — From Article I of the Outer Space Treaty, which entered into force on this day in 1967 after the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain signed it that January. The treaty bars any nation from claiming the moon or other celestial bodies and directs countries to treat astronauts as envoys of all humanity.