Mr. Burns, X-Rays, and the How to Answer a Telephone Call in 1877

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2906 (Overall post 5113)

Mr. Burns, the terminally-alive money monster from The Simpsons, evidently gets it right when he answers his telephone with the phrase "ahoy ahoy". It seems to me that was the established courtesy in the very earliest stages of telephonic communication. But how did you know the telephone was "ringing" to answer it in 1877 if there was no "ringer"?

In 1877, Alex Graham Bell's invention and demonstration of the telephone was only about a year old and was followed immediately by worldwide interest and experimentation. One aspect of the telephone that I hadn't thought about before but stumbled upon last night¹ is something seemingly simple—how did you know to answer a telephone call in 1877? Evidently, you did it with some difficulty, as there seems yet to have been a ringer/notification that a person was receiving a call.

It seems that the first person to address this issue in a published paper was—unexpectedly--the discoverer of the x-ray, Wilhelm Rontgen.

Rontgen (1845-1923) was still quite young and a lecturer at Strasbourg in 1877, publishing in the area of thermal conductivity of crystals (1870) and specific heats of gases; and he was still eighteen years away from his own epochal contribution to the history of science  (“Ueber eine neue Art von Strahlen", "On a New Type of Ray" in 1895) and then for reasons presently unknown to me he was attracted to an issue with the new and magnificent invention of the telephone.
He states the case pretty clearly in the opening paragraph of his 600-word article:

"THE speaking of the telephone is admittedly so weak that it can only be caught by keeping the instrument in

immediate contact with the ear. Hence there is transmitted through the telephone in its present

form no sound which would be intense enough to announce to any one who was in a large room and who

did not hold the telephone close to his ear, that a message was about to be sent from the transmitting station. 

The consequence is that a warning apparatus must be attached to the telephone, so  that there may be no fear

of missing a projected telephonic conversation."

Rontgen proceeds to experiment with an unused part of the telephone magnet attaching various tuning forks to the device which would become part of the circuit. He writes that:

"the currents thereby induced in the coil are powerful enough to set the fork of the receiving station in such intense vibration that the sound may be distinctly heard in a large room; warned by this signal a person can in the usual way put the telephone to his ear and listen to the words of from the transmitting station. And so vice versa. "

I'm not sure when a bell or warning device becomes part of the telephone experience after this, though I assume it comes quickly, once the issue had been identified. 

Notes:

Rontgen, W.C. "A Telephonic Alarum", In NATURE, volume 17, no. 426, December 27, 1877, p165.