Chapter 288 Manual Telephone Exchange
The auto exhibition was a huge success, with more than 100 cars sold on the day of the exhibition, which also allowed Royal Benz to earn a net income of more than 30 pesetas that day.

This is not the end. The exhibition lasted for three days, and an average of more than 100 cars were sold every day.

Although car sales experienced a cliff-like decline after the exhibition, they were still able to maintain a growth rate of about 10 vehicles per day.

As 1881 came to an end, Benz sent Carlo an update on the company’s progress over the past year.

In fact, it is the sales situation one month after the auto show. Although it was only one month, Royal Benz Automobile Company sold more than 600 cars in this one month.

Based on the net profit of 3000 pesetas per car, the net profit of more than 600 cars is at least 180 million pesetas.

If the selling price of a car is 1.5 pesetas, in just one month, Royal Benz Automobile Company has raised more than 900 million pesetas.

Although half of this is due to the auto show, it is undeniable that Benz’s Mercedes-Benz company has achieved great success.

Even if only a few cars are sold every day, the car company’s net income can reach tens of thousands of pesetas.

There are 365 days in a year, and the annual net income is a huge figure of three to four million pesetas.

As for whether Mercedes-Benz can achieve sales of several cars per day, it may not be possible relying on Spain alone, but if the entire European market is taken into account, it will definitely be easy to achieve this level.

Although the guaranteed annual revenue of several million by Royal Benz Automobile Company seems like a lot, to Carlo at this moment, such a small amount of money is nothing.

Unless car sales can increase dramatically or Mercedes-Benz can develop a new generation of better cars, Carlo will not have the energy to pay too much attention to the situation of the car company.

As time came to 1882, a new technology caught Carlo’s attention, that is, wired telephone technology.

Like the automobile, wired telephone technology was an invention that changed the world, even though it was still cumbersome and relied on manual telephone exchanges.

But it is undeniable that it is the step-by-step exploration of these complicated technologies that has made telephone technology so advanced in later generations.

Without the efforts of these pioneers of this era, the technology of later generations would not have been able to continue to move forward by standing on the shoulders of giants.

It is worth mentioning that the so-called wired telephone was not the result of the efforts of Spanish scientists, but the research and development result of Alexander Graham Bell.

This famous Mr. Bell was the scientist who developed the metal detector for the assassinated US President Garfield.

In later generations, there are various opinions about who invented the telephone. However, in this era, Bell, as the first person to apply for a telephone patent, is naturally considered the inventor of the telephone.

After he applied for a patent for the telephone, wired telephone technology quickly became popular throughout the United States and spread across the Atlantic to Europe.

Carlo certainly knew the changes that wired telephone technology had brought to human life. As early as after Bell applied for the relevant telephone technology, the Royal Academy of Sciences of Spain had contacted Bell and wanted to introduce Bell’s wired telephone technology.

It is undeniable that the wired telephone technology at that time had great defects. The connection between telephones was entirely dependent on wires. If you wanted to call different people, you had to rely on manual telephone exchanges to connect to different lines.

This also means that at this time, only a small number of people can use the telephone. If more people use the telephone, the manual telephone exchange will be overcrowded and problems will occur frequently.

In addition, current telephone technology is also limited by distance. Although telephone communication can be carried out across cities, the long distance will affect the sound quality of the phone playback.

What you say can definitely be transmitted, but it is not certain whether the person on the other end of the phone can hear it clearly.

Although it had some flaws, the wired telephone technology at that time was definitely an important milestone for people who only relied on wired telegraphs to communicate.

After all, the telegraph still required the spoken words to be converted into codes, which were then received by other stations via cables.

The phone call only needs to go through the line, and the other party can hear what is being said in real time without the need to decompile the content.

After introducing Bell’s wired telephone patent, Spain decided to establish an artificial telephone exchange in Madrid to first connect telephones within the government.

Telephones are installed in the residences and offices of cabinet ministers, the offices of several important government departments, the House of Commons and the House of Lords, the royal palace, etc.

Because the number of people using these phones is limited, Madrid’s manual telephone exchange is not under much pressure to be efficient.

Basically, only a dozen employees are needed to ensure telephone communications in important places such as the cabinet government, the royal palace and the parliament.

The most obvious effect of connecting the phone to important departments such as the government is that communication between departments becomes faster and the cabinet government can process messages faster.

It is precisely because countries have seen such benefits that they have strongly supported the development of telephones.

On January 1882, 1, Spain’s first manual telephone exchange was officially built in Madrid and was soon put into use.

Carlo was also curious and became the first user of the Spanish telephone. He had a brief conversation with Prime Minister Canovas on the phone.

The Royal Palace of Madrid is located on Bairron Street in the city center, and the government building is located on Castilla Street in the north of the center of Madrid. The straight-line distance between the two is more than eight kilometers.

If telegraphs are used for communication, even if the locations where the telegram is sent and received are only a few kilometers apart, it still takes one minute or even two or three minutes to complete the entire process of sending and receiving the telegram.

But for wired phones, the delay in communication over such short distances is almost negligible.

Carlo and Prime Minister Canovas’ watches were calibrated, and even the stopwatch hands were consistent. It was through the time on their watches that Carlo determined that the delay of a wired telephone over a short distance was less than a second.

Such a delay is quite exaggerated, which also means that in short-distance communication environments, the telephone has a wider range of functions and influence than the telegraph.

Of course, if the distance is longer, the advantages of telegraph are quite obvious.

The telephone requires the two people to be online at the same time, while the telegraph does not. In addition, the telegraph can also communicate secretly in the form of encryption, while the telephone basically cannot do encrypted communication.

Because Madrid’s telephone communication system had just been established, detailed testing of telephone communication in various places was required. 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 does not have any noticeable delay in short-distance calls, that is, calls within 20 kilometers.

The maximum delay for calls over this distance is one second, which is quite short compared to telegraph calls.

Because other cities had not yet opened manual telephone exchanges, medium and long-distance telephone delay tests could only be conducted by temporarily calling telegraph lines.

According to the test results of Madrid Telephone Company, when the call distance exceeds 20 kilometers, the call delay will gradually begin to increase.

When the call distance exceeds 50 kilometers, the call delay will increase to 3-5 seconds and the call will become extremely unstable.

As for long-distance calls of hundreds of kilometers, it is difficult to achieve with current technology. Even if it can be achieved, it will seriously affect the quality of the call and the delay will be difficult to control.

This also means that current wired telephone technology is limited to communication within cities, and it is difficult to achieve long-distance communication across cities.

It is difficult to communicate over long distances. This is the biggest drawback of current telephones and a problem that current wired telephones urgently need to solve.

After determining that the current wired telephone had a certain role to play, Carlo increased his investment in the Madrid Telephone Company, established a research and development team for the wired telephone project at the Royal Academy of Sciences, and appointed several experts in related fields to conduct further research on wired telephones.

Carlo gave the R&D team several orders. First, Spain’s wired telephones must be able to communicate across cities within the next few years.

If cross-city communication is possible, the role of telephones will be greatly enhanced, whether it is to improve communication efficiency between governments at all levels or for military purposes.

Secondly, look for an automatic telephone exchange that can replace manual methods. If only manual methods can be used to connect calls, this will be a great test of the efficiency of the telephone exchange.

At that time, there were not many users of wired telephones, and manual methods were acceptable for telephone communications between cities.

By the time such a convenient technology as the telephone became popular among the general public, manual telephone communications alone could no longer meet the city’s telephone communication needs.

It is necessary to explore a machine that can automatically perform telephone exchanges, which will not only save manpower but also enable the technology of wired telephones to develop faster.

Carlo’s request was not made blindly, but was based on the development of the telephone in his memory.

Neither long-distance telephone communications nor automatic telephone exchanges are complex technologies.

In Carlo’s memory, these two technologies will gradually mature in the next ten years. At this time, Carlo invested a lot of money in research and development, which is very likely to advance the time for the two technologies to be released.

As a country that masters both technologies, Spain can also achieve further development in telephony.

In addition to making his own requests, Carlo also allocated 200 million pesetas to the telephone research team and promised to provide at least 100 million pesetas in research and development funds each year so that the research team could devote themselves to research with confidence.

This amount of R&D funds is already a lot. Bell didn’t spend so much money when it developed the telephone.

The reason why Carlo was willing to invest so much R&D funds in the telephone research team was that he hoped that with sufficient financial support, they could discover more mature technologies related to telephones more quickly.

In addition to funding the research and development of telephone technology, Carlo also planned to build an artificial telephone exchange in Madrid so that the two major cities in Spain would have telephone communication technology.

When wired telephone technology enables cross-city communication in the future, the first thing Carlo will do is to merge the telephone communication systems of Madrid and Barcelona, ​​and connect the telephone communication systems to important cities in each region.

If Madrid and all cities in mainland Spain can achieve communication within seconds, this will also allow government decrees to be delivered to regional and municipal governments at a faster speed.

At the same time, any unexpected incidents occurring in regional and municipal governments can be learned by the cabinet government more quickly, so that responses and solutions can be come up with earlier.

Spain’s Madrid Telephone Company and manual telephone exchange did not attract the attention of European countries. After all, wired telephone technology was not unfamiliar to European countries.

As early as two years earlier, in 1880, Britain, France and Germany had established telephone exchanges and laid telephone lines in some of their important cities.

Spain lags behind some European countries in this regard. Of course, the main reason for this is that Carlo has higher requirements for Spain’s wired telephone technology.

Although they all used wired telephone technology, European countries implemented telephone communications two years earlier, resulting in their telephones being magnetic telephones that required users to provide their own power supply.

Whether it is battery-powered or wire-powered, such a phone needs to be connected to a power source to be used.

The telephones in Spain use the latest technology. The shared-power telephones do not require users to provide additional power, as the telephone lines have their own power supply.

Although there is not much difference between the two phones, not needing to provide its own power supply will obviously be more convenient for some restricted usage scenarios.

After all, Europe’s current power industry is still in its earliest stages of development, and there are not many cities with electricity. Even in cities that have electricity, there are still many areas that are not covered by electricity.

Even in Madrid, the famous European city that never sleeps, the only places with electricity are industrial areas in the suburbs and some busy streets in the city center.

Most citizens do not have electricity in their homes, so without power, magnetic telephones cannot be used.

The biggest advantage of the shared power telephone is that it eliminates the limitation of power supply. Apart from that, there is not much improvement in call quality and distance.

After telephone communications were established in important government departments, according to reports submitted by various departments after using them for a period of time, each department was quite welcoming of such wired telephones.

With wired telephones, communication between government departments has become more convenient. As the ruler of the country, Carlo can also contact the cabinet government or important departments of the cabinet more quickly, and Prime Minister Canovas can also contact all cabinet ministers, greatly reducing the time required for communication.

Sometimes, officials only need to communicate over the phone to discuss things that originally required a face-to-face meeting.

This is something that telegrams cannot do, after all, telegrams need to be compiled and the content in telegrams will be seen by more people.

(End of this chapter)