John J. Carty

Nothing is more familiar in these days, or more characteristic of the age in which we live, than the underlying belief shared by pretty much all of us that anything is possible if science, building on previous achievement, applies itself to subduing and harnessing some force of nature hitherto uncontrolled. No invention in that field, however unbelievable a dozen years ago, excites today either incredulity or very great surprise. This popular attitude provides in many respects the most impressive of the contrasts between the present era and that of forty or fifty years ago, when even such inventions as the telephone were received with curiosity, but with outspoken skepticism over their practical use to the community. When John J. Carty obtained his first job, some 54 years ago, as operator for the newly-established Telephone Dispatch Company of Boston, it was only three years after Alexander Graham Bell had publicly demonstrated the feasibility of telephone communication. The boy of 18, who had been compelled to give up even such elementary scientific training as the college course of those days offered, plunged at once into the work of mastering the scientific questions which had engaged his particular activities.

In years when the telephone was still very generally looked upon as a toy, when New York city residents were accustomed to send and receive their private telephone messages by way of the nearest drugstore, Carty’s mind was busy with schemes for mechanical appliances to meet the enormous extension of the system which he clearly foresaw. The multiple switchboard was his own achievement, and the series of successful improvements, which followed rapidly on his initiative, won for him quite spontaneously the post of chief engineer for the New York Telephone. He became one of the comparatively small group of men whose inventive genius, organizing capacity and vision of the future made quick and accurate telephone-communication in this country an essential part of life, at a time when the rest of the world was struggling with a lame and imperfect system. But, however extraordinary one achieved innovation might be, Carty always saw something larger still ahead. Establishment of nation-wide direct transmission in 1915, followed in due course by transoceanic communication, was in large degree his personal achievement. It was honest recognition of his work which not long ago led one of the highest officers in the American Telephone to testify publicly that, “if we were to take out of the present telephone system those things which John J. Carty personally devised, the system would in many important respects be no longer operative.”

Alexander Dana Noyes
1933 Century Association Yearbook