Quiz a friend or two about who popularized the type of electricity we use today – go ahead, get your geek on – and a few would correctly name Nikola Tesla. Then ask who invented long-distance telephony.

Probably no one would answer correctly.

It wasn’t Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, or any other celebrated name from the late 19th century’s feverish and fertile age of invention.

Like his renowned contemporary, Tesla, the inventor of long-distance telephony was an electrical engineer. Unlike Tesla’s numerous, sophisticated, and lasting inventions, his were few, crude, and transient.

But they worked – and brought him temporary fame.

Just as Tesla’s brilliance and legacy weren’t fully appreciated until long after his death, so too should be remembered the legacy of his humbler brother inventor whose name once graced the New York Times: Ypsilanti engineer Webster Gillett.

Born around 1840, Webster and his older brother Charles and younger sister Alma grew up on their parents’ 80-acre farm just east of Ypsilanti. Webster’s father Jason kept a few milk cows and pigs and a small flock of sheep. He raised wheat, Indian corn, and oats. Jason was a hard-working farmer. Between 1850 and 1870, his farm grew in size from 80 to 135 acres and its value rose from $1,000 to $10,000 [$170,000 today]. He was one of the more successful farmers in his neighborhood.

Around 1870, Jason’s 29-year-old son Webster also found success. He was granted the first of what would be nine patents – one for an electric alarm for use on railroad cars. Soon after, he obtained another – for an electrical temperature signal. The device received a mention in the Nov. 9, 1872 issue of The Telegrapher magazine, published in New York.

A year later, at age 33, Webster was superintendent of Ypsilanti’s Northwestern Telegraph Manufacturing Co. The company made and sold “Gillett’s Telegraph Apparatus, Gillett’s Electrical Railway Signals, Gillett’s Electrical Temperature Signals,” and “Gillett’s Hotel Enunciator.”

Webster started his career in an Ypsilanti telegraph supply company.

The hotel enunciator, also called “annunciator,” was similar to a hospital call-button system. Hotel guests could use it to summon room service. Webster was not the first to invent an annunciator, but his work on a device for communication over distance presaged his work to come.

Around 1880, at age 40, Webster began his most important and productive period of work. Between March of 1879 and the fall of 1880 he was granted three patents: for a method of adapting telegraph lines for telephone transmission; and for two versions of a speaking telephone (just a few years after Bell’s original telephone patent). Webster assigned one half of one telephone patent to Brooklyn engineer Richard Schermerhorn. He said farewell to his parents on the farm and moved to New York City.

Considering that the telephone is a direct outgrowth of the telegraph, it’s unsurprising that Webster got involved in a telephone equipment company in his new home of Brooklyn. He wasn’t alone in doing so. Telephony was the cutting-edge technology of the day and many inventors were contributing ideas. There was only one technological problem that even Alexander Graham Bell couldn’t solve: long-distance calls.

Telephony works by creating an electrical wave whose shape mirrors the sound wave of a speaker’s voice. At the receiving end, the electrical signal is converted back into a sound wave, producing recognizable speech. The only problem, in Webster’s day, was that the electrical signal was weak, and upon encountering resistance in the wire, soon petered out.

An obvious solution would be to provide a stronger electrical current from the transmitting end to push the signal farther. This wasn’t possible – too much current burned out the delicate needle-and-diaphragm apparatus that converted sound into an electrical wave.

Webster created a mechanical solution to this electrical problem. He simply added more needle-diaphragm pairs, each with its own battery power supply. First he invented a “two-point” (two needle-diaphragms) telephone. This instantly doubled the power pushing the signal down the line. He next created a four-point and a ten-point telephone. His crowning achievement was the twenty-point telephone.

This baroque device contained what resembled a candelabra of twenty needles and diaphragms. A voice speaking into the telephone made all twenty needles quiver. Each needle was wired to its own independent battery. The powerful combined signal surged much farther down the wires than ever before.

“Experiments were made last night on the large wire of the Postal Telegraph Company between New York and Meadville, Penn., a distance of 500 miles, with a telephone devised by Prof. Webster Gillett, of Ypsilanti, Mich.,” reported the Dec. 20, 1883 New York Times.

At the New York end of the wire were Prof. Gillett [and] Judge E. R. Wiggins, of Boston, the President of the Atlantic and Pacific Telephone Company, which owns the patents … Alfred Beal was at the Meadville end … there was little difficulty in carrying on a conversation. The gentlemen here held receivers to their ears, while Mr. Beal addressed them and sang ‘Way Down Upon the Swanee River’ and ‘Old Black Joe,’ which came plainly over the wire. Prof. Gillett asked Mr. Beal for a piece of his wedding cake. Judge Wiggins said he could hear Mr. Beal blush. The provocation for the blush was listening in Meadville.

The paper continued:

What Prof. Gillett calls a 10-point instrument was used. He uses in his transmitter a needle attached to a rubber disc … Each point, Prof. Gillett says, is like adding another telephone in power… “We feel confident that before we get through we are going to say ‘Hello’ and a good deal more, too, to the people on the other side,” said Prof. Gillett. “What we are aiming at is communication at long distances.”

Webster’s aim was true. Before long, his innovation enabled a call from New York to Chicago’s famed meat-packing titan, Philip Armour. The question that came over the wire to Mr. Armour, according to the Feb. 6, 1885 New York Times, was:

“Is it true that Chicago girls have big feet?”

“With painful deliberation,” reported the Times, “[the caller] spoke this query into a little transmitter of one of Webster Gillett’s long-distance telephones last night. The agitated diaphragm passed the interrogation on to one of the Postal Telegraph Company’s wires, and on the copper highway it sped on to Chicago …”

What the paper called the “eminent pork expert,” Philip Armour, “pondered long, and finally answered sorrowfully, ‘They have.’”

Advances in telephone equipment soon made Webster’s intricate phones obsolete. His name is absent from encyclopedias and telephone histories.

But for a moment in the 1880s, the Ypsilanti inventor, whose sheer brainpower whisked him from a humble farm to a cosmopolitan city and won him momentary fame, was at the forefront of long-distance technology.

Mystery Artifact

Mystery Artifact

Your humble author is completely bumfoozled as to how such a crowd of prescient folks immediately and correctly pegged last column’s enigmatic Mystery Artifact as a toaster.

Matthew Naud, ‘FF’LO, Rod Johnson, Anna Ercoli Schnitzer, and Jim Rees all guessed correctly. My goodness. And here I thought I’d picked a stumper.

So we’re stepping up the challenge this time. This Mystery Artifact comes from an Ypsilanti artifact collector and friend who may have in his possession a greater number of artifacts than even exist within the Ypsilanti Museum. Among his gems is this four-inch-long puzzler. What on earth could it be? Take your best guess and good luck!

Laura Bien is the author of “Tales from the Ypsilanti Archives” and the upcoming book “Hidden Ypsilanti.” Contact her at ypsidixit@gmail.com.

From one of Preston Rose's advertisements, in the October, 1892 issue of the magazine "Alienist and Neurologist."

Year-old aged beef bouillon blended with Canadian beer was the health remedy peddled by onetime University of Michigan urinalysist Preston B. Rose – after he was kicked out of the university.

A graduate with the class of 1862, Preston entered UM as an assistant chemistry instructor in the 1860s. He married Cornelia Esther Robinson in 1863. Preston departed from his wife and the university to serve in the Civil War with Michigan’s 5th Infantry Regiment. He worked as assistant surgeon, and was discharged due to his wounds, mustering out in 1865.

Back in Ann Arbor, part of Preston’s work involved exposing worthless patent medicines. That work was undertaken with the Washtenaw County Medical Society, which was founded in 1866. The society was mentioned in a 1906 book, “Past and Present of Washtenaw County,” written by Samuel Beakes, who served as mayor of Ann Arbor from 1888-1890. According to Beakes, the society analyzed many patent medicines, “and exposed their worthlessness.”

The Beakes volume goes on to name the man who would ultimately become Rose’s nemesis: “In this creditable work Dr. Silas H. Douglass, Dr. Albert B. Prescott and Dr. Preston B. Rose were chiefly active.”

It was Silas Douglass – Preston’s boss in the new chemistry department at UM – who would cause him no end of trouble.

The trouble centered on lab fees. Students were charged a fee for chemicals at the beginning of the semester and refunded any balance at the end. The accounting system was a bit informal, and soon Preston was facing charges of embezzlement. The case went all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court and was a prominent story in local papers.

The courts found in favor of Douglass, who held a more powerful post at UM and was paid more than twice Preston’s salary. Preston was suspended from his post as instructor in the Chemical Laboratory in 1876. The scandal didn’t die down until 1881.

Preston lived on South State Street not far from the university. In 1880 his household consisted of his wife Cornelia, his 13-year-old daughter Luella, his 11-year-old daughter Gertrude, his 7-year-old son Carlton, and his 5-year-old daughter Bertha.

Patenting Peptonized Beef

After the scandal, Preston temporarily moved to Chicago. He used his knowledge of chemistry to concoct a revolutionary new health elixir, Peptonized Beef. It was advertised this way in the November 1885 edition of the Physician and Surgeon magazine:

We call attention to advertisement of Peptonized Beef in this issue. It would appear that the problem of an extract of digested beef has been solved by Professor Preston B. Rose, formerly of [University of Michigan], and its preparation attempted upon a scale commensurate with its importance. The general agents of this preparation, Messrs. Chapman, Green & Co., of Chicago, will be pleased to forward samples as per their advertisement.

But Preston did not rest on his peptonized-beef laurels. In 1886, he filed another patent, for what he called a “Food Compound,” a delicacy rendered from wastewater in meat rendering tanks. Ordinarily, the tank water was considered a waste product, but Preston’s “Food Compound” salvaged nutritional value from it. His patent application read:

The invention relates to an article of food for both human and animal consumption and the utilization of substances heretofore considered worthless for food or other purposes, and succinctly is as follows: In the rendering of lard, tallow, or other fats a considerable quantity of water is necessarily present or introduced in the rendering tanks, known in that industry as “tank-water.”

This tank-water … has heretofore been simply an offensive element in the rendering of fats, and its disposition has been almost universally the discharge of the same in the sewers or to be disposed of with the other offensive surroundings of the rendering establishment, and such water is the principal source of the offensive and deleterious odors which arise in the rendering of fats.

Attempts have been made to utilize this tank-water as a fertilizer, but, by reason of its peculiar character and the object to be obtained, they have met with indifferent success. The ten per cent, of solid matter contained in solution in this tank-water is organized substantially as follows: Mineral salts and an albuminous substance, of which there is gelatine or glue, syntonine, and perhaps other products. Of this ten per cent. of solid matter about fifteen per cent, of the same is nitrogen.

My food product and method or process of preparing the same is substantially as follows: First, the tank-water is drawn into separate vessels or apartments and there evaporated until the above-indicated solid matter remains about the consistency of syrup, and even in this condition it is a palatable and nutritious article of semi-liquid or solid food; second, this syrup is then thoroughly intermingled by hand or mechanical means with corn-meal, flour, or other farinaceous substance, and the new composition, so intermingled, is then subjected to heat or evaporation until it reaches the desired condition as an article of food. This intermingling may be done at any degree of heat, and either by means of steam-pressure or otherwise; third, this food-mixture product is then subjected to a grinding or pulverizing process by means of the ordinary grinding mill or otherwise as its final best form for a food product.”

In 1896, Preston filed another patent, this one for a Farinaceous Food Compound.

His patent application reads:

Be it known that I, Preston B. Rose, a citizen of the United States, residing at Ann Arbor, in the county of Washtenaw and State of Michigan, have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Food Compounds … My invention consists in a food compound comprising a farinaceous substance mixed with peptone in any desired proportion …

In carrying my invention into effect I take a certain quantity of a farinaceous substance, such as flour, cracked or rolled wheat, oatmeal, rolled oats, cornmeal, or other farinaceous substance, and combine with it a peptone in any desired proportion, preferably from one to twenty-five per cent.

I prefer to use as the peptone a product known in the trade as “peptonized beef,” which combines the advantages of the peptone and a nutritious substance. The farinaceous substance is mixed with water or milk and made into a dough, as in the usual process of making bread, crackers, or biscuit.

The peptone in a solid, liquid, or semisolid condition, as preferred, is thoroughly incorporated with the farinaceous substance and the resulting dough is kneaded by hand or machinery, as desired, and is then molded, pressed, or formed into any preferred shape, as bread, crackers, or biscuit, and is subjected to heat for a time sufficient to bring it into the desired condition of food.”

Preston also filed patent for a fertilizer made from the same tank-water.

Peddling Peptonized Beef … and Ale

By 1890 Preston’s beef tonic continued to be advertised in even more glowing terms in the June issue of the Medical Brief magazine, alongside ads for such panaceas as “Tongaline” and “Viburnated Celery.”

The ad for Preston’s elixir read, “The late world-renowned Dr. Fothergill once said, “What a boon it would be to the Medical Profession if some reliable Chemist would bring out an Extract of Malt in combination with a well-digested or peptonized Beef, giving us the elements of Beef and the stimulating and nutritious portions of Ale.”

Fothergill’s wish for the beef-ale combination had been realized, the advertisement stated. It cited an attestation from the celebrated chemist, Prof. G. A. Liebig:

A careful chemical examination of the Peptonized Ale and Beef shows a much larger per cent of nitrogenous blood and muscle making matter over all other malt extracts, and that it is also rich in Diastase, giving it the power to digest Starch Foods. The ‘Peptonized’ Beef, one of the main ingredients contained in our article, is manufactured by Prof. Preston B. Rose, of Chicago, lately of the faculty of the University of Michigan, whose article is strongly endorsed by many of our most eminent physicians.

Our article contains all the elements of a perfect FLESH food in a concentrated form … it contains all the albumen and fibrine of the beef as well as the nutritive qualities of the malted barley … [it] is entirely soluble and is quickly diffused through-out the whole system. [It] is for this reason well suited to the enfeebled digestion of Dyspeptics, and in reestablishing strength and flesh in convalescence after protracted and wasting diseases.

Two free bottles of ale and beef were offered to any physician.

Peptonized Payoff

In his old age, Preston lived with his daughter Luella on Division Street in Ann Arbor. He apparently earned enough from his ventures to pay off his mortgage. According to his death certificate, Preston died of a combination of artheriosclerosis, bladder stones, cystitis, and nephritis.

Preston is buried in Ann Arbor’s Forest Hill Cemetery.

This biweekly column features a Mystery Artifact contest. You are invited to take a look at the artifact and try to deduce its function.

Mystery artifact

Some shrewd guessers pegged the last Mystery Artifact‘s function: a typewriter, one of several odd early models of typewriters available in the ole-time Sears catalog. Al Feldt and Dave both guessed correctly.

This week’s Mystery Artifact consists of a set of two small objects. Copied from a similar set in the Ypsilanti Historical Museum, they were hand-carved by a modern-day artisan. What might they be? Take your best guess and good luck!

Laura Bien is the author of “Tales from the Ypsilanti Archives.” Have an idea for a column? Contact her at ypsidixit@gmail.com.