Background
John Joseph Carty was born on April 14, 1861 in Cambridge, Massachussets, United States. He was the fourth child of Henry and Elizabeth (O'Malley) Carty.
John Joseph Carty was born on April 14, 1861 in Cambridge, Massachussets, United States. He was the fourth child of Henry and Elizabeth (O'Malley) Carty.
The possibilities of the telephone, whose inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, was residing in Cambridge, made so strong an appeal to his imagination that John entered the service of the Bell company in Boston in 1879. Here his duties covered the entire range of practical telephony, plant construction, maintenance and design, and traffic and operation. In 1887 he took charge of the cable department of the Western Electric Company in New York City, a subsidiary of the Bell System, and for several years supervised all the important cable-laying projects in eastern cities. There are three important foundation stones of telephony, in use wherever the telephone is employed, which are Carty's creations. His invention of the "common battery" for supplying operating current from a single central office battery to any number of interconnected telephones made practical the commercial development of telephony in metropolitan areas. His development of the high-resistance-bridging signal bell for subscribers' substations, to replace the theretofore universally employed low-resistance series bell, permitted a widespread extension in the use of the telephone. Formerly the signaling and talking instruments were connected in series, involving the interposition of heavy impedance which seriously interfered with the moderate currents used to transmit speech. He found an effective remedy for this trouble by bridging the signal bell coils between the leads, or connecting them in multiple, thus removing the series impedance of the bells from the circuit, and making possible a larger number of toll or party-line stations on a single circuit. Equally revolutionary and of a more distinctly scientific character was his discovery that the principal cause of cross interference between telephone circuits was electrostatic and not electromagnetic unbalance. This discovery and the rules which Carty worked out for the proper construction of adjacent telephone circuits are now universally employed.
Besides his cable work with the Western Electric Company, Carty directed the switchboard organization and returned to the still unsolved common battery problem. By using storage-batteries of very low internal resistance he was able for the first time to operate two or more telephone transmitters from the same source of current supply. These things and a host of others similar but less important were personal creations. They belong to his earlier years. The great achievements of his later life and for which he is best known in the field of electrical communication are the achievements of a generalissimo. Long-distance telephony overland, transoceanic radio telephony, the coordination of factors which rendered telephony so marvelously easy bear scarcely a trace of Carty as a creator of any essential new element. They are, however, almost as surely his creations as any of his earlier work. In 1889 he became chief engineer of the Metropolitan Telephone & Telegraph Company (New York Telephone Company). He reorganized all of its technical work, reconstructed its switchboard and cable plant, replacing overhead wires by underground cables, and introduced new traffic, equipment, and construction methods which greatly improved the service. When Theodore N. Vail returned to the presidency of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company in 1907 he appointed Carty chief engineer to reorganize its technical forces. Carty at once consolidated the experimental laboratories at Boston, New York, Chicago, and elsewhere into one laboratory in New York, later known as the Bell Telephone Laboratories. Talking across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific was one of Carty's boyhood dreams and with Vail's backing, he led a group of distinguished scientists and engineers in a combined attack upon this problem of long-distance telephony. On January 25, 1915, the New York-San Francisco telephone line was opened to public service, and on October 21, 1915, the human voice was for the first time transmitted across the Atlantic. The latter feat was accomplished by radio telephone equipment designed and operated under his direction from the United States Naval Station at Arlington, Va. , to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. By 1916 he and his staff had devised methods which made it possible to talk through an all-cable circuit for distances as great as 1, 500 miles. At the time of the entrance of the United States into the First World War, Carty held the rank of major in the Signal Reserve Corps. He organized among the telephone personnel twelve battalions of picked signal corps troops who were the principal signal troops during the first phase of the conflict. He organized a research and inspection division for the chief signal officer of the American Expeditionary Force and was responsible for the maintenance of transatlantic communications between General Pershing in France and the War Department in Washington. He was promoted colonel and was ordered to France in 1918, serving there throughout the war on the staff of the chief signal officer. He was later promoted to the rank of brigadier-general in the Reserve Corps. Returning home in 1919, he retired as chief engineer of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company and became vice-president, but in 1930 he relinquished this post also and with it his active career.
He was an ardent advocate of scientific industrial research, and research in pure science in the universities. Throughout his career he grasped opportunity with unerring forehandedness, and in late life revealed some part at least of his theory of action when he advised young men to "pick out a first-class difficulty and overcome it. " Consideration of everything Carty did shows always the same technique: painstaking analysis of the problem; exact formulation of the questions to be solved; full consideration of every ascertainable obstacle, human or material, likely to be encountered; assembly of just the right forces and then when all was ready a feverish onslaught quite in contrast with the slow and methodical preparations.
Quotations: "Pick out a first-class difficulty and overcome it. "
He was a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D. C. ; a member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, and American Philosophical Society; a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and honorary member of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (president 1915 - 16), and of the Franklin Institute.
Carty was married, on August 8, 1891, to Marion Mount Russell, daughter of Joseph Russell of Dublin, Ireland. They had one son, John Russell Carty, a physician, who survived them.