After Squier graduated from West Point Military Academy in 1887, he was assigned to an artillery unit at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland. To improve his understanding of ballistics and battlefield communications, Squier studied electrical engineering at nearby Johns Hopkins University.
In 1898, Squier served in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. He commanded a ship that laid hundreds of miles of communications cables to connect soldiers on far-flung islands. Squier became convinced that the Army could win wars faster and save lives with improvements in long-distance communications.
At the time, technologies like the telegraph and telephone were limited to transmitting one signal or conversation over a communications cable at a time.
“If one wire could be made to do the work of many wires,” wrote Squier, “the main difficulty in field communications for war purposes would be solved.”
Using his engineering background, Squier developed a system for transmitting multiple signals over the same wire at different frequencies. His patents for “multiplex telegraphy and telephony” were game changers, increasing the capacity of the standard telephone wire by 400 percent and the telegraph wire by 1,000 percent.
Squier’s multiplexing technology was a boon to early telephone companies like the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. (AT&T), which Squier later sued for patent infringement.
Broadcasting Radio Over Electrical Lines
Not only was Squier a technological genius, but he was able to imagine novel applications for his technology beyond military communications. In 1910, soon after filing his patents for multiplexing, Squier recorded this idea in his journal:
“Try superimposing wireless telegraphic and telephonic messages upon the ordinary electric light wires in a building or throughout a city. I see no reason why this same wiring, which is now utilized to carry power, should not also serve for telephony by electric waves. This would simplify house wiring for hotels and office buildings, etc.”
Radio at the time was still in its infancy, and broadcast signals were weak and plagued with interference and static. Multiplexing had proven that it was possible to send multiple communications signals over the same telephone or telegraph cable.
Now Squier wondered if radio broadcasts could be transmitted over electrical wires instead of through the air. He called his invention “wired wireless.”
“The far-flung tentacles of the two vast wire networks, telephone wires and electric-light wires, are already side by side in millions of American homes,” wrote Squier. “The people should see to it that these two essential public electric utility channels are required to cooperate promptly in speeding the solution of the difficult and baffling problems of radio broadcasting.”
At the same time Squier was inventing multiplexing and “wired wireless,” he was flying with the Wright Brothers and creating the “aeronautical division” of the Army Signal Corps, the grandfather of the Air Force.
“Squier was interested in so many different things,” says Harvey. “You would think that a West Point graduate would have a military mindset and be pretty narrowly focused, but he was all over the place. And then he turned around and thought up Muzak.”