At the high school his favorite study was physics; and for a time he and another boy named Rolfe--now a distinguished man of science--carried on electrical experiments of their own in the cellar of the Rolfe house.

Here they had a "Tom Thumb" telegraph, a telephone which they had ventured to improve, and a hopeless tangle of wires.

Whenever they could afford to buy more wires and batteries, they went to a near-by store which supplied electrical apparatus to the professors and students of Harvard.

This store, with its workshop in the rear, seemed to the two boys a veritable wonderland; and when Carty, a youth of eighteen, was compelled to leave school because of his bad eyesight, he ran at once and secured the glorious job of being boy-of-all-work in this store of wonders.

So, when he became an operator in the Boston telephone exchange, a year later, he had already developed to a remarkable degree his natural genius for telephony.
Since then, Carty and the telephone business have grown up together, he always a little distance in advance.