Quelltext der Seite History of the Telephone Casson 1910 01 Birth of the Telephone

{{Werk
|Titel=History of the Telephone
|Autor=Casson-Herbert-N
|Copyright=Siehe eLib Lizenzen
|Auflage=1
|Kurzbeschreibung=Geschichte der Erfindung und Entwicklung des Telephons.
|Entstehungsjahr=1910
|Erscheinungsjahr=1910
|Sprache=English
|Verlag=
|Typ=Monographie
|ISBN=140653451X
|ISSN=9781406534511
|Fachgebiete=202 Elektrotechnik Elektronik Informationstechnik,508 Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften,601 Geschichte Archäologie
|Tags=Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Technikgeschichte, Telefon, Kommunikation, Erfindung
|Version=1
|Wikilink=Telephone_-_History_of_Telephone_-_Herbert_N_Casson_-_1910
|Searchlink=Telephone+History
|Personen=Bell-Alexander-Graham
}}

:History of the Telephone

:BY HERBERT N. CASSON
:1910


==CHAPTER I - THE BIRTH OF THE TELEPHONE==

In that somewhat distant year 1875, when the
telegraph and the Atlantic cable were the
most wonderful things in the world, a tall young
professor of elocution was desperately busy in a
noisy machine-shop that stood in one of the narrow
streets of Boston, not far from Scollay
Square. It was a very hot afternoon in June,
but the young professor had forgotten the heat
and the grime of the workshop. He was wholly
absorbed in the making of a nondescript machine,
a sort of crude harmonica with a clock-spring
reed, a magnet, and a wire. It was a most
absurd toy in appearance. It was unlike any
other thing that had ever been made in any country.
The young professor had been toiling over
it for three years and it had constantly baffled
him, until, on this hot afternoon in June, 1875,
he heard an almost inaudible sound--a faint
TWANG--come from the machine itself.

For an instant he was stunned. He had been
expecting just such a sound for several months,
but it came so suddenly as to give him the sensation
of surprise. His eyes blazed with delight,
and he sprang in a passion of eagerness to an
adjoining room in which stood a young mechanic
who was assisting him.

&quot;Snap that reed again, Watson,&quot; cried the
apparently irrational young professor. There
was one of the odd-looking machines in each
room, so it appears, and the two were connected
by an electric wire. Watson had snapped the
reed on one of the machines and the professor
had heard from the other machine exactly the
same sound. It was no more than the gentle
TWANG of a clock-spring; but it was the first time
in the history of the world that a complete sound
had been carried along a wire, reproduced perfectly
at the other end, and heard by an expert
in acoustics.

That twang of the clock-spring was the first
tiny cry of the newborn telephone, uttered in the
clanging din of a machine-shop and happily
heard by a man whose ear had been trained to
recognize the strange voice of the little newcomer.
There, amidst flying belts and jarring
wheels, the baby telephone was born, as feeble
and helpless as any other baby, and &quot;with no
language but a cry.&quot;

The professor-inventor, who had thus rescued
the tiny foundling of science, was a young Scottish
American. His name, now known as widely
as the telephone itself, was Alexander Graham
Bell. He was a teacher of acoustics and a student
of electricity, possibly the only man in his
generation who was able to focus a knowledge
of both subjects upon the problem of the telephone.
To other men that exceedingly faint
sound would have been as inaudible as silence
itself; but to Bell it was a thunder-clap. It was
a dream come true. It was an impossible thing
which had in a flash become so easy that he could
scarcely believe it. Here, without the use of a
battery, with no more electric current than that
made by a couple of magnets, all the waves of
a sound had been carried along a wire and
changed back to sound at the farther end. It
was absurd. It was incredible. It was something
which neither wire nor electricity had been
known to do before. But it was true.

No discovery has ever been less accidental.
It was the last link of a long chain of discoveries.
It was the result of a persistent and
deliberate search. Already, for half a year
or longer, Bell had known the correct theory of
the telephone; but he had not realized that the
feeble undulatory current generated by a magnet
was strong enough for the transmission of speech.
He had been taught to undervalue the incredible
efficiency of electricity.

Not only was Bell himself a teacher of the
laws of speech, so highly skilled that he was
an instructor in Boston University. His father,
also, his two brothers, his uncle, and his
grandfather had taught the laws of speech in the
universities of Edinburgh, Dublin, and London.
For three generations the Bells had been professors
of the science of talking. They had even
helped to create that science by several inven-
tions. The first of them, Alexander Bell, had
invented a system for the correction of stammering
and similar defects of speech. The second,
Alexander Melville Bell, was the dean of British
elocutionists, a man of creative brain and a most
impressive facility of rhetoric. He was the author
of a dozen text-books on the art of speaking
correctly, and also of a most ingenious
sign-language which he called &quot;Visible Speech.&quot;
Every letter in the alphabet of this language
represented a certain action of the lips and
tongue; so that a new method was provided for
those who wished to learn foreign languages or
to speak their own language more correctly.
And the third of these speech-improving Bells,
the inventor of the telephone, inherited the
peculiar genius of his fathers, both inventive and
rhetorical, to such a degree that as a boy he had
constructed an artificial skull, from gutta-percha
and India rubber, which, when enlivened by a
blast of air from a hand-bellows, would actually
pronounce several words in an almost human
manner.

The third Bell, the only one of this remarkable
family who concerns us at this time, was a young
man, barely twenty-eight, at the time when his
ear caught the first cry of the telephone. But he
was already a man of some note on his own account.
He had been educated in Edinburgh, the
city of his birth, and in London; and had in one
way and another picked up a smattering of
anatomy, music, electricity, and telegraphy.
Until he was sixteen years of age, he had read
nothing but novels and poetry and romantic tales
of Scottish heroes. Then he left home to become
a teacher of elocution in various British
schools, and by the time he was of age he had
made several slight discoveries as to the nature
of vowel-sounds. Shortly afterwards, he met in
London two distinguished men, Alexander J.
Ellis and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who did far
more than they ever knew to forward Bell in
the direction of the telephone.

Ellis was the president of the London Philological
Society. Also, he was the translator
of the famous book on &quot;The Sensations of Tone,&quot;
written by Helmholtz, who, in the period from
1871 to 1894 made Berlin the world-centre for
the study of the physical sciences. So it happened
that when Bell ran to Ellis as a young
enthusiast and told his experiments, Ellis informed
him that Helmholtz had done the same
things several years before and done them more
completely. He brought Bell to his house and
showed him what Helmholtz had done--how he
had kept tuning-forks in vibration by the power
of electro-magnets, and blended the tones of several
tuning-forks together to produce the complex
quality of the human voice.

Now, Helmholtz had not been trying to invent
a telephone, nor any sort of message-carrier.
His aim was to point out the physical basis of
music, and nothing more. But this fact that
an electro-magnet would set a tuning-fork humming
was new to Bell and very attractive. It
appealed at once to him as a student of speech.
If a tuning-fork could be made to sing by a
magnet or an electrified wire, why would it not
be possible to make a musical telegraph--a telegraph
with a piano key-board, so that many messages
could be sent at once over a single wire?
Unknown to Bell, there were several dozen inven-
tors then at work upon this problem, which
proved in the end to be very elusive. But it gave
him at least a starting-point, and he forthwith
commenced his quest of the telephone.

As he was then in England, his first step was
naturally to visit Sir Charles Wheatstone, the
best known English expert on telegraphy.
Sir Charles had earned his title by many inventions.
He was a simple-natured scientist, and
treated Bell with the utmost kindness. He
showed him an ingenious talking-machine that
had been made by Baron de Kempelin. At this
time Bell was twenty-two and unknown; Wheatstone
was sixty-seven and famous. And the
personality of the veteran scientist made so vivid
a picture upon the mind of the impressionable
young Bell that the grand passion of science became
henceforth the master-motif of his life.

From this summit of glorious ambition he was
thrown, several months later, into the depths of
grief and despondency. The White Plague had
come to the home in Edinburgh and taken away
his two brothers. More, it had put its mark
upon the young inventor himself. Nothing but
a change of climate, said his doctor, would put
him out of danger. And so, to save his life, he
and his father and mother set sail from Glasgow
and came to the small Canadian town of Brantford,
where for a year he fought down his
tendency to consumption, and satisfied his nervous
energy by teaching &quot;Visible Speech&quot; to a
tribe of Mohawk Indians.

By this time it had become evident, both to
his parents and to his friends, that young Graham
was destined to become some sort of a creative
genius. He was tall and supple, with a pale
complexion, large nose, full lips, jet-black eyes,
and jet-black hair, brushed high and usually
rumpled into a curly tangle. In temperament
he was a true scientific Bohemian, with the ideals
of a savant and the disposition of an artist. He
was wholly a man of enthusiasms, more devoted
to ideas than to people; and less likely to master
his own thoughts than to be mastered by them.
He had no shrewdness, in any commercial sense,
and very little knowledge of the small practical
details of ordinary living. He was always intense,
always absorbed. When he applied his
mind to a problem, it became at once an enthralling
arena, in which there went whirling a chariot-
race of ideas and inventive fancies.

He had been fascinated from boyhood by his
father's system of &quot;Visible Speech.&quot; He knew
it so well that he once astonished a professor of
Oriental languages by repeating correctly a sentence
of Sanscrit that had been written in &quot;Visible
Speech&quot; characters. While he was living in
London his most absorbing enthusiasm was the
instruction of a class of deaf-mutes, who could
be trained to talk, he believed, by means of the
&quot;Visible Speech&quot; alphabet. He was so deeply
impressed by the progress made by these pupils,
and by the pathos of their dumbness, that when
he arrived in Canada he was in doubt as to which
of these two tasks was the more important--the
teaching of deaf-mutes or the invention of a
musical telegraph.

At this point, and before Bell had begun to
experiment with his telegraph, the scene of the
story shifts from Canada to Massachusetts. It
appears that his father, while lecturing in Boston,
had mentioned Graham's exploits with a
class of deaf-mutes; and soon afterward the Boston
Board of Education wrote to Graham, offering
him five hundred dollars if he would come to
Boston and introduce his system of teaching in a
school for deaf-mutes that had been opened recently.
The young man joyfully agreed, and on
the first of April, 1871, crossed the line and became
for the remainder of his life an American.

For the next two years his telegraphic work
was laid aside, if not forgotten. His success as
a teacher of deaf-mutes was sudden and overwhelming.
It was the educational sensation of
1871. It won him a professorship in Boston
University; and brought so many pupils around
him that he ventured to open an ambitious
&quot;School of Vocal Physiology,&quot; which became at
once a profitable enterprise. For a time there
seemed to be little hope of his escaping from the
burden of this success and becoming an inventor,
when, by a most happy coincidence, two of his
pupils brought to him exactly the sort of stimulation
and practical help that he needed and had
not up to this time received.

One of these pupils was a little deaf-mute
tot, five years of age, named Georgie Sanders.
Bell had agreed to give him a series of private
lessons for $350 a year; and as the child lived
with his grandmother in the city of Salem, sixteen
miles from Boston, it was agreed that Bell should
make his home with the Sanders family. Here
he not only found the keenest interest and sympathy
in his air-castles of invention, but also was
given permission to use the cellar of the house as
his workshop.

For the next three years this cellar was his
favorite retreat. He littered it with tuning-
forks, magnets, batteries, coils of wire, tin
trumpets, and cigar-boxes. No one outside of
the Sanders family was allowed to enter it, as
Bell was nervously afraid of having his ideas
stolen. He would even go to five or six stores
to buy his supplies, for fear that his intentions
should be discovered. Almost with the secrecy
of a conspirator, he worked alone in this cellar,
usually at night, and quite oblivious of the fact
that sleep was a necessity to him and to the
Sanders family.

&quot;Often in the middle of the night Bell would
wake me up,&quot; said Thomas Sanders, the father
of Georgie. &quot;His black eyes would be blazing
with excitement. Leaving me to go down to
the cellar, he would rush wildly to the barn and
begin to send me signals along his experimental
wires. If I noticed any improvement in his
machine, he would be delighted. He would leap
and whirl around in one of his `war-dances' and
then go contentedly to bed. But if the experiment
was a failure, he would go back to his workbench
and try some different plan.&quot;

The second pupil who became a factor--a
very considerable factor--in Bell's career was a
fifteen-year-old girl named Mabel Hubbard, who
had lost her hearing, and consequently her speech,
through an attack of scarlet-fever when a baby.
She was a gentle and lovable girl, and Bell, in his
ardent and headlong way, lost his heart to her
completely; and four years later, he had the
happiness of making her his wife. Mabel Hubbard
did much to encourage Bell. She followed each
step of his progress with the keenest interest.
She wrote his letters and copied his patents. She
cheered him on when he felt himself beaten.
And through her sympathy with Bell and his ambitions,
she led her father--a widely known Boston
lawyer named Gardiner G. Hubbard--to
become Bell's chief spokesman and defender, a
true apostle of the telephone.

Hubbard first became aware of Bell's inventive
efforts one evening when Bell was visiting
at his home in Cambridge. Bell was illustrating
some of the mysteries of acoustics by the aid of
a piano. &quot;Do you know,&quot; he said to Hubbard,
&quot;that if I sing the note G close to the strings of
the piano, that the G-string will answer me?&quot;
&quot;Well, what then?&quot; asked Hubbard. &quot;It is
a fact of tremendous importance,&quot; replied Bell.
&quot;It is an evidence that we may some day have
a musical telegraph, which will send as many
messages simultaneously over one wire as there
are notes on that piano.&quot;

Later, Bell ventured to confide to Hubbard
his wild dream of sending speech over an electric
wire, but Hubbard laughed him to scorn. &quot;Now
you are talking nonsense,&quot; he said. &quot;Such a
thing never could be more than a scientific toy.
You had better throw that idea out of your mind
and go ahead with your musical telegraph, which
if it is successful will make you a millionaire.&quot;

But the longer Bell toiled at his musical telegraph,
the more he dreamed of replacing the telegraph
and its cumbrous sign-language by a new
machine that would carry, not dots and dashes,
but the human voice. &quot;If I can make a deaf-
mute talk,&quot; he said, &quot;I can make iron talk.&quot; For
months he wavered between the two ideas. He
had no more than the most hazy conception of
what this voice-carrying machine would be like.
At first he conceived of having a harp at one end
of the wire, and a speaking-trumpet at the other,
so that the tones of the voice would be reproduced
by the strings of the harp.

Then, in the early Summer of 1874, while he
was puzzling over this harp apparatus, the dim
outline of a new path suddenly glinted in front
of him. He had not been forgetful of &quot;Visible
Speech&quot; all this while, but had been making
experiments with two remarkable machines--the
phonautograph and the manometric capsule, by
means of which the vibrations of sound were
made plainly visible. If these could be im-
proved, he thought, then the deaf might be taught
to speak by SIGHT--by learning an alphabet of
vibrations. He mentioned these experiments to
a Boston friend, Dr. Clarence J. Blake, and he,
being a surgeon and an aurist, naturally said,
&quot;Why don't you use a REAL EAR?&quot;

Such an idea never had, and probably never
could have, occurred to Bell; but he accepted it
with eagerness. Dr. Blake cut an ear from a dead
man's head, together with the ear-drum and the
associated bones. Bell took this fragment of
a skull and arranged it so that a straw touched
the ear-drum at one end and a piece of moving
smoked glass at the other. Thus, when Bell
spoke loudly into the ear, the vibrations of the
drum made tiny markings upon the glass.

It was one of the most extraordinary incidents
in the whole history of the telephone. To an
uninitiated onlooker, nothing could have been
more ghastly or absurd. How could any one
have interpreted the gruesome joy of this young
professor with the pale face and the black
eyes, who stood earnestly singing, whispering,
and shouting into a dead man's ear? What
sort of a wizard must he be, or ghoul, or madman?
And in Salem, too, the home of the
witchcraft superstition! Certainly it would
not have gone well with Bell had he lived
two centuries earlier and been caught at such
black magic.

What had this dead man's ear to do with the
invention of the telephone? Much. Bell noticed
how small and thin was the ear-drum, and
yet how effectively it could send thrills and
vibrations through heavy bones. &quot;If this tiny disc
can vibrate a bone,&quot; he thought, &quot;then an iron
disc might vibrate an iron rod, or at least, an iron
wire.&quot; In a flash the conception of a membrane
telephone was pictured in his mind. He saw in
imagination two iron discs, or ear-drums, far
apart and connected by an electrified wire, catching
the vibrations of sound at one end, and reproducing
them at the other. At last he was on the
right path, and had a theoretical knowledge of
what a speaking telephone ought to be. What
remained to be done was to construct such a machine
and find out how the electric current could
best be brought into harness.

Then, as though Fortune suddenly felt that he
was winning this stupendous success too easily,
Bell was flung back by an avalanche of troubles.
Sanders and Hubbard, who had been paying the
cost of his experiments, abruptly announced that
they would pay no more unless he confined his
attention to the musical telegraph, and stopped
wasting his time on ear-toys that never could be
of any financial value. What these two men
asked could scarcely be denied, as one of them
was his best-paying patron and the other was the
father of the girl whom he hoped to marry. &quot;If
you wish my daughter,&quot; said Hubbard, &quot;you must
abandon your foolish telephone.&quot; Bell's &quot;School
of Vocal Physiology,&quot; too, from which he had
hoped so much, had come to an inglorious end.
He had been too much absorbed in his experiments
to sustain it. His professorship had been
given up, and he had no pupils except Georgie
Sanders and Mabel Hubbard. He was poor,
much poorer than his associates knew. And his
mind was torn and distracted by the contrary
calls of science, poverty, business, and affection.
Pouring out his sorrows in a letter to his mother,
he said: &quot;I am now beginning to realize the
cares and anxieties of being an inventor. I have
had to put off all pupils and classes, for flesh and
blood could not stand much longer such a strain
as I have had upon me.&quot;

While stumbling through this Slough of Despond,
he was called to Washington by his patent
lawyer. Not having enough money to pay the
cost of such a journey, he borrowed the price of a
return ticket from Sanders and arranged to stay
with a friend in Washington, to save a hotel bill
that he could not afford. At that time Professor
Joseph Henry, who knew more of the theory of
electrical science than any other American, was
the Grand Old Man of Washington; and poor
Bell, in his doubt and desperation, resolved to
run to him for advice.

Then came a meeting which deserves to be
historic. For an entire afternoon the two men
worked together over the apparatus that Bell had
brought from Boston, just as Henry had worked
over the telegraph before Bell was born. Henry
was now a veteran of seventy-eight, with only
three years remaining to his credit in the bank
of Time, while Bell was twenty-eight. There
was a long half-century between them; but the
youth had discovered a New Fact that the sage,
in all his wisdom, had never known.

&quot;You are in possession of the germ of a great
invention,&quot; said Henry, &quot;and I would advise you
to work at it until you have made it complete.&quot;

&quot;But,&quot; replied Bell, &quot;I have not got the
electrical knowledge that is necessary.&quot;

&quot;Get it,&quot; responded the aged scientist.

&quot;I cannot tell you how much these two words
have encouraged me,&quot; said Bell afterwards, in
describing this interview to his parents. &quot;I live
too much in an atmosphere of discouragement for
scientific pursuits; and such a chimerical idea as
telegraphing VOCAL SOUNDS would indeed seem to
most minds scarcely feasible enough to spend
time in working over.&quot;

By this time Bell had moved his workshop from
the cellar in Salem to 109 Court Street, Boston,
where he had rented a room from Charles
Williams, a manufacturer of electrical supplies.
Thomas A. Watson was his assistant, and both
Bell and Watson lived nearby, in two cheap little
bedrooms. The rent of the workshop and bedrooms,
and Watson's wages of nine dollars a
week, were being paid by Sanders and Hubbard.
Consequently, when Bell returned from Washington,
he was compelled by his agreement to
devote himself mainly to the musical telegraph,
although his heart was now with the telephone.
For exactly three months after his interview with
Professor Henry, he continued to plod ahead,
along both lines, until, on that memorable hot
afternoon in June, 1875, the full TWANG of the
clock-spring came over the wire, and the telephone
was born.

From this moment, Bell was a man of one purpose.
He won over Sanders and Hubbard. He
converted Watson into an enthusiast. He forgot
his musical telegraph, his &quot;Visible Speech,&quot;
his classes, his poverty. He threw aside a profession
in which he was already locally famous.
And he grappled with this new mystery of electricity,
as Henry had advised him to do, encouraging
himself with the fact that Morse, who was
only a painter, had mastered his electrical
difficulties, and there was no reason why a professor
of acoustics should not do as much.

The telephone was now in existence, but it was
the youngest and feeblest thing in the nation. It
had not yet spoken a word. It had to be taught,
developed, and made fit for the service of the
irritable business world. All manner of discs
had to be tried, some smaller and thinner than a
dime and others of steel boiler-plate as heavy as
the shield of Achilles. In all the books of electrical
science, there was nothing to help Bell and
Watson in this journey they were making
through an unknown country. They were as
chartless as Columbus was in 1492. Neither
they nor any one else had acquired any experience
in the rearing of a young telephone. No
one knew what to do next. There was nothing
to know.

For forty weeks--long exasperating weeks--
the telephone could do no more than gasp and
make strange inarticulate noises. Its educators
had not learned how to manage it. Then, on
March 10, 1876, IT TALKED. It said distinctly--

&quot;MR. WATSON, COME HERE, I WANT YOU.&quot; Watson,
who was at the lower end of the wire, in the
basement, dropped the receiver and rushed with
wild joy up three flights of stairs to tell the glad
tidings to Bell. &quot;I can hear you!&quot; he shouted
breathlessly. &quot;I can hear the WORDS.&quot;

It was not easy, of course, for the weak young
telephone to make itself heard in that noisy workshop.
No one, not even Bell and Watson, was
familiar with its odd little voice. Usually Watson,
who had a remarkably keen sense of hearing,
did the listening; and Bell, who was a professional
elocutionist, did the talking. And day by day
the tone of the baby instrument grew clearer--a
new note in the orchestra of civilization.

On his twenty-ninth birthday, Bell received
his patent, No. 174,465--&quot;the most valuable
single patent ever issued&quot; in any country. He
had created something so entirely new that there
was no name for it in any of the world's languages.
In describing it to the officials of the
Patent Office, he was obliged to call it &quot;an
improvement in telegraphy,&quot; when, in truth, it was
nothing of the kind. It was as different from the
telegraph as the eloquence of a great orator is
from the sign-language of a deaf-mute.

Other inventors had worked from the standpoint
of the telegraph; and they never did, and
never could, get any better results than signs
and symbols. But Bell worked from the standpoint
of the human voice. He cross-fertilized
the two sciences of acoustics and electricity. His
study of &quot;Visible Speech&quot; had trained his mind
so that he could mentally SEE the shape of a word
as he spoke it. He knew what a spoken word
was, and how it acted upon the air, or the ether,
that carried its vibrations from the lips to the ear.
He was a third-generation specialist in the
nature of speech, and he knew that for the transmission
of spoken words there must be &quot;a pulsatory
action of the electric current which is the
exact equivalent of the aerial impulses.&quot;

Bell knew just enough about electricity, and
not too much. He did not know the possible
from the impossible. &quot;Had I known more about
electricity, and less about sound,&quot; he said, &quot;I
would never have invented the telephone.&quot;
What he had done was so amazing, so foolhardy,
that no trained electrician could have thought
of it. It was &quot;the very hardihood of invention,&quot;
and yet it was not in any sense a chance discovery.
It was the natural output of a mind that
had been led to assemble just the right materials
for such a product.

As though the very stars in their courses were
working for this young wizard with the
talking wire, the Centennial Exposition in
Philadelphia opened its doors exactly two
months after the telephone had learned to
talk. Here was a superb opportunity to
let the wide world know what had been
done, and fortunately Hubbard was one of the
Centennial Commissioners. By his influence a
small table was placed in the Department of
Education, in a narrow space between a stairway
and a wall, and on this table was deposited the
first of the telephones.

Bell had no intention of going to the
Centennial himself. He was too poor. Sanders
and Hubbard had never done more than pay his
room-rent and the expense of his experiments.
For his three or four years of inventing he had re-
ceived nothing as yet--nothing but his patent.
In order to live, he had been compelled to
reorganize his classes in &quot;Visible Speech,&quot; and
to pick up the ravelled ends of his neglected
profession.

But one Friday afternoon, toward the end of
June, his sweetheart, Mabel Hubbard, was taking
the train for the Centennial; and he went to the
depot to say good-bye. Here Miss Hubbard
learned for the first time that Bell was not to
go. She coaxed and pleaded, without effect.
Then, as the train was starting, leaving Bell on
the platform, the affectionate young girl could
no longer control her feelings and was overcome
by a passion of tears. At this the susceptible
Bell, like a true Sir Galahad, dashed after the
moving train and sprang aboard, without ticket
or baggage, oblivious of his classes and his poverty
and of all else except this one maiden's
distress. &quot;I never saw a man,&quot; said Watson, &quot;so
much in love as Bell was.&quot;

As it happened, this impromptu trip to the
Centennial proved to be one of the most timely
acts of his life. On the following Sunday after-
noon the judges were to make a special tour of
inspection, and Mr. Hubbard, after much trouble,
had obtained a promise that they would spend a
few minutes examining Bell's telephone. By
this time it had been on exhibition for more
than six weeks, without attracting the serious
attention of anybody.

When Sunday afternoon arrived, Bell was at
his little table, nervous, yet confident. But hour
after hour went by, and the judges did not arrive.
The day was intensely hot, and they had many
wonders to examine. There was the first electric
light, and the first grain-binder, and the
musical telegraph of Elisha Gray, and the marvellous
exhibit of printing telegraphs shown by
the Western Union Company. By the time they
came to Bell's table, through a litter of school-
desks and blackboards, the hour was seven
o'clock, and every man in the party was hot, tired,
and hungry. Several announced their intention
of returning to their hotels. One took up a telephone
receiver, looked at it blankly, and put it
down again. He did not even place it to his ear.
Another judge made a slighting remark which
raised a laugh at Bell's expense. Then a most
marvellous thing happened--such an incident as
would make a chapter in &quot;The Arabian Nights
Entertainments.&quot;

Accompanied by his wife, the Empress
Theresa, and by a bevy of courtiers, the Emperor
of Brazil, Dom Pedro de Alcantara, walked
into the room, advanced with both hands outstretched
to the bewildered Bell, and exclaimed:
&quot;Professor Bell, I am delighted to see you
again.&quot; The judges at once forgot the heat
and the fatigue and the hunger. Who was
this young inventor, with the pale complexion
and black eyes, that he should be the friend
of Emperors? They did not know, and for
the moment even Bell himself had forgotten,
that Dom Pedro had once visited Bell's class
of deaf-mutes at Boston University. He was
especially interested in such humanitarian work,
and had recently helped to organize the first
Brazilian school for deaf-mutes at Rio de
Janeiro. And so, with the tall, blond-bearded
Dom Pedro in the centre, the assembled judges,
and scientists--there were fully fifty in all--
entered with unusual zest into the proceedings of
this first telephone exhibition.

A wire had been strung from one end of the
room to the other, and while Bell went to the
transmitter, Dom Pedro took up the receiver and
placed it to his ear. It was a moment of tense
expectancy. No one knew clearly what was
about to happen, when the Emperor, with a
dramatic gesture, raised his head from the receiver
and exclaimed with a look of utter amazement:
&quot;MY GOD--IT TALKS!&quot;

Next came to the receiver the oldest scientist
in the group, the venerable Joseph Henry, whose
encouragement to Bell had been so timely. He
stopped to listen, and, as one of the bystanders
afterwards said, no one could forget the look of
awe that came into his face as he heard that iron
disc talking with a human voice. &quot;This,&quot; said
he, &quot;comes nearer to overthrowing the doctrine
of the conservation of energy than anything I
ever saw.&quot;

Then came Sir William Thomson, latterly
known as Lord Kelvin. It was fitting that he
should be there, for he was the foremost elec-
trical scientist at that time in the world, and had
been the engineer of the first Atlantic Cable.
He listened and learned what even he had not
known before, that a solid metallic body could
take up from the air all the countless varieties of
vibrations produced by speech, and that these
vibrations could be carried along a wire and
reproduced exactly by a second metallic body. He
nodded his head solemnly as he rose from the
receiver. &quot;It DOES speak,&quot; he said emphatically.
&quot;It is the most wonderful thing I have seen in
America.&quot;

So, one after another, this notable company
of men listened to the voice of the first telephone,
and the more they knew of science, the less they
were inclined to believe their ears. The wiser
they were, the more they wondered. To Henry
and Thomson, the masters of electrical magic, this
instrument was as surprising as it was to the man
in the street. And both were noble enough to
admit frankly their astonishment in the reports
which they made as judges, when they gave Bell
a Certificate of Award. &quot;Mr. Bell has achieved
a result of transcendent scientific interest,&quot;
wrote Sir William Thomson. &quot;I heard it speak
distinctly several sentences. . . . I was
astonished and delighted. . . . It is the
greatest marvel hitherto achieved by the electric
telegraph.&quot;

Until nearly ten o'clock that night the judges
talked and listened by turns at the telephone.
Then, next morning, they brought the apparatus
to the judges' pavilion, where for the remainder
of the summer it was mobbed by judges and scientists.
Sir William Thomson and his wife ran
back and forth between the two ends of the wire
like a pair of delighted children. And thus it
happened that the crude little instrument that
had been tossed into an out-of-the-way corner
became the star of the Centennial. It had been
given no more than eighteen words in the official
catalogue, and here it was acclaimed as the wonder
of wonders. It had been conceived in a cellar
and born in a machine-shop; and now, of all the
gifts that our young American Republic had
received on its one-hundredth birthday, the telephone
was honored as the rarest and most welcome
of them all.


*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 02 Telephone as Business|CHAPTER II - THE BUILDING OF THE BUSINESS]]

==CONTENT==

*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910|PREFACE]]
*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 01 Birth of the Telephone|CHAPTER I - THE BIRTH OF THE TELEPHONE]]
*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 02 Telephone as Business|CHAPTER II - THE BUILDING OF THE BUSINESS]]
*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 03 Business Development|CHAPTER III - THE HOLDING OF THE BUSINESS]]
*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 04 Art of Telephone|CHAPTER IV - THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ART]]
*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 05 Telephone Expansion|CHAPTER V - THE EXPANSION OF THE BUSINESS]]
*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 06 Telephone Users|CHAPTER VI - NOTABLE USERS OF THE TELEPHONE]]
*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 07 Efficiency and the Telephone|CHAPTER VII - THE TELEPHONE AND NATIONAL EFFICIENCY]]
*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 08 Telephone worldwide|CHAPTER VIII - THE TELEPHONE IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES]]
*[[History of the Telephone Casson 1910 09 Future of the Telephone|CHAPTER IX - THE FUTURE OF THE TELEPHONE]]


{{Vorlagen_2_Closing_Divs}}