The History of the Telephone | Page 4

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.
"Snap that reed again, Watson," 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 "with no language but a cry."

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 "Visible Speech." 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