The History of the Telephone | Page 5

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 "The Sensations of Tone,"
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 "Visible Speech" 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 "Visible
Speech." 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 "Visible Speech" 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
"Visible Speech" alphabet. He was so deeply