The History of the Telephone | Page 7

notes on that piano."
Later, Bell ventured to confide to Hubbard his wild dream of sending
speech over an electric wire, but Hubbard laughed him to scorn. "Now
you are talking nonsense," he said. "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."
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. "If I can make a deaf- mute talk," he said, "I can make iron talk."
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 "Visible Speech" 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, "Why don't you use a REAL
EAR?"
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. "If
this tiny disc can vibrate a bone," he thought, "then an iron disc might
vibrate an iron rod, or at least, an iron wire." 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. "If you wish my daughter," said Hubbard, "you must
abandon your foolish telephone." Bell's "School of Vocal Physiology,"
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