The History of the Telephone | Page 7

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 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: "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."
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