CHAPTER 1: 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.
"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.
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