The History of the Telephone

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Thirty-five short years, and presto! the newborn art of telephony is fullgrown. Three million telephones are now scattered abroad in foreign countries, and seven millions are massed here, in the land of its birth.

So entirely has the telephone outgrown the ridicule with which, as many people can well remember, it was first received, that it is now in most places taken for granted, as though it were a part of the natural phenomena of this planet. It has so marvellously extended the facilities of conversation—that "art in which a man has all mankind for competitors"—that it is now an indispensable help to whoever would live the convenient life. The disadvantage of being deaf and dumb to all absent persons, which was universal in pre-telephonic days, has now happily been overcome; and I hope that this story of how and by whom it was done will be a welcome addition to American libraries.

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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.

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