The Somerset reporter. [volume] (Skowhegan, Me.) 1868-1909, 1896-10-15
ORIGIN OF THE HELLO
INVENTION OF THE TELEPHONE. AS
TcLD BY IT'S AUTHOR.

DIR. Bell, Like His Father Was Interested
In Efforts to Instruct Deaf Aiutes-While
Engaged In This Line of Work the TeIe-
phone Was Suggested to His Mind.
The story of how the telephone came
TO be invented was told by Dr. Alexan-
der Graham Bell during his attendance
Oh the meeting of the American Associ-
alton to Promote the Teaching of Speech
to the Deaf, held at Mount Airy DIR.
Bells father was an elocutionist in
England and we'll known as eorreetor
OF defects III utteranee, as his GRANDPA
Their had also been. His father had de-
Vised a method of representing the ae-
ton of the vocal organs by symbols,
similar to those used in chemistry. In
like manner letters representing the va
rious organs of speech, with figures at
tached indicating the positions of those
organs would represent certain sounds
or spoken words. A person placing his
tongue, teeth lips and palate in the po-
sition indicated by certain formula
would produce definite sound. The
of deaf mutes was not overlooked by
DIR. Bells father, and experiments were
made i'll little school III London. DIR.
Bell became interested in the subject
and developed n method of teaching the
deaf to speak. His father had lectured
III this country, and in this way the
system had come to the knowledge of
the deaf and dumb institutions III Bos-
ton and eff the prominent educators in
that city, and i'll 1871 the board of edu-
cation invited DIR. Bell TO see what he
could do III the Boston School For the
Deaf. He accepted the invitation and
put the system III practice there with
very gre;.t success, and 1t was intro
duced in one institution after another
throughout the country.
DR. Bell did not at that time believe
it was possible for deaf mutes to under
stand speech by looking ut the mouth of
the speaker. The mechanism of speech
was, he thought, too complicated for
that. He therefore set to work to in
vent an apparatus which would repre-
sent speech to the eye Us it was spoken
by throwing picture of the vibrations
on the screen. He commenced his exper-
iments with Koenig's manometrio flame
apparatus, which, by means of vibrat-
ing diaphram, stretched on piece of
wood divided into two parts, and a Sc
ries of mirrors produced band of light
with wave effects, according to the
sound uttered. The flame was too fee
BILE to be photographed. DIR. Bell then
turned his attention to another appara-
tus, called a phonetograph, in which
was stretched "a membrane, against
which person spoke and which car
ried little pencil over smoked glass,
which made curved line that could
easily be photographed.
He made many hundreds of tracings.
but unfortunately they did not corre-
spond with the flame pictures before
described, and he attributed the trouble
to the clumsiness of the apparatus He
therefore mapped out changes in the
construction of his phonetograph and
thought he saw i'll his draft a rude anal
ogy to the construction of the human
ear Instead of bones actuated by a
membrane, MS in the ear, he had lever
of wood moved by membrane He
therefore concluded to modify the shape
to correspond with the human ear and
went to distinguished aurist in Bos-
ton, Clarence A. Blake, who suggested
his xperimenting with an actual hu-
man ear. DIR. Blake got an ear and dis
sected it for DR. Bell so as to expose the
membrane and the little bones. The doc
tor attached II pencil to the bone called
the malleus, moistened the membrane
with glycerin and water and construct
ed an outer ear With this, beautiful
tracings were made on the smoked glass.
The tracings, however, were different
from what he had before produced
While he was engaged upon the above
line of search at the Institution For the
Deaf be was also developing an inven-
ton out Of which he expected to make
some money-yiz, an electrical multi
pie telegraph, by which he could send
many messages simultaneously over one
wire. DIR. Boil simpliied this apparatus
greatly. He noticed that when half a
dozen were operating together there
was a resultant electrical effect, and
that but one sending magnet was neces-
sary to produce all the sounds. Further
consideration convinced him that he
could not only send any number of mu
steal tones simultaneously, but sounds
of any kind His familiarity with the
nature of speech had taught him that
the term quality of sound" means
really chord of different musical tones
having different intensities, and he
could conceive how u sound of any kind
whatever, even words, might be trans
mitted if one of these reeds could be
moved in frontof an electro magnet i'll
the resultant way in which the air is
moved when sound is uttered His
experiments in vibrations had taught
him the form of the sound waves The
problem was to make mass of steel
vibrate in the way the air does, The
problem was in his mind at the time he
was making the experiments with the
human ear, before described.
The Thought suddenly stuck him
that there was great disproportion in
mass between the bones of the ear and
the membrane that connected them /,
that these bones were, relatively to the
membrane, very heavy and very mass
I'VE Why then, could not the piece of
iron or steel be moved by attaching II
to heavier and sitter membrane, of