The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-05-02

B. c. Forbes in Leslie's.
 M NEXT to the reaping machine, which
 1WJ drove famine from the world, S Americas greatest gift to modern civilization has been the telephone. The name of it's inventor, Dr. Alexander Gra- ham Bell will live down the ages after all but two or three present-day Ameri- cans have been forgotten.
 The world scoffed at the first telephone just as it scoffed at McCormick's first crude reaper, at Fultons first steamship, at Fields first transatlantic cable-laying project, at Morses first telegraph, at Goodyear's first rubber product, at Wright's first airplane and at Edison's electric lighting experiments.
 Unlike most famous inventors, pr. Bell did not spring from obscurity and pow erty His father was a scholar and sci- enlist of note, and young Bell received a ripe education. But he did not escape the common fate of inventors and pio- ners. His struggles with poverty came in early manhood instead of in boyhood.
 The world first learned of the tele- phone at the centennial exposition at Philadelphia in 1876. On January 20 Of that year young college professor of Salem, Mass, Alexander Graham Bell, had executed specifications and a claim for an invention embodying an improve ment in telegraphy. which in reality was a telephone, and on February IA his ap- plication for the American patent was filed at Washington.
 I can give from Dr. Bells own lips the story of the birth of the telephone. surely a narrative worthy of a place In history:
 ''As young, unknown man. said pr. Bell, 1T had been experimenting with multiple telegraph apparatus and l went to Washington to discuss with the venerable Professor Henry of Washing ton, great authority on electricity, an idea I had conceived for transmitting speech by wires He was so sympathetic and encouraging and expressed such deep interest that talked to him quite freely. He told me he thought had the germ of great invention. I told him, how ever that I had not the electrical knowl- edge necessary to bring 1t into existence. He replied, Get it.
 That was the very beginning of the telephone. Let Thomas A. Watson de-
 ''In 1874 was working in a crude little workshop in Boston where inventors came to have all sorts of Apparatus made. A young man came in one day, and although I had found all inventors en- thusiastic I soon saw that not one of them had the boundless enthusiasm and confidence of my new client. He wanted apparatus made which would use the law of sympathetic vibration to send eight or 10 messages simultaneously over a single wire The scheme looked all right to me at first, but we couldn't get it to work We kept on experimenting all winter-and it was good thing we did not succeed at first. for if we had, the speaking telephone might never have emerged from Bells brain. One evening Bell said me. Watson, I want to tell you of another idea I have which will surprise you He, then confidcd to Iae that he believed it would be possible to invent simple contrivance to enable people to talk by telegraph. My nervous system never got a worse shock! On June ?. 1875, when we were hard at work on Bells harmonic telegraph apparatus. I in one room trying to send messages and he in another receiving them, one of the transmitter strings stopped vibrating and Bell. hearing a strange sound. immedi- ately yelled to me. What did you do there?'
 sThere and then he realized that the sound he had heard over the wire was the first real sound ever carried by cleo tricity to the ear of man. The speaking telephone was born at that moment.
 Alexander Graham Bell grasped the momentous fact that the mechanism could transmit other sounds. voices, to, the human ear. Bell at once gave me instructions to construct the first speak