The mirror., 1919-04-17
THE TELEPHONE
Story of the Early Struggles of It's Inventor Alexander
Graham Bell, and His Final Triumph
Paper Read Before the Prison Chautauqua, by F. E. w.
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plague had come into the home of
Bell in Edinburgh, and the doctors
advised that nothing but a change
in climate would save his life, so
with his father and mother he set
sail for the small Canadian town of
Brandford, near Toronto, where
for a year he fought down his ten
dency to consumption, and satis-
fed his nervous energy by teach
ing visible speech to a tribe of
Mohawk Indians.
While living in London his most
absorbing enthusiasm was the in
struction of a class of deaf mutes.
He was so deeply impressed by the
progress made by these pupils that
when he arrived in Canada he was
in doubt as to which of these two
tasks was the most important-the
teaching of deaf mutes or the in.
vention of a musical telegraph.
About this time his father, while
lecturing in Boston. mentioned his
sons exploits with class of deaf
mutes, and the Boston board of
education wrote and offered the
young man $500 if he would come
to Boston and introduce his system
of teaching in a school for deaf
mutes. He agreed and went there
in 1871. For the next two years
his telegraphic work was laid aside.
His success as a teacher was the
educational sensation of 1871; it
won him professorship in Boston
university. But in order to pursue
his experiments he became private
tutor in the families of Thomas
Sanders and Gardner G.. Hubbard,
and later he made Mabel Hubbard
his wife. She helped him very
much and led her father to become
Bells chief spokesman and de-
fender and a true apostle of the
telephone.
Early in the summer of 1874,
Bell mentioned some experiments
to a friend, DR.. Clarence Blake,
and he, being surgeon, asked
Bell why he did not use a real ear;
so DR.. Blake cut an ear from a
dead subject. Bell took this frag-
ment of skull and arranged it so
that a straw touched the ear drum
at one end a piece of smoked glass
at the other. Thus when Bell
spoke loudly into the ear, the vi
brations of the drum made tiny
markings upon the glass. It was
one of the most extraordinary in
cidents in the whole history of the
telephone. To the uninitiated on
locker nothing could have been
more CHASTITY and absurd.
Bell noticed how small and thin
was the ear drum, yet how effec-
lively it could send thrills and
vibrations through heavy bones.
If that tiny disc could vibrate
bone, then m iron disc might vi
brate an iron rod, or at least an
iron wire, and 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. What remained to
be done was to construct such
machine and find out how the elec-
trio current could best be brought
into harness. At this point for
tune seemed to frown upon him,
for he was very poor and his pat
rons were tired paying out for the
construction of useless ear toys.
They wanted him to confne his at
tention to the musical telegraph.
At that time Professor Joseph
Henry, who knew more of the
theory of electrical science than
any other American, was the
'grand old man" of Washington,