on came to his
alert brain. Might there not be another Morse sounder somewhere about?
If there were, that would account for the whole difficulty. Springing
up, he began to search the room and after following the wires, sure
enough, he traced them to a relay with a high resistance coil in the
circuit. Feverishly he cut this out and rushed back to his telephone.
Plainly over the wire came Bell's voice, '_Ahoy! Ahoy!_' For a few
seconds both of them were too delighted to say much of anything else.
Then they sobered down and began this first long-distance conversation.
Now one of the objections Mr. Bell had constantly been forced to meet
from the skeptical public was that while the telegraph delivered
messages that were of unchallenged accuracy telephone conversations
were liable to errors of misunderstanding. One could not therefore rely
so completely on the trustworthiness of the latter as on that of the
former. To refute this charge Mr. Bell had insisted that both he and
Watson carefully write out whatever they heard that the two records
might afterward be compared and verified. '_That is_,' Mr. Bell had
added with the flicker of a smile, '_if we succeed in talking at all_!'
Well, they did succeed, as you have heard. At first they held only a
stilted dialogue and conscientiously jotted it down; but afterward
their exuberance got the better of them and in sheer joy they chattered
away like magpies until long past midnight. Then, loath to destroy the
connection, Watson detached his telephone, replaced the Company's
wires, and set out for Boston. In the meantime Mr. Bell, who had
previously made an arrangement with the _Boston Advertiser_ to publish
on the following morning an account of the experiment, together with
the recorded conversations, had gone to the newspaper office to carry
his material to the press. Hence he was not at the Exeter Place rooms
when the jubilant Watson arrived. But the early morning hour did not
daunt the young electrician; and when, after some delay, Mr. Bell came
in, the two men rushed toward one another and regardless of everything
else executed what Mr. Watson has since characterized as a _war dance_.
Certainly they were quite justified in their rejoicings and perhaps if
their landlady had understood the cause of their exultations she might
have joined in the dance herself. Unluckily she had only a scant
sympathy with inventive genius and since the victory celebration not
only aroused her, but