rd of being the original inventor
of the telephone have appeared. The most interesting case was that
of Signor Antonio Meucci, an Italian emigrant, who produced a mass of
evidence to show that in 1849, while in Havanna, Cuba, he experimented
with the view of transmitting speech by the electric current. He
continued his researches in 1852-3, and subsequently at Staten Island,
U.S.; and in 1860 deputed a friend visiting Europe to interest people
in his invention. In 1871 he filed a caveat in the United States Patent
Office, and tried to get Mr. Grant, President of the New York District
Telegraph Company, to give the apparatus a trial. Ill-health and
poverty, consequent on an injury due to an explosion on board the Staten
Island ferry boat Westfield, retarded his experiments, and prevented
him from completing his patent. Meucci's experimental apparatus was
exhibited at the Philadelphia Exhibition of 1884, and attracted much
attention. But the evidence he adduces in support of His early claims is
that of persons ignorant of electrical science, and the model shown
was not complete. The caveat of 1871 is indeed a reliable document; but
unfortunately for him it is not quite clear from it whether he employed
a 'lovers' telephone,' with a wire instead of a string, and joined a
battery to it in the hope of enhancing the effect. 'I employ,' he says,
'the well known conducting effect of continuous metallic conductors as
a medium for sound, and increase the effect by electrically insulating
both the conductor and the parties who are communicating. It forms
a speaking telegraph without the necessity of any hollow tube.' In
connection with the telephone he used an electric alarm. It is by
no means evident from this description that Meucci had devised a
practicable speaking telephone; but he may have been the first to employ
electricity in connection with the transmission of speech. [Meucci is
dead.]

'This crowning marvel of the electric telegraph,' as Sir William Thomson
happily expressed it, was followed by another invention in some respects
even more remarkable. During the winter of 1878 Professor Bell was
in England, and while lecturing at the Royal Institution, London, he
conceived the idea of the photophone. It was known that crystalline
selenium is a substance peculiarly sensitive to light, for when a ray
strikes it an electric current passes far more easily through it than if
it were kept in the dark. It therefore occurred to