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d up_ by a physical contrivance, carried a thousand miles through a thread of wire not a quarter of an inch in diameter, and delivered in its integrity to the sense of another waiting to receive it! At all events, the history of the telephone, belonging so distinctly to our own age, will stand as a reminder to after times of the great stride which the human race made in inventive skill and scientific progress in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The telephone, like many similar instruments, was the work of several ingenious minds directed at nearly the same time to the same problem. The solution, however, must be accredited first of all to Elisha P. Gray, of Chicago, and Alexander Graham Bell, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It should be mentioned, however, that Amos E. Dolbear, of Tufts College, Massachusetts, and Thomas A. Edison, of Menlo Park, New Jersey, likewise succeeded in solving the difficulty in the way of telephonic communication, and in answering practically several of the minor questions that hindered at first the complete success of the invention. The telephone is an instrument for the reproduction of sounds, particularly the sounds of the human voice, by the agency of electrical conduction at long distances from the origin of the vocal disturbance. Or it may be defined as an instrument for the _transmission_ of the sounds referred to by the agencies described. Indeed it were hard to say whether in a telephonic message we receive a _reproduced_ sound or a _transmitted_ sound. On the whole, it is more proper to speak of a reproduction of the original sound by transmission of the waves in which that sound is first written. It is now well known that the phenomenon called sound consists of a wave agitation communicated through the particles of some medium to the organ of hearing. Every particular sound has its own physical equivalent in the system of waves in which it is written. The only thing, therefore, that is necessary in order to carry a sound in its integrity to any distance, is to transmit its physical equivalent, and to redeliver that equivalent to some organ of hearing capable of receiving it. Upon these principles the telephone was produced--created. Every sound which falls by impact upon the sheet-iron disk of the instrument communicates thereto a sort of tremor. This tremor causes the disk to approach and recede from the magnetic pole placed just behind the diaphra
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