dy of speech. He was especially
anxious to aid his mother, who was deaf.

As a boy he exhibited a genius for invention, as well as for
acoustics. Much of this was duo to the wise encouragement of his
father. He himself has told of a boyhood invention.

My father once asked my brother Melville and myself to try to
make a speaking-machine, I don't suppose he thought we could
produce anything of value, in itself. But he knew we could not
even experiment and manufacture anything which even tried to
speak, without learning something of the voice and the
throat; and the mouth--all that wonderful mechanism of sound
production in which he was so interested.

So my brother and I went to work. We divided the task--he was
to make the lungs and the vocal cords, I was to make the mouth
and the tongue. He made a bellows for the lungs and a very
good vocal apparatus out of rubber. I procured a skull and
molded a tongue with rubber stuffed with cotton wool, and
supplied the soft parts of the throat with the same material
Then I arranged joints, so the jaw and the tongue could move.
It was a great day for us when we fitted the two parts of the
device together. Did it speak? It squeaked and squawked a
good deal, but it made a very passable imitation of
"Mam-ma--Mam-ma." It sounded very much like a baby. My father
wanted us to go on and try to get other sounds, but we were so
interested in what we had done we wanted to try it out. So we
proceeded to use it to make people think there was a baby in
the house, and when we made it cry "Mam-ma," and heard doors
opening and people coming, we were quite happy. What has
become of It? Well, that was across the ocean, in Scotland,
but I believe the mouth and tongue part that I made is in
Georgetown somewhere; I saw it not long ago.

The inventor tells of another boyhood invention that, though it had no
connection with sound or speech, shows his native ingenuity. Again we
will tell it in his own words.

I remember my first invention very well. There were several of
us boys, and we were fond of playing around a mill where they
ground wheat into flour. The miller's son was one of the
boys, and I am afraid he showed us how to be a good deal of a
nuisance to his father. One day the miller called us into the
mill and said, "Why don't you do something useful instead of