just playing all the time?" I wasn't afraid of the miller as
much as his son was, so I said, "Well, what can we do that
is useful?" He took up a handful of wheat, ran it over in his
hand and said: "Look at that! If you could manage to get the
husks off that wheat, that would be doing something useful!"

So I took some wheat home with me and experimented. I found
the husks came off without much difficulty. I tried brushing
them off and they came off beautifully. Then it occurred to me
that brushing was nothing but applying friction to them. If
I could brush the husks off, why couldn't the husks be rubbed
off?

There was in the mill a machine--I don't know what it was
for--but it whirled its contents, whatever it was, around in
a drum. I thought, "Why wouldn't the husks come off if the raw
wheat was whirled around in that drum?" So back I went to the
miller and suggested the idea to him.

"Why," he said, "that's a good idea." So he called his foreman
and they tried it, and the husks came off beautifully, and
they've been taking husks off that way ever since. That was
my very first invention, and it led me to thinking for myself,
and really had quite an influence on my way and methods of
thought.

Up to his sixteenth year young Bell's reading consisted largely of
novels, poetry, and romantic tales of Scotch heroes. But in addition
he was picking up some knowledge of anatomy, music, electricity, and
telegraphy. When he was but sixteen years of age his father secured
for him a position as teacher of elocution and this necessarily turned
his thought into more serious channels. He now spent his leisure
studying sound. During this period he made several discoveries in
sound which were of some small importance.

When he was twenty-one years of age he went to London and there had
the good fortune to come to the attention of Charles Wheatstone
and Alex J. Ellis. Ellis was at that time president of the London
Philological Society, and had translated Helmholtz's _The Sensation
of Tone_ into English. He had made no little progress with sound, and
demonstrated to Bell the methods by which German scientists had caused
tuning-forks to vibrate by means of electro-magnets and had combined
the tones of several tuning-forks in an effort to reproduce the sound
of the human voice. Helmholtz had performed this experiment simply to
demonstrate the physi