At this time Bell enjoyed the friendship of Dr. Clarence J. Blake, an
eminent Boston aurist, who suggested that the experiments be conducted
with a human ear instead of with a mechanical apparatus in imitation
of the ear. Bell eagerly accepted the idea, and Doctor Blake provided
him with an ear and connecting organs cut from a dead man's head. Bell
soon had the ghastly specimen set up in his workshop. He moistened the
drum with glycerine and water and, substituting a stylus of hay for
the stapes bone, he obtained a wonderful series of curves which showed
the vibrations of the human voice as recorded by the ear. One can
scarce imagine a stranger picture than Bell must have presented in the
conduct of those experiments. We can almost see him with his face the
paler in contrast with his black hair and flashing black eyes as he
shouted and whispered by turns into the ghastly ear. Surely he must
have looked the madman, and it is perhaps fortunate that he was not
observed by impressionable members of the public else they would have
been convinced that the witches had again visited old Salem town to
ply their magic anew. But it was a new and very real and practical
sort of magic which was being worked there.

His experiments with the dead man's ear brought to Bell at least one
important idea. He noted that, though the ear-drum was thin and light,
it was capable of sending vibrations through the heavy bones that
lay back of it. And so he thought of using iron disks or membranes to
serve the purpose of the drum in the ear and arrange them so that
they would vibrate an iron rod. He thought of connecting two such
instruments with an electrified wire, one of which would receive the
sound-vibrations and the other of which would reproduce them after
they had been transmitted along the wire. At last the experimenter
was on the right track, with a conception of a practicable method of
transmitting sound. He now possessed a theoretical knowledge of what
the telephone he sought should be, but there yet remained before him
the enormous task of devising and constructing the apparatus which
would carry out the idea, and find the best way of utilizing the
electrical current for this work.

Bell was now at a critical point in his career and was confronted by
the same difficulty which assails so many inventors. In his constant
efforts to achieve a telephone he had entirely neglected his school of
vocal physiology, which was now abandoned. Ge