siology," and his
success in his chosen field brought him into association with the
people who afterward played an important part in the development of
the telephone. Not a single element of romance was lacking in Bell's
experience; his great invention even involved the love story of his
life. Two influential citizens of Boston, Thomas Sanders and Gardiner G.
Hubbard, had daughters who were deaf and dumb, and both engaged Bell's
services as teacher. Bell lived in Sanders's home for a considerable
period, dividing his time between teaching his little pupil how to talk
and puttering away at a proposed invention which he called a "harmonic
telegraph." Both Sanders and Hubbard had become greatly interested in
this contrivance and backed Bell financially while he worked. It was
Bell's idea that, by a system of tuning different telegraphic receivers
to different pitches, several telegraphic messages could be sent
simultaneously over the same wire. The idea was not original with Bell,
although he supposed that it was and was entirely unaware that, at the
particular moment when he started work, about twenty other inventors
were struggling with the same problem. It was one of these other twenty
experimenters, Elisha Gray, who ultimately perfected this instrument.
Bell's researches have an interest only in that they taught him much
about sound transmission and other kindred subjects and so paved the way
for his great conception. One day Hubbard and Sanders learned that Bell
had abandoned his "harmonic telegraph" and was experimenting with an
entirely new idea. This was the possibility of transmitting the human
voice over an electric wire. While working in Sanders's basement, Bell
had obtained from a doctor a dead man's ear, and it is said that while
he was minutely studying and analyzing this gruesome object, the idea of
the telephone first burst upon his mind. For years Bell had been engaged
in a task that seemed hopeless to most men--that of making deaf-mutes
talk. "If I can make a deaf-mute talk, I can make iron talk," he
declared. "If I could make a current of electricity vary in intensity as
the air varies in density," he said at another time, "I could transmit
sound telegraphically." Many others, of course, had dreamed of inventing
such an instrument. The story of the telephone concerns many men who
preceded Bell, one of whom, Philip Reis, produced, in 1861, a mechanism
that could send a few discordant sounds, though not the