o
42729-A._)]

Meanwhile Bell, always a scientist and experimenter at heart, after his
invention of the telephone in 1876 was looking for new worlds to
conquer. If we accept Tainter's version of the story, it was through
Gardiner Green Hubbard that Bell took up the phonograph challenge. Bell
had married Hubbard's daughter Mabel in 1879. Hubbard was then president
of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Co., and his organization, which had
purchased the Edison patent, was having trouble with its finances
because people did not like to buy a machine which seldom worked well
and proved difficult for an unskilled person to operate.

In 1879 Hubbard got Bell interested in improving the machine, and it was
agreed that a laboratory should be set up in Washington. Experiments
were also to be conducted on the transmission of sound by light, and
this resulted in the selenium-cell Photophone, patented in 1881. Both
the Hubbards and the Bells decided to move to the Capital. While Bell
took his bride to Europe for an extended honeymoon, his associate
Charles Sumner Tainter, a young instrument maker, was sent on to
Washington from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to start the laboratory.[3]
Bell's cousin, Chichester Bell, who had been teaching college chemistry
in London, agreed to come as the third associate. During his stay in
Europe Bell received the 50,000-franc ($10,000) Volta prize, and it was
with this money that the Washington project, the Volta Laboratory
Association,[4] was financed.

[Illustration: Figure 2.--PHOTOGRAPHING SOUND IN 1884. A rare photograph
taken at Volta Laboratory, Washington, D. C., by J. Harris Rogers, a
friend of Bell and Tainter (_Smithsonian photo 44312-E_).

A description of the procedure used is found on page 67, of Tainter's
unpublished autobiography (see footnote 1). There, Tainter quotes
Chichester Bell as follows:

"A jet of bichromate of potash solution, vibrated by the voice, was
directed against a glass plate immediately in front of a slit, on which
light was concentrated by means of a lens. The jet was so arranged that
the light on its way to the slit had to pass through the nappe and as
the thickness of this was constantly changing, the illumination of the
slit was also varied. By means of a lens ... an image of this slit was
thrown upon a rotating gelatine-bromide plate, on which accordingly a
record of the voice vibrations was obtained."]

Tainter's story, in his autobiography, of the est