ed in
physics and had read Tyndall and Helmholtz, besides having learnt
something in Ireland through a fortunate friendship with a cousin of Mr.
Graham Bell who was also a chemist and physicist, I was, I believe, the
only person in the entire establishment who knew the current scientific
explanation of telephony; and as I soon struck up a friendship with our
official lecturer, a Colchester man whose strong point was
pre-scientific agriculture, I often discharged his duties for him in a
manner which, I am persuaded, laid the foundation of Mr. Edison's London
reputation: my sole reward being my boyish delight in the half-concealed
incredulity of our visitors (who were convinced by the hoarsely
startling utterances of the telephone that the speaker, alleged by me to
be twenty miles away, was really using a speaking-trumpet in the next
room), and their obvious uncertainty, when the demonstration was over,
as to whether they ought to tip me or not: a question they either
decided in the negative or never decided at all; for I never got
anything.

So much for my electrical engineer! To get him into contact with
fashionable society before he became famous was also a problem easily
solved. I knew of three English peers who actually preferred physical
laboratories to stables, and scientific experts to gamekeepers: in fact,
one of the experts was a friend of mine. And I knew from personal
experience that if science brings men of all ranks into contact, art,
especially music, does the same for men and women. An electrician who
can play an accompaniment can go anywhere and know anybody. As far as
mere access and acquaintance go there are no class barriers for him. My
difficulty was not to get my hero into society, but to give any sort of
plausibility to my picture of society when I got him into it. I lacked
the touch of the literary diner-out; and I had, as the reader will
probably find to his cost, the classical tradition which makes all the
persons in a novel, except the comically vernacular ones, or the
speakers of phonetically spelt dialect, utter themselves in the formal
phrases and studied syntax of eighteenth century rhetoric. In short, I
wrote in the style of Scott and Dickens; and as fashionable society then
spoke and behaved, as it still does, in no style at all, my
transcriptions of Oxford and Mayfair may nowadays suggest an
unaccountable and ludicrous ignorance of a very superficial and
accessible code of manners. I was