e girl, and had
learned to talk through the teaching of Alexander Graham Bell. Her
father was a man of great public spirit and the best friend Mr. Bell
had in bringing the telephone before the public. Mabel Hubbard became
the wife of her teacher, and encouraged him constantly to try and try
again until his telephone would work.

Professor Bell made his first instrument in odd hours after he had
finished teaching for the day. You may smile when you hear he used in
making it an old cigar box, two hundred feet of wire, and two magnets
taken from a toy fish pond. But this was because he was very poor and
had scarcely any money to spend on materials for his experiments. But
he kept on working, and after the Centennial he was able to found a
company and put his new invention on the market. The company had
little money, so Mr. Bell lectured and explained his work. By this
means he not only raised money, but established his name as the
inventor of the telephone. There were a number of other students who
had been thinking along the same lines as Mr. Bell, but he went
farther than any one else and was the first to carry the sounds of the
human voice by electricity.

In the year 1877, the telephone was put into practical use for the
public. It grew slowly. People did not realize how it could help them
and they looked upon having a telephone as a luxury rather than a
necessity. It was in the same year that the first long distance line
was established. Today, when we can talk from Boston to San Francisco,
it seems strange to read that the first long distance telephone
reached only from Boston to Salem, a distance of sixteen miles. But
then Mr. Bell thought twenty miles would be the limit at which it
would be possible to send messages. So you see the Salem line was
really quite long enough to satisfy the inventor, whose first
instrument could convey sound only from the basement to the second
story of a single building.

Before long the reward that follows struggles and trials came to
Alexander Graham Bell. The telephone went around the world because so
many countries adopted it. Japan was the first, but she was followed
quickly by others. It went to far off Abyssinia, where it is said the
monkeys use the cables for swings and the elephants use the poles for
scratching posts.

Mr. Bell saw his invention enter every field of activity. It brought
him riches and honor, but, more than all, it became a servant of
mankind, and he coul