s a young enthusiast and told his experiments,
Ellis informed him that Helmholtz had done the same things several years
before and done them more completely. He brought Bell to his house and
showed him what Helmholtz had done--how he had kept tuning-forks in
vibration by the power of electro-magnets, and blended the tones of
several tuning-forks together to produce the complex quality of the
human voice.

Now, Helmholtz had not been trying to invent a telephone, nor any sort
of message-carrier. His aim was to point out the physical basis of
music, and nothing more. But this fact that an electro-magnet would set
a tuning-fork humming was new to Bell and very attractive. It appealed
at once to him as a student of speech. If a tuning-fork could be made to
sing by a magnet or an electrified wire, why would it not be possible
to make a musical telegraph--a telegraph with a piano key-board, so that
many messages could be sent at once over a single wire? Unknown to Bell,
there were several dozen inven-tors then at work upon this problem,
which proved in the end to be very elusive. But it gave him at least a
starting-point, and he forthwith commenced his quest of the telephone.

As he was then in England, his first step was naturally to visit Sir
Charles Wheatstone, the best known English expert on telegraphy. Sir
Charles had earned his title by many inventions. He was a simple-natured
scientist, and treated Bell with the utmost kindness. He showed him an
ingenious talking-machine that had been made by Baron de Kempelin. At
this time Bell was twenty-two and unknown; Wheatstone was sixty-seven
and famous. And the personality of the veteran scientist made so vivid
a picture upon the mind of the impressionable young Bell that the grand
passion of science became henceforth the master-motif of his life.

From this summit of glorious ambition he was thrown, several months
later, into the depths of grief and despondency. The White Plague had
come to the home in Edinburgh and taken away his two brothers. More, it
had put its mark upon the young inventor himself. Nothing but a change
of climate, said his doctor, would put him out of danger. And so, to
save his life, he and his father and mother set sail from Glasgow and
came to the small Canadian town of Brantford, where for a year he fought
down his tendency to consumption, and satisfied his nervous energy by
teaching "Visible Speech" to a tribe of Mohawk Indians.

By this time it h