s still made on the plan that Bell discovered.
No inventor who preceded Bell did more, in the invention of the
telephone, than to help Bell indirectly, in the same way that Fra Mauro
and Toscanelli helped in the discovery of America by making the map and
chart that were used by Columbus. Bell was helped by his father, who
taught him the laws of acoustics; by Helmholtz, who taught him the
influence of magnets upon sound vibrations; by Koenig and Leon Scott,
who taught him the infinite variety of these vibrations; by Dr. Clarence
J. Blake, who gave him a human ear for his experiments; and by Joseph
Henry and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who encouraged him to persevere. In
a still more indirect way, he was helped by Morse's invention of
the telegraph; by Faraday's discovery of the phenomena of magnetic
induction; by Sturgeon's first electro-magnet; and by Volta's electric
battery. All that scientists had achieved, from Galileo and Newton to
Franklin and Simon Newcomb, helped Bell in a general way, by creating a
scientific atmosphere and habit of thought. But in the actual making of
the telephone, there was no one with Bell nor before him. He invented it
first, and alone.
CHAPTER IV. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ART
Four wire-using businesses were already in the field when the telephone
was born: the fire-alarm, burglar-alarm, telegraph, and messenger-boy
service; and at first, as might have been expected, the humble little
telephone was huddled in with these businesses as a sort of poor
relation. To the general public, it was a mere scientific toy; but there
were a few men, not many, in these wire-stringing trades, who saw a
glimmering chance of creating a telephone business. They put telephones
on the wires that were then in use. As these became popular, they added
others. Each of their customers wished to be able to talk to every
one else. And so, having undertaken to give telephone service, they
presently found themselves battling with the most intricate and baffling
engineering problem of modern times--the construction around the
tele-phone of such a mechanism as would bring it into universal service.
The first of these men was Thomas A. Watson, the young mechanic who had
been hired as Bell's helper. He began a work that to-day requires an
army of twenty-six thousand people. He was for a couple of years
the total engineering and manufacturing department of the telephone
business, and by 1880 had taken out sixty patents
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