-to weave such a web of
wires, with interlocking centres, as would put any one telephone in
touch with every other. There was no help for them in books or colleges.
Watson, who had acquired a little knowledge, had become a shipbuilder.
Electrical engineering, as a profession, was unborn. And as for their
telegraphic experience, while it certainly helped them for a time, it
started them in the wrong direction and led them to do many things which
had afterwards to be undone.

The peculiar electric current that these young pathfinders had to deal
with is perhaps the quickest, feeblest, and most elusive force in
the world. It is so amazing a thing that any description of it seems
irrational. It is as gentle as a touch of a baby sunbeam, and as swift
as the lightning flash. It is so small that the electric current of a
single incandescent lamp is greater 500,000,000 times. Cool a spoonful
of hot water just one degree, and the energy set free by the cooling
will operate a telephone for ten thousand years. Catch the falling
tear-drop of a child, and there will be sufficient water-power to carry
a spoken message from one city to another.

Such is the tiny Genie of the Wire that had to be protected and trained
into obedience. It was the most defenceless of all electric sprites,
and it had so many enemies. Enemies! The world was populous with its
enemies. There was the lightning, its elder brother, striking at it
with murderous blows. There were the telegraphic and light-and-power
currents, its strong and malicious cousins, chasing and assaulting it
whenever it ventured too near. There were rain and sleet and snow and
every sort of moisture, lying in wait to abduct it. There were rivers
and trees and flecks of dust. It seemed as if all the known and unknown
agencies of nature were in conspiracy to thwart or annihilate this
gentle little messenger who had been conjured into life by the wizardry
of Alexander Graham Bell.

All that these young men had received from Bell and Watson was that part
of the telephone that we call the receiver. This was practically the
sum total of Bell's invention, and remains to-day as he made it. It was
then, and is yet, the most sensitive instrument that has ever been put
to general use in any country. It opened up a new world of sound. It
would echo the tramp of a fly that walked across a table, or repeat in
New Orleans the prattle of a child in New York. This was what the
young men received, and t