did much to encourage Bell. She followed each step of his
progress with the keenest interest. She wrote his letters and copied his
patents. She cheered him on when he felt himself beaten. And through her
sympathy with Bell and his ambitions, she led her father--a widely
known Boston lawyer named Gardiner G. Hubbard--to become Bell's chief
spokesman and defender, a true apostle of the telephone.
Hubbard first became aware of Bell's inventive efforts one evening when
Bell was visiting at his home in Cambridge. Bell was illustrating some
of the mysteries of acoustics by the aid of a piano. "Do you know," he
said to Hubbard, "that if I sing the note G close to the strings of
the piano, that the G-string will answer me?" "Well, what then?" asked
Hubbard. "It is a fact of tremendous importance," replied Bell. "It is
an evidence that we may some day have a musical telegraph, which will
send as many messages simultaneously over one wire as there are notes on
that piano."
Later, Bell ventured to confide to Hubbard his wild dream of sending
speech over an electric wire, but Hubbard laughed him to scorn. "Now you
are talking nonsense," he said. "Such a thing never could be more than
a scientific toy. You had better throw that idea out of your mind and go
ahead with your musical telegraph, which if it is successful will make
you a millionaire."
But the longer Bell toiled at his musical telegraph, the more he dreamed
of replacing the telegraph and its cumbrous sign-language by a new
machine that would carry, not dots and dashes, but the human voice.
"If I can make a deaf-mute talk," he said, "I can make iron talk." For
months he wavered between the two ideas. He had no more than the most
hazy conception of what this voice-carrying machine would be like.
At first he conceived of having a harp at one end of the wire, and a
speaking-trumpet at the other, so that the tones of the voice would be
reproduced by the strings of the harp.
Then, in the early Summer of 1874, while he was puzzling over this harp
apparatus, the dim outline of a new path suddenly glinted in front of
him. He had not been forgetful of "Visible Speech" all this while,
but had been making experiments with two remarkable machines--the
phonautograph and the manometric capsule, by means of which the
vibrations of sound were made plainly visible. If these could be
im-proved, he thought, then the deaf might be taught to speak by
SIGHT--by learning an alphabet of v
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