ibrations. He mentioned these
experiments to a Boston friend, Dr. Clarence J. Blake, and he, being a
surgeon and an aurist, naturally said, "Why don't you use a REAL EAR?"

Such an idea never had, and probably never could have, occurred to Bell;
but he accepted it with eagerness. Dr. Blake cut an ear from a dead
man's head, together with the ear-drum and the associated bones. Bell
took this fragment of a skull and arranged it so that a straw touched
the ear-drum at one end and a piece of moving smoked glass at the other.
Thus, when Bell spoke loudly into the ear, the vibrations of the drum
made tiny markings upon the glass.

It was one of the most extraordinary incidents in the whole history of
the telephone. To an uninitiated onlooker, nothing could have been more
ghastly or absurd. How could any one have interpreted the gruesome joy
of this young professor with the pale face and the black eyes, who stood
earnestly singing, whispering, and shouting into a dead man's ear? What
sort of a wizard must he be, or ghoul, or madman? And in Salem, too, the
home of the witchcraft superstition! Certainly it would not have gone
well with Bell had he lived two centuries earlier and been caught at
such black magic.

What had this dead man's ear to do with the invention of the telephone?
Much. Bell noticed how small and thin was the ear-drum, and yet how
effectively it could send thrills and vibrations through heavy bones.
"If this tiny disc can vibrate a bone," he thought, "then an iron disc
might vibrate an iron rod, or at least, an iron wire." In a flash the
conception of a membrane telephone was pictured in his mind. He saw in
imagination two iron discs, or ear-drums, far apart and connected by
an electrified wire, catching the vibrations of sound at one end, and
reproducing them at the other. At last he was on the right path, and had
a theoretical knowledge of what a speaking telephone ought to be. What
remained to be done was to construct such a machine and find out how the
electric current could best be brought into harness.

Then, as though Fortune suddenly felt that he was winning this
stupendous success too easily, Bell was flung back by an avalanche
of troubles. Sanders and Hubbard, who had been paying the cost of his
experiments, abruptly announced that they would pay no more unless he
confined his attention to the musical telegraph, and stopped wasting his
time on ear-toys that never could be of any financial value. W