h a chimerical idea as telegraphing VOCAL SOUNDS would indeed seem to
most minds scarcely feasible enough to spend time in working over."

By this time Bell had moved his workshop from the cellar in Salem to 109
Court Street, Boston, where he had rented a room from Charles Williams,
a manufacturer of electrical supplies. Thomas A. Watson was his
assistant, and both Bell and Watson lived nearby, in two cheap little
bedrooms. The rent of the workshop and bedrooms, and Watson's wages
of nine dollars a week, were being paid by Sanders and Hubbard.
Consequently, when Bell returned from Washington, he was compelled
by his agreement to devote himself mainly to the musical telegraph,
although his heart was now with the telephone. For exactly three months
after his interview with Professor Henry, he continued to plod ahead,
along both lines, until, on that memorable hot afternoon in June, 1875,
the full TWANG of the clock-spring came over the wire, and the telephone
was born.

From this moment, Bell was a man of one purpose. He won over Sanders and
Hubbard. He converted Watson into an enthusiast. He forgot his musical
telegraph, his "Visible Speech," his classes, his poverty. He threw
aside a profession in which he was already locally famous. And he
grappled with this new mystery of electricity, as Henry had advised
him to do, encouraging himself with the fact that Morse, who was only
a painter, had mastered his electrical difficulties, and there was no
reason why a professor of acoustics should not do as much.

The telephone was now in existence, but it was the youngest and feeblest
thing in the nation. It had not yet spoken a word. It had to be taught,
developed, and made fit for the service of the irritable business world.
All manner of discs had to be tried, some smaller and thinner than
a dime and others of steel boiler-plate as heavy as the shield of
Achilles. In all the books of electrical science, there was nothing to
help Bell and Watson in this journey they were making through an unknown
country. They were as chartless as Columbus was in 1492. Neither they
nor any one else had acquired any experience in the rearing of a young
telephone. No one knew what to do next. There was nothing to know.

For forty weeks--long exasperating weeks--the telephone could do no more
than gasp and make strange inarticulate noises. Its educators had not
learned how to manage it. Then, on March 10, 1876, IT TALKED. It said
distinctly--