"MR. WATSON, COME HERE, I WANT YOU." Watson, who was at the lower end of
the wire, in the basement, dropped the receiver and rushed with wild joy
up three flights of stairs to tell the glad tidings to Bell. "I can hear
you!" he shouted breathlessly. "I can hear the WORDS."

It was not easy, of course, for the weak young telephone to make itself
heard in that noisy workshop. No one, not even Bell and Watson, was
familiar with its odd little voice. Usually Watson, who had a
remarkably keen sense of hearing, did the listening; and Bell, who was
a professional elocutionist, did the talking. And day by day the tone
of the baby instrument grew clearer--a new note in the orchestra of
civilization.

On his twenty-ninth birthday, Bell received his patent, No.
174,465--"the most valuable single patent ever issued" in any country.
He had created something so entirely new that there was no name for it
in any of the world's languages. In describing it to the officials
of the Patent Office, he was obliged to call it "an improvement in
telegraphy," when, in truth, it was nothing of the kind. It was as
different from the telegraph as the eloquence of a great orator is from
the sign-language of a deaf-mute.

Other inventors had worked from the standpoint of the telegraph; and
they never did, and never could, get any better results than signs and
symbols. But Bell worked from the standpoint of the human voice. He
cross-fertilized the two sciences of acoustics and electricity. His
study of "Visible Speech" had trained his mind so that he could mentally
SEE the shape of a word as he spoke it. He knew what a spoken word was,
and how it acted upon the air, or the ether, that carried its vibrations
from the lips to the ear. He was a third-generation specialist in the
nature of speech, and he knew that for the transmission of spoken words
there must be "a pulsatory action of the electric current which is the
exact equivalent of the aerial impulses."

Bell knew just enough about electricity, and not too much. He did
not know the possible from the impossible. "Had I known more about
electricity, and less about sound," he said, "I would never have
invented the telephone." What he had done was so amazing, so foolhardy,
that no trained electrician could have thought of it. It was "the
very hardihood of invention," and yet it was not in any sense a chance
discovery. It was the natural output of a mind that had been led to
assemble just the rig