Then came Sir William Thomson, latterly known as Lord Kelvin. It was
fitting that he should be there, for he was the foremost electrical
scientist at that time in the world, and had been the engineer of the
first Atlantic Cable. He listened and learned what even he had not known
before, that a solid metallic body could take up from the air all the
countless varieties of vibrations produced by speech, and that these
vibrations could be carried along a wire and reproduced exactly by a
second metallic body. He nodded his head solemnly as he rose from
the receiver. "It DOES speak," he said emphatically. "It is the most
wonderful thing I have seen in America."

So, one after another, this notable company of men listened to the voice
of the first telephone, and the more they knew of science, the less they
were inclined to believe their ears. The wiser they were, the more they
wondered. To Henry and Thomson, the masters of electrical magic, this
instrument was as surprising as it was to the man in the street. And
both were noble enough to admit frankly their astonishment in the
reports which they made as judges, when they gave Bell a Certificate
of Award. "Mr. Bell has achieved a result of transcendent scientific
interest," wrote Sir William Thomson. "I heard it speak distinctly
several sentences.... I was astonished and delighted.... It is the
greatest marvel hitherto achieved by the electric telegraph."

Until nearly ten o'clock that night the judges talked and listened by
turns at the telephone. Then, next morning, they brought the apparatus
to the judges' pavilion, where for the remainder of the summer it was
mobbed by judges and scientists. Sir William Thomson and his wife ran
back and forth between the two ends of the wire like a pair of delighted
children. And thus it happened that the crude little instrument that
had been tossed into an out-of-the-way corner became the star of
the Centennial. It had been given no more than eighteen words in the
official catalogue, and here it was acclaimed as the wonder of wonders.
It had been conceived in a cellar and born in a machine-shop; and now,
of all the gifts that our young American Republic had received on its
one-hundredth birthday, the telephone was honored as the rarest and most
welcome of them all.

CHAPTER II. THE BUILDING OF THE BUSINESS

After the telephone had been born in Boston, baptized in the Patent
Office, and given a royal reception at the Philadelphia