en of his day. A versatile and entertaining companion, by turns
prosperous and impecunious, and an optimist always, Gardiner Hubbard
became a really indispensable factor as the first advance agent of the
telephone business.

No other citizen had done more for the city of Cambridge than Hubbard.
It was he who secured gas for Cambridge in 1853, and pure water, and a
street-railway to Boston. He had gone through the South in 1860 in
the patriotic hope that he might avert the impending Civil War. He
had induced the legislature to establish the first public school for
deaf-mutes, the school that drew Bell to Boston in 1871. And he had been
for years a most restless agitator for improvements in telegraphy and
the post office. So, as a promoter of schemes for the public good,
Hubbard was by no means a novice. His first step toward capturing
the attention of an indifferent nation was to beat the big drum of
publicity. He saw that this new idea of telephoning must be made
familiar to the public mind. He talked telephone by day and by night.
Whenever he travelled, he carried a pair of the magical instruments
in his valise, and gave demonstrations on trains and in hotels.
He buttonholed every influential man who crossed his path. He was a
veritable "Ancient Mariner" of the telephone. No possible listener was
allowed to escape.

Further to promote this campaign of publicity, Hubbard encouraged Bell
and Watson to perform a series of sensational feats with the telephone.
A telegraph wire between New York and Boston was borrowed for half an
hour, and in the presence of Sir William Thomson, Bell sent a tune
over the two-hundred-and-fifty-mile line. "Can you hear?" he asked the
operator at the New York end. "Elegantly," responded the operator. "What
tune?" asked Bell. "Yankee Doodle," came the answer. Shortly afterwards,
while Bell was visiting at his father's house in Canada, he bought
up all the stove-pipe wire in the town, and tacked it to a rail fence
between the house and a telegraph office. Then he went to a village
eight miles distant and sent scraps of songs and Shakespearean
quotations over the wire.

There was still a large percentage of people who denied that spoken
words could be transmitted by a wire. When Watson talked to Bell
at public demonstrations, there were newspaper editors who referred
sceptically to "the supposititious Watson." So, to silence these
doubters, Bell and Watson planned a most severe test of the tel