ephone.
They borrowed the telegraph line between Boston and the Cambridge
Observatory, and attached a telephone to each end. Then they maintained,
for three hours or longer, the FIRST SUSTAINED conversation by
telephone, each one taking careful notes of what he said and of what
he heard. These notes were published in parallel columns in The Boston
Advertiser, October 19, 1876, and proved beyond question that the
telephone was now a practical success.

After this, one event crowded quickly on the heels of another. A series
of ten lectures was arranged for Bell, at a hundred dollars a lecture,
which was the first money payment he had received for his invention. His
opening night was in Salem, before an audience of five hundred people,
and with Mrs. Sand-ers, the motherly old lady who had sheltered Bell in
the days of his experiment, sitting proudly in one of the front seats.
A pole was set up at the front of the hall, supporting the end of a
telegraph wire that ran from Salem to Boston. And Watson, who became the
first public talker by telephone, sent messages from Boston to various
members of the audience. An account of this lecture was sent by
telephone to The Boston Globe, which announced the next morning--

"This special despatch of the Globe has been transmitted by telephone
in the presence of twenty people, who have thus been witnesses to a feat
never before attempted--the sending of news over the space of sixteen
miles by the human voice."

This Globe despatch awoke the newspaper editors with an unexpected jolt.
For the first time they began to notice that there was a new word in the
language, and a new idea in the scientific world. No newspaper had made
any mention whatever of the telephone for seventy-five days after Bell
received his patent. Not one of the swarm of reporters who thronged the
Philadelphia Centennial had regarded the telephone as a matter of any
public interest. But when a column of news was sent by telephone to
The Boston Globe, the whole newspaper world was agog with excitement.
A thousand pens wrote the name of Bell. Requests to repeat his lecture
came to Bell from Cyrus W. Field, the veteran of the Atlantic Cable,
from the poet Longfellow, and from many others.

As he was by profession an elocutionist, Bell was able to make the most
of these opportunities. His lectures became popular entertainments. They
were given in the largest halls. At one lecture two Japanese gentlemen
were induce