in each room, so
it appears, and the two were connected by an electric wire. Watson had
snapped the reed on one of the machines and the professor had heard from
the other machine exactly the same sound. It was no more than the gentle
TWANG of a clock-spring; but it was the first time in the history of the
world that a complete sound had been carried along a wire, reproduced
perfectly at the other end, and heard by an expert in acoustics.

That twang of the clock-spring was the first tiny cry of the newborn
telephone, uttered in the clanging din of a machine-shop and happily
heard by a man whose ear had been trained to recognize the strange voice
of the little newcomer. There, amidst flying belts and jarring wheels,
the baby telephone was born, as feeble and helpless as any other baby,
and "with no language but a cry."

The professor-inventor, who had thus rescued the tiny foundling of
science, was a young Scottish American. His name, now known as widely
as the telephone itself, was Alexander Graham Bell. He was a teacher
of acoustics and a student of electricity, possibly the only man in his
generation who was able to focus a knowledge of both subjects upon the
problem of the telephone. To other men that exceedingly faint sound
would have been as inaudible as silence itself; but to Bell it was a
thunder-clap. It was a dream come true. It was an impossible thing which
had in a flash become so easy that he could scarcely believe it. Here,
without the use of a battery, with no more electric current than that
made by a couple of magnets, all the waves of a sound had been carried
along a wire and changed back to sound at the farther end. It was
absurd. It was incredible. It was something which neither wire nor
electricity had been known to do before. But it was true.

No discovery has ever been less accidental. It was the last link of
a long chain of discoveries. It was the result of a persistent and
deliberate search. Already, for half a year or longer, Bell had known
the correct theory of the telephone; but he had not realized that the
feeble undulatory current generated by a magnet was strong enough
for the transmission of speech. He had been taught to undervalue the
incredible efficiency of electricity.

Not only was Bell himself a teacher of the laws of speech, so highly
skilled that he was an instructor in Boston University. His father,
also, his two brothers, his uncle, and his grandfather had taught the
laws of s