peech in the universities of Edinburgh, Dublin, and London.
For three generations the Bells had been professors of the science
of talking. They had even helped to create that science by several
inven-tions. The first of them, Alexander Bell, had invented a system
for the correction of stammering and similar defects of speech. The
second, Alexander Melville Bell, was the dean of British elocutionists,
a man of creative brain and a most impressive facility of rhetoric. He
was the author of a dozen text-books on the art of speaking correctly,
and also of a most ingenious sign-language which he called "Visible
Speech." Every letter in the alphabet of this language represented a
certain action of the lips and tongue; so that a new method was provided
for those who wished to learn foreign languages or to speak their own
language more correctly. And the third of these speech-improving Bells,
the inventor of the telephone, inherited the peculiar genius of his
fathers, both inventive and rhetorical, to such a degree that as a boy
he had constructed an artificial skull, from gutta-percha and India
rubber, which, when enlivened by a blast of air from a hand-bellows,
would actually pronounce several words in an almost human manner.

The third Bell, the only one of this remarkable family who concerns us
at this time, was a young man, barely twenty-eight, at the time when his
ear caught the first cry of the telephone. But he was already a man of
some note on his own account. He had been educated in Edinburgh, the
city of his birth, and in London; and had in one way and another picked
up a smattering of anatomy, music, electricity, and telegraphy. Until he
was sixteen years of age, he had read nothing but novels and poetry and
romantic tales of Scottish heroes. Then he left home to become a teacher
of elocution in various British schools, and by the time he was of age
he had made several slight discoveries as to the nature of vowel-sounds.
Shortly afterwards, he met in London two distinguished men, Alexander J.
Ellis and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who did far more than they ever knew
to forward Bell in the direction of the telephone.

Ellis was the president of the London Philological Society. Also, he was
the translator of the famous book on "The Sensations of Tone," written
by Helmholtz, who, in the period from 1871 to 1894 made Berlin the
world-centre for the study of the physical sciences. So it happened that
when Bell ran to Ellis a