426 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



dence filed in a score of courts should satisfy all honest and unbiased 

 minds that Bell's way is not only ' the only way ' in which an electric- 

 speaking telephone can transmit speech, but the absence of any earlier 

 published description of a conception of a method similar in character 

 to that first promulgated by Alexander Graham Bell proves that speech 

 never was successfully transmitted electrically prior to its transmission 

 by him. 



After inventors, electricians and scientists had experimented with 

 Bell's telephone for nearly two years, Dr. C. J. Blake told the eminent 

 gentlemen who had gathered in London, in May, 1878, to hear his 

 interesting lecture on the telephone: 



When we consider the complex character of the waves resulting from the 

 production of articulated sounds, and the loss in the excursions of the receiving 

 disk (in the telephone), the wonder grows that this piece of metal can by its 

 mechanical vibration reproduce so clearly and distinctly the delicate shades of 

 quality of the human voice. That this should have been so perfectly accom- 

 plished is the result, not of inspiration, but of laborious research, and the 

 instrument of which we reap the benefit to-day is the product, not merely of 

 the genius, but of the patient and persistent labor of Alexander Graham Bell. 



In other words, the achievement of the seemingly impossible in the 

 invention of the electric-speaking telephone came not through utilizing 

 the idea or suggestion of another, nor in improving a philosophical or 

 experimental instrument advertised and sold for many years, prior to 

 1875, as a telephone; neither was it gained in a momentary inspira- 

 tion, nor through automobilic rushes along the by-paths of superficial 

 education. 



This creation of a new art followed as the natural outcome of an 

 original and magnificent conception that won the plaudits of scientists 

 in all lands. The invention of the electric-speaking telephone (not 

 the string telephone, nor the make-and-break musical telephone) fol- 

 lowed in natural sequence. The combination of diaphragm and electro- 

 magnet was the outgrowth of conception and perfected theory, and 

 formed a practical materialization of both. And conception, theory 

 and apparatus were the honestly earned fruits not only of the inventor's 

 ' intellectual capacity and precision of thought,' but of a thorough 

 knowledge of the essential elements in every factor entering into the 

 problem of speech transmission; a knowledge gained through long and 

 patient research, through many experiments, through financial ex- 

 penditures that involved personal deprivations and hardships and 

 necessitated the strictest self-denial, and through discouraging criti- 

 cisms and bitter ridicule on the folly of wasting time and money in 

 inventing ' a scientific toy.' 



The magnitude of the masterly conception of creating, controlling 

 and varying the strength or flow of the electric current by the spoken 

 words, and making that current the vehicle for the transmission of 

 the form or quality as well as the pitch and strength of the spoken 

 words, and of delivering at a distant point the same words, with the 



