l62 



NATURE 



[y uric 6, 1878 



One great beauty of Prof, Bell's invention is that the instru- 

 ments at the two ends of the line are precisely alike. When the 

 tin plate of the transmitter approaches the core of its bobbin it 

 produces a current in the circuit, which has also to circulate 

 round the bobbin of the receiver, and thus the core of the 

 receiver is rendered more or less magnetic, and attracts its tin 

 plate with greater or smaller force. Thus the tin plate of the 

 receiver reproduces on a smaller scale, but with perfect fidelity, 

 every motion of the tin plate of the transmitter. 



This perfect symmetry of the whole apparatus — the wire in 

 the middle, the two telephones at the end of the wire, and the 

 two gossips at the ends of the telephones — may be very fasci- 

 nating to a mere mathematician, but it would not satisfy an 

 evolutionist of the Spencerian type, who would consider any- 

 thing with both ends alike to be an organism of a very low 

 type, which must have its functions differentiated before any 

 satisfactory integration can take place. 



Accordingly, many attempts have been made, by differentiating 

 the function of the transmitter from that of the receiver, to over- 

 come the principal limitation to the power of the telephone. As 

 long as the human voice is the sole motive power of the appara- 

 tus it is manifest that what is heard at one end must be fainter 

 than what is spoken at the other. But if the vibration set up by 

 the voice is used no longer as the source of energy, but merely as 

 a means of modulating the strength of a current produced by a 

 voltaic battery, then there will be no necessary limitation of the 

 intensity of the resulting sound, so that what is whispered to the 

 transmitter may be proclaimed ore rotundo by the receiver, 



A result of this kind has already been obtained by Mr. 

 Edison by means of a transmitter in which the sound vibrations 

 produce a varying pressure on a piece of carbon, which forms 

 part of the electric circuit. The greater the pressure, the 

 smaller is the resistance due to the insertion of the carbon, and 

 therefore the greater is the current in the circuit. 



I have not yet seen Mr. Edison's transmittei*, but the micro- 

 phone of Prof. Hughes is an application of carbon and other 

 substances to the construction of a transmitter, which modulates 

 the intensity of a battery current in more or less complete ac- 

 cordance with the sound-vibrations it receives. The energy of 

 the sound produced is no longer limited by that of the original 

 sound. All that the original sound does is to draw supplies of 

 energy from the battery, so that a very feeble sound may give 

 rise to a considerable effect. Thus, when a fly walks over the 

 table of the microphone the sound of his tramp may be heard 

 miles off. 



Indeed, the microphone seems to open up several new lines of 

 research. We shall have London physicians performing stetho- 

 scopic auscultations on patients in all parts of the kingdom. 

 The Entomological Society have recently been much interested 

 by Mr. Wood-Mason's discovery of a stridulating apparatus in 

 scorpions. Perhaps ere long a microphone, placed in a nest of 

 tropical scorpions, may be connected up to a receiver in the 

 apartments of the society, so as to give the members and their 

 musical friends an opportunity of deciding whether the musical 

 taste of the scorpion resembles that of the nightingale or that of 

 the cat, 



I have said that the telephone is an instance of the benefit to 

 be derived from the cross-fertilization of the sciences. Now this 

 is an operation which cannot be performed by merely collecting 

 treatises on the different sciences, and binding them up into an 

 encyclopsedia. Science exists only in the mind, and the union 

 of the sciences can take place only in a living person. 



Now, Prof. Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, is 

 not an electrician who has found out how to make a tin plate 

 speak, but a speaker, who, to gain his private ends, has become 

 an electrician. He is the son of a very remarkable man, 

 Alexander Melville Bell, author of a book called "Visible Speech," 

 and of other works relating to pronunciation. In fact, his 

 whole life has been employed in teaching people to speak. He 

 brought the art to such perfection that, though a Scotchman, he 

 taught himself in six months to speak English, and I regret ex- 

 tremely that when I had the opportunity in Edinburgh I did not 

 take lessons from him. Mr. Melville Bell has made a complete 

 analysis and classification of all the sounds capable of being 

 uttered by the human voice, from the Zulu clicks to coughing 

 and sneezing ; and he has embodied his results in a system of 

 symbols, the elements of which are not taken from any existing 

 alphabet, but are founded on the different configurations of the 

 organs of speech. 



The capacities of this new mode of representing speech have 



been put to the test by Mr. Alexander J. Ellis, author of "The 

 Essentials of Phonetics," a gentleman who has studied the whole 

 theory of speech acoustically, philologically, and historically. 

 He describes the result in a letter to The Reader : — 



" The mode of procedure was as follows :— Mr, Bell sent his 

 two sons, wli ") were to read the writing, out of the room — it is 

 interesting to know that the elder, who read all the words in 

 this case, had only had five weeks' instruction in the use of the 

 alphabet — and I dictated slowly and distinctly the sounds which 

 I wished to be written. They consisted of a few words in Latin, 

 pronounced first as at Eton, then as in Italy, and then according 

 to some theoretical notions of how the Latins might have 

 uttered them. Then came some English provincialisms and 

 affected pronunciations, the words 'how odd' being given in 

 several distinct ways. Suddenly German provincialisms were 

 introduced; then discriminations of sounds often confused. Some 

 Arabic, some Cockney English, with an introduced Arabic 

 guttural, some mispronounced Spanish, and a variety of shades 

 of vowels and diphthongs. 



" The result was perfectly satisfactory — that is, Mr. Bell wrote 

 down my queer and purposely exaggerated pronunciations and 

 mispronunciations, and delicate distinctions, in such a manner 

 that his sons, not having heard them, so uttered them as to sur- 

 prise me by the extremely correct echo of my own voice. . , . 

 Accent, tone, drawl, brevity, indistinctness were all reproduced 

 with surprising accuracy. Being on the watch, I could, as it 

 were, trace the alphabet in the lips of the readers. I think, 

 then, that Mr. Bell is justified in the somewhat bold title which 

 he has assumed for his mode of writing — ' Visible speech.' I 

 only hope that for the advantage of linguists, such an alphabet 

 may soon be made accessible, and that, for the intercourse of 

 nations, it may be adopted generally, at least for extra- European 

 nations, as for the Chinese dialect and the several extremely 

 diverse Indian languages, where such an alphabet would rapidly 

 become a great social and political engine." 



The inventor of the telephone was thus prepared, by early 

 training in the practical analysis of the elements of speech, to 

 associate whatever scientific knowledge he might afterwards ac- 

 quire with those elementary sensations and actions, which each 

 of us must learn from himself, because they lie too deep within 

 us to be described to others. This training was put to a very 

 severe test when, at the request of the Boston Board of Educa- 

 tion, Prof. Graham Bell conducted a series of experiments 

 with his father's system in the Boston School for the Deaf and 

 Dumb. I cannot conceive a nobler application of the scientific 

 analysis of speech, than that by which it enables those to whom 

 all sound is 



"expunged and rased 

 And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out " 



not only to speak themselves, but to read by sight what other 

 people are saying. The successful result of the experiments at 

 Boston is not only the most valuable testimonial to the father's 

 system of visible speech, but an honour which the inventor 

 of the telephone may well consider as the highest he has at-' 

 tained. 



An independent method of research into the process of speech 

 was employed by Wheatstone, Willis, and Kempelen, the aim 

 of which was to imitate the sounds of the human voice by means 

 of artificial apparatus. This apparatus was in some cases 

 modelled so as to represent as nearly as possible the form as 

 well as the functions of the organs of speech, but it was found 

 that an equally good imitation of the vocal sounds could be ob- 

 tained from apparatus the form of which had no resemblance to 

 the natural organs. 



Several isolated facts of considerable importance were esta- 

 bUshed by this method, but the whole theory of speaking and. 

 hearing has been so profoundly modified by Helmholtz and 

 Donders, that much of what was advanced before their time has 

 come to possess only an historical interest. 



Among all the recent steps in the progress of science, I kno\r 

 none of which the truly scientific or science-producing conse- 

 quences are likely to be so influential as the rise of a school oi 

 physiologists, who investigate the conditions of our sensations by 

 producing on the external senses impressions, the physical condi- 

 tions of which can be measured with precision, and then record- 

 ing the verdict of consciousness as to the similarity or difference 

 of the resulting sensations. 



Prof. Helmholtz, in his recent address as Rector of the Uni- 

 versity of Berlin, lays great stress on that personal interaction, 

 between living minds, which I have already spoken of as essen- 



