124 nature's Miracles. 



one octave and made a set of reeds tuned to 

 the notes of the scale, and then when some one 

 would play a melody I could reproduce it in 

 two ways : One by placing my body in the cir- 

 cuit and rubbing a metal plate it might be 

 the bottom of a tin pan, a joint of stovepipe or 

 otherwise anything that was metal and would 

 vibrate would give the effect. Another way 

 was to connect an electromagnet (having a 

 diaphragm or reed across its poles) in the cir- 

 cuit at the receiving-end and mount it on some 

 kind of a soundboard. I made a great num- 

 ber of different kinds of receivers that were 

 capable of receiving either musical or articu- 

 late sounds, as has many times been proven 

 by experiment. I carried two sets of experi- 

 ments along together; the one looking toward 

 a system of multiple telegraphy and the other 

 the transmission of articulate speech. Let us 

 first look into the multiple telegraph and take 

 the other up under the head of the telephone. 

 When the electrical keyboard was completed 

 I found that I could transmit not only a 

 melody but a harmony; that more than one 

 tone could be transmitted simultaneously. 

 This discovery opened up a long series of ex- 

 periments with the view of sending a num- 

 ber of messages simultaneously by means of 

 musical tones differing in pitch. I had already 

 demonstrated that several tones could be trans- 

 mitted at once, but they would speak all alike 



