SCIENCE IN THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD 



ture of an electromagnet. It was my fellow juryman, 

 Professor Watson, who, at the other extremity of the 

 line, uttered these words in a loud and distinct voice, 

 while applying his mouth to a tightly stretched mem- 

 brane provided with a small piece of soft iron, which 

 executed movements corresponding to the sound vibra- 

 tions of the air close to an electric magnet introduced 

 into the circuit. This discovery, the wonder of wonders 

 in electric telegraphy, is due to a young fellow country- 

 man of our own, Mr. Graham Bell, a native of Edin- 

 burgh, and now naturalized in New York. 



"It is impossible not to admire the daring invention 

 by which we have been able to realize with these simple 

 expedients the complex problem of reproducing by 

 electricity the tone and delicate articulations of voice 

 and speech; and it was necessary, in order to obtain 

 this result, to find out the means of varying the intensity 

 of the current in the same proportion as the inflections 

 of the sound emitted by the voice." 



DR. GRAHAM BELL DESCRIBES HIS INVENTION 



A year later Bell himself described his invention, 

 and the interesting experiments leading up to it, in a 

 paper read before The Society of Telegraph Engineers. 



"I hit upon an expedient for determining the pitch 

 which at that time I thought to be original with my- 

 self," he said. "It consisted in vibrating a tuning-fork 

 in front of the mouth while the position of the vocal 

 organs for the various vowel sounds were silently taken. 

 It was found that each vowel position caused the rein- 

 forcement of some particular fork or forks. 



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