Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/440

Scotland. On that occasion men eminent in their respective professions listened with the deepest interest, while the president, Sir William Thomson (now Lord Kelvin), gave a vivid description of his visit to the Centennial, and stated that the most marvelous of all the wonderful exhibits he had seen in America was a pair of rudely-constructed telephones!

Then he explained to the members how surprising it all seemed when on that memorable Sabbath in June, 1876, to his listening ear came the words spoken at the distant end of the line; and he added:

All this my own ears heard, spoken to me with unmistakable distinctness by this circular disk armature of just such another little electro-magnet as this which I hold in my hand. . . . This, the greatest by far of all marvels of the electric telegraph, is due to a young countryman of our own, Mr. Graham Bell, now becoming a naturalized citizen of the United States. Who can but admire the hardihood of the invention which devised such a very slight means to realize the mathematical conception that, if electricity is to convey all the delicacies of quality which distinguish articulate speech, the strength of this current must vary continuously and as nearly as may be in simple proportion to the velocity of a particle of air engaged in constituting the sound?

Sir William Thomson was then and is now the leading electrician of the world. And it was this generous endorsement of Alexander Graham Bell's invention that brought the telephone to the attention of scientific bodies in all countries, and led learned men in all lands to investigate its merits and to strive to improve its technical value. For in its remarkable simplicity the invention was a disappointment to many men, until practical experience demonstrated that the more elaborate copies were no more serviceable as speech-transmitting devices than the primitive original instrument. Nor during all the intervening years that have elapsed since 1876 has any inventor or any mechanician or any scientist ever suggested a more complete or a simpler description of the conception of the electric-speaking telephone and its governing principles than Graham Bell embodied in his application for a patent.

Yet that simple invention has exerted a far more potent influence than any of the more attractive fruits of inventive genius in revolutionizing and enriching custom and method in almost every branch of industry, of commerce and of society. And no other invention has so marvelously increased the scope of human usefulness and intelligent activity. With its aid time and distance are virtually eliminated, and Maine and Missouri and Mississippi and Minnesota are distant from each other only the length of a telephone call.

Yet marvelous as was the achievement of inventing the electric-speaking telephone, equally meritorious was the breadth of mind that could entertain at a time when poverty was pressing a prophetic vision of one vast transcontinental telephone system uniting every important village, town and city with wire highways over which messages would speed as quickly as thoughts are spoken.