forward to say that it was not rightfully his. No one, so far as we know, had any strong desire to do so. No one conceived that the telephone would ever be any more than a

after several hundred articles on it had appeared in newspapers and scientific magazines, and after actual sales of telephones had been made in various parts of the country, ther

had been his competitors in the attempt to produce a musical telegraph, persuaded themselves that they had unconsciously done as much as he. Any possessor of a telegraphic patent, who had used the common phrase "talking wire," had a chance to build up a plausible story of

easily by any smart boy or any ordinary mechanic. The making of a telephone was like the trick of Columbus standing an egg on end. Nothing was easier to those who knew how. And so it happened that, as the crude little model of Bell's original telephone lay in the Pa

east-Edison, Gray, and Dolbear. It expected an easy victory; in fact, the disparity between the two opponents was so evident, that there seemed little chance of a co

corporation that ever existed." It had behind it not only forty millions of capital, but the prestige of the Vanderbilts, and the favor of financiers everywhere. Also, it met the telephone pioneers at every point because it, too,

knew eight languages to translate them. He and his men ransacked libraries and patent offices; they rummaged and sleuthed and interviewed; and found nothing of any value. In his final report to the Western Union, Mr. Pope announced that there was no way to make a telephone except Bell's way, and advised the purchase of the Bell patents. "I am entirely

claimed everything. It introduced Gray as the original inventor of the telephone, and ordered its lawyers to take action at once against the Bell Company for infringement of the Gray patent. This high-handed action, it hoped, would most quickly bring the little Bell group into

the trial proceeded, he became convinced that the Bell patent was valid. He notified the Western Union confidentially, of course, that its case could not be proven, and that "Bell was the original inventor of the telephone." The best policy, he suggested, was to withdraw their claims a

months of disputation, a treaty of peace was drawn up and s

t Bell was the o

that his pate

from the telep

in return for this

Western Union t

n a royalty of twenty per c

t of the teleg

rta of the telephone. It transformed a giant competitor into a friend. It added to the Bell System fifty-six thousand telephones in fifty-five cities. A

ccessful, it had a low idea of the possibilities of the telephone business; and its already busy agents had little time or knowledge or enthusiasm to give to the new enter

ped the Western Union, and hastened to join in the grand Te Deum of applause. Within five months from the signing of the agreement, there had to be a reorganization; and the American Bell Telephone Company was created, with six million dollars capital. In the followin

ssible for a man of his ardent temperament to be idle, he plunged into the National Geographical Society. He was a Colonel Sellers whose dream of millions (for the telephone) had come true; and when he died, in 1897, he was rich both in money and in the affection of his friends. Charles Williams, in whose workshop the first telephones were made, sold his factory t

r obtained and tossed aside an immense fortune as incidentally as did Bell. When the Bell Company offered him a salary of ten thousand dollars a year to remain its chief inventor, he refused the offer cheerfully on the ground that he could not "invent to order." In 1880, the French Government gave him the Volta Prize of fifty thousand

e of telephone service. If the Bell Company had sold its stock at the highest price reached, in 1880, it would have received less than nine million dollars-a huge sum, but not too much to p

ington postal service, and toasted as "the Monte Cristo of the Telephone." It was said that the actual cost of the Bell plant was only one-twenty-fifth of its capital, and that every four cents of investment had

enteen-year locusts. In three years, one hundred and twenty-five competing companies were started, in open defiance of the Bell patents. The main object of these companies was not, like that of the Western Union, to do a legitimate telephon

They had financed their company in a most honest and simple way; and they were desperately opposed to the financial banditti whose purpose was to transform the telephone business into a cheat and a gamble. At first, ha

Granger movement was at that time a strong political factor in the Middle West, and its blind fear of patents and "monopolies" was turned aggressively against the Bell Company. A few Senators and legitimate capitalists were lifted

the adverse decision of the court. Several years after his defeat, he came forward with new weapons and new methods of attack. He becam

-and-neck race to see who could first invent a musical telegraph-when, presto! Bell suddenly turned aside, because of his acoustical knowledge, and invented the telephone, while Gray kept straight ahead. Like all others who were in quest of a better telegraph instrument, Gray had glimmerings of the possibility o

t to do so; while an APPLICATION is a declaration that the writer has already perfected the invention. But Gray could never forget that he had seemed to be, for a time, s

t is impossible to make a practical speaking telephone on the principle shown by Professor Bell.... The currents are too feeble"; second, Gray the CONVERT, who wrote frankly to Bell in 1877, "I do not claim the credit of inventing it"; and third, Gray the

, as he admitted in court, failed when he tried to make a telephone on the lines laid down in his caveat. The final word on the whole

he was mistaken. No subject was ever so thoroughly investigated as the invention of the speaking telephone. No patent has ever been submitted to such de

he said, "upon your very great invention, and I hope to see it supplant all forms of existing telegraphs, and that you will be successful in obtaining the wealth and honor which is your due." But one

n Frankfort, Germany, had hoped to make a telephone, but he had failed. His machine was operated by a "make-and-break" current, and so could not carry the infinitely delicate vibrations made by the human voice. It could transmit the pitch of a sound, but not the QUALI

f it. Such scientists as Lord Kelvin, Joseph Henry, and Edison had seen the little Reis instrument years before Bell invented the telephone; but they regarded it as a mere musical toy. It was "not in any sense a speaking telephone," said Lord Kelvin. And Edison, when trying to put the Reis machine in the most favorable light, admitted hu

intelligible sentence. "It CAN speak, but it WON'T," explained one of Dolbear's lawyers. It is now generally known that while a Reis machine, when clogged and out of order, would transmit a word or two in an imperfect wa

ilure was due not to workmanship but to the principle which was adopted as the basis of what had to be done. ... Bell discovered a new art-that of

tale of prior invention, could find a speculator to support him. On they came, a motley array, "some in rags, some on nags, and some in velvet gowns." One of them claimed to have done wonders with an iron hoop and a file in 1867; a second had a marvellous table wit

ventor named Daniel Drawbaugh, and opened up a noisy newspaper campaign. To secure public sympathy for Drawbaugh, it was said that he had invented a complete telephone and switchboard before 1876, but was in such "utter and abject poverty" that

ntific American; and it had become the fixed habit of his life to copy other people's inventions and exhibit them as his own. He was a trailer of inventors. More than forty instances of this imitative habit were shown at the trial, and he was sev

talists undertook to pay the expenses of this adventure. Wires were strung; stock was sold; and the enterprise looked for a time so genuine that when the Bell lawyers asked for an injunction against it, they were refused. This was as hard a blow as the Bell people received in their eleven years of litigation; and the Bell

of the Bell patents. It was a bold and desperate move, and enabled the promoters of paper companies to sell stock for several years longer. The whole dispute was re-opened, from Gray to Drawbaugh. Every battle was re-f

ere carried to the Supreme Court in Washington. It fought out five hundred and eighty-seven other law

hone patents, and reported: "It is to Bell that the world owes the possession of the speaking telephone." Yet his patent was continuously under fire, and never at any time secure. Stock companies whose paper capital to

rvellously well mated. Smith was an old-fashioned attorney of the Websterian sort, dignified, ponderous, and impressive. By 1878, when he came in to defend the little Bell Company against the towering Western Union,

n Petersham, studying the laws of physics and electricity. He was never in the slightest degree spectacular. Once only, during the eleven years of litigation, did he lose control of his temper. He was attacking the credibility of a witness w

re in Chickering Hall, New York, and was a "doubting Thomas." But a closer study of the telephone transformed him into an enthusiast. Having a memory like a filing system, and a knack for invention

s deep voice: "I submit, Your Honor, that the literature of the world does not afford a passage which states how the human voice can be electrically transmitted, previous to the patent of Mr. Bell." His death, like his life, was dramatic. He was on his feet in the courtroom, battling against an infringer, when, in the middle of a sentence, he fell to the floor, overcome by sickness and the responsibilities he had carried for twelve

rd story of HOW HE DID IT, which rebuked and confounded the mob of pretenders. The second was the historical fact that the most eminent electrical scientists of Europe and America had seen Bell's telephone at the Centennial and had

l, it would make ten pages of this book; but the core of it is in the last sentence: "The method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically, by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accomp

erved. There was no telephone until he made one, and since he made one, no one has found out any other way. Hundreds of clever men have be

brations; by Koenig and Leon Scott, who taught him the infinite variety of these vibrations; by Dr. Clarence J. Blake, who gave him a human ear for his experiments; and by Joseph Henry and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who encouraged him to persevere. In a still more indirect way, he was helped by Morse's invention of the telegraph; by Faraday's discovery of the phenomena of magnet