Our Many Visitors
Meanwhile the fame of the invention had spread rapidly abroad and all sorts of people made pilgrimages to Bell’s laboratory to hear the telephone talk. A list of the scientists who came to the attic of that cheap boarding house to see the telephone would read like the roster of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. My old electrical mentor, Moses G. Farmer, called one day to see the latest improvements. He told me then with tears in his eyes when he first read a description of Bell’s telephone he couldn’t sleep for a week, he was so mad with himself for not discovering the thing years before. “Watson,” said he, “that thing has flaunted itself in my very face a dozen times within the last ten years and every time I was too blind to see it. But,” he continued, “if Bell had known anything about electricity he would never have invented the telephone.”
Prof. Bell’s Original Centennial Magneto Transmitter
Two of our regular visitors were young Japanese pupils of Professor Bell—very polite, deferential, quiet, bright-eyed little men, who saw everything and made cryptic notes. They took huge delight in proving that the telephone could talk Japanese. A curious effect of the telephone I noticed at that time was its power to paralyze the tongues of men otherwise fluent enough by nature and profession. I remember a prominent lawyer who, when he heard my voice in the telephone making some such profound remark to him as “How do you do?” could only reply, after a long pause, “Rig a jig jig and away we go.”