BELL AND THE TELEPHONE.
Scottish-American Inventor Had Hard
Work to Convince Them the Telephone
Was Anything More than a Toy.
Alexander Graham Bell, whose discoveries contributed largely to the commercial success of the telephone, had been known only as a teacher of deaf-mutes previous to the time he took out his telephone patents. He had been a teacher in Scotland, his native country, and when he emigrated to America it was with the intention of continuing to teach here. The system he used was one of his own, and from the first he got good results from the most difficult cases.
Important as this work was, he could earn nothing more than a scanty living. Soon even this income was threatened, for he began to devote more and more time to the study of sound-transmission, and in order to make a living at all by teaching it was necessary to devote his entire time to it.
At the Centennial Exhibition, in Philadelphia, he showed a crude model of a telephone, but it attracted only passing notice from capitalists, though eminent scientists predicted a future for it. The results were not what Bell looked for, but he took up the work again, made some improvements, and took out patents covering the principal features of the telephone as it is to-day.
Three hours after he filed his application Elisha Gray filed a caveat for his telephone.
On February 1, 1877, Bell went to Salem, Massachusetts, and gave his first public exhibition and lecture. It aroused some curiosity, but drew no financial backing. On May 10 he lectured before the Boston Academy, and there, apparently, the results were little more encouraging than they had been at Salem.