So it happened that on Monday evening, February 12, 1877, Arthur and Herbert, with about five hundred others, were at Lyceum Hall in Salem. It was an eager audience, full of curiosity.
Upon the platform and well toward the front was a small table, on the top of which rested an unimportant-looking covered box. From this box wires extended above to the gas fixture and out through the hall. At the back of the platform was a blackboard on a frame, and at the side a young woman, an expert telegrapher, who was to help Mr. Bell.
"Rather an unpromising set of apparatus!" Arthur heard a man behind him whisper to his neighbor.
"I'm not expecting much," returned the neighbor. "They say Professor Bell's going to talk to Boston. That's nonsense!"
But just then Professor Bell began. He briefly explained the instrument upon the table, which, Arthur saw, varied but little from that at Philadelphia.
"Only," thought Arthur, "he uses it now as he said he should, for transmitting and receiving too."
Then Professor Bell gave a brief account of the studies he had made since 1872, when he came to Boston to teach speech to deaf mutes.
"I made up my mind," said he, "that if I could make a deaf mute talk, I could make iron talk. For two years I worked on the problem, but unsuccessfully. At last, about two years ago, while a friend and I were experimenting daily with a wire stretched between my own room at Boston University and the basement of an adjoining building, I spoke into the transmitter, 'Can you hear me?' To my surprise and delight the answer came at once, 'I can understand you perfectly.' To be sure," continued the lecturer, "the sounds were not perfect, but they were intelligible. I had transmitted articulate speech.
"My problem was a long way toward its solution. With practically those same instruments, improved with a year's experimenting, I went to the Exposition, where, as you know, I interested many people. Since last June Sir William Thomson and I have succeeded in talking over a distance of about sixty miles. Moreover, I have talked, but not so successfully, between New York and Boston, a distance of over two hundred miles. To-night I expect to establish a connection between this hall and my study in Exeter Place in Boston, eighteen miles away. My colleague, Professor Watson, is there, in company with six other gentlemen."
Then, in an ordinary tone, as if speaking to some one a few feet away, Professor Bell inquired, talking into the transmitter: