The mention of electricity brought up new possibilities for future discovery, some of them so amazing as to almost pass the bounds of credibility. He said:
“Morse taught the world years ago to write at a distance by electricity; the telephone enables us to talk at a distance by electricity; and now scientists are agreed that there is no theoretical reason why the well-known principles of light should not be applied in the same way that the principles of sound have been applied in the telephone, and thus allow us to see at a distance by electricity. It is some ten years since the scientific papers of the world were greatly exercised over a report that I had filed at the Smithsonian Institution a sealed packet supposed to contain a method of doing this very thing; that is, transmit the vision of persons and things from one point on the earth to another. As a matter of fact, there was no truth in the report, but it resulted in stirring up a dozen scientific men of eminence to come out with statements to the effect that they too had discovered various methods of 41 seeing by electricity. That shows what I know to be the case, that men are working at this great problem in many laboratories, and I firmly believe it will be solved one day.
“Of course, while the principle of seeing by electricity at a distance is precisely that applied in the telephone, yet it will be very much more difficult to construct such an apparatus, owing to the immensely greater rapidity with which the vibrations of light take place when compared with the vibrations of sound. It is merely a question, however, of finding a diaphragm which will be sufficiently sensitive to receive these vibrations and produce the corresponding electrical variations.”
THOUGHT TRANSFERENCE BY ELECTRICITY.
After he had spoken of this idea for some time, Professor Bell stopped suddenly, and, with an amused twinkle in his eyes, exclaimed: “But while we are talking of all this, what is to prevent some one from discovering a way of thinking at a distance by electricity?”
Having said this, the genial professor threw himself back and laughed heartily at the amazement his words awakened. Was he joking? Apparently not, for he proceeded seriously to discuss one of the most astounding conceptions that ever entered an inventor’s mind. Thinking by electricity! Imagine two persons, one thousand or ten thousand miles apart, placed in communication electrically, in such a way that, without any spoken word, without sounding-board, key, or any bodily movement, the one receives instantly the thoughts of the other, and instantly sends back his own thoughts. The wife in New York knows what is passing in the brain of her husband in Paris. The husband has the same knowledge. What boundless possibilities, to be sure, this arrangement offers for business men, lovers, humorous writers, and the police authorities!
Preposterous as such an idea appears in its first conception, it certainly assumes an increasing plausibility when one listens to Professor Bell’s reasoning.
“After all,” he says, “what would there be in such a system more mysterious than in the processes of the mind reader? You substitute a wire and batteries for a strange-eyed man in a dress suit, that is all.”
The logical basis of Professor Bell’s scheme is clear, and its details quite beautiful in their simplicity, when you admit his major premise. That premise is that the human brain is merely a kind of electrical reservoir, and that thinking is nothing more than an electrical disturbance, like the aurora borealis or the sparks from a Holtz machine. The nerves are the wires leading from the central battery in the head. The reasonableness of this assumption is increased when one remembers that electricity may be made to act upon the nerves, even in a lifeless body, so as to produce the same muscular contractions which are produced by the brain force, whatever that may be. We talk of animal magnetism. What if it were the same as any other kind of magnetism? If these two forces are identical in one respect, why may they not be so in all respects? So Professor Bell reasons, and granting that the human brain is merely a store-house of electricity for our bodily needs, of electricity not essentially different from that which we know elsewhere, it must be possible to apply the same electrical laws to the brain as to any other electric apparatus and to get similar results.
“Do you begin to see my idea?” said Professor Bell, growing more and more enthusiastic as he proceeded. Then he gave a rapid outline of what might be a system of thinking by electricity.