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.
Thought Telephone a Toy.
The general opinion expressed was that the telephone was a remarkably clever toy, but that it was nothing more. Investors took this view of it, and Bell, who had been reduced to poverty by the expenses of his experiments, went from one financier to another offering stock in the company he had formed, but everywhere he met with rebuffs. Financiers did not care to have anything to do with a machine designed to accomplish the impossible feat of making audible the voice of a person many miles away.
The reception he met with did not in the least shake Bell's faith in his work, but he was sorely in need of money. He resolved on a desperate move, and he went to Chauncey M. Depew and offered him a one-sixth interest in the company if he would loan ten thousand dollars to put the company on its feet. Depew took a week to consider the proposition. At the end of the week he wrote back that the incident might be considered closed. The telephone was a clever idea, but it was utterly lacking in commercial possibilities, and ten thousand dollars was far too big a sum to risk in marketing an instrument that at best could never be more than a plaything.
Thus Depew let slip an opportunity to acquire for ten thousand dollars an interest that to-day could not be bought for less than twenty-five millions.
Bell was being hard pushed, and he determined to make a last offer. Don Cameron, of Pennsylvania, was then one of the leading figures in the United States Senate, and his influence throughout the country was very great. Bell went to him and offered him, for nothing, one-half interest in the invention if he would endeavor to have it introduced to the public.
Cameron would not even consider the proposition, and gave orders "that Bell and his fool talking-machine be thrown out" if he again attempted to get an interview.
While Bell was ineffectually struggling in this direction, a few men in Boston, who had been interested by the exhibition before the Boston Academy, determined to give the telephone a thorough test. A line three miles long was built from Boston to Somerville, and this proved so unequivocally the utility of the telephone that there could no longer be any question of its success.
The pioneer line, three miles long, cost a few hundred dollars. In less than thirty years the number of miles of wire has increased to nearly four million, and thirty thousand persons are regularly employed by the telephone companies.
Soon after the Somerville demonstration, the tide turned in Bell's favor. Capital, which had previously fought shy of the talking-machine, rushed boldly in, and the inventor who had been turned away from office-doors and denied access to the presence of politicians was offered fabulous prices for part interest in his company.