He saw that this new idea of telephoning must be made familiar to the public mind. He talked telephone by day and by night. Whenever he travelled, he carried a pair of the magical instruments in his valise, and gave demonstra-tions on trains and in hotels. He buttonholed every influential man who crossed his path.
He was a veritable "Ancient Mariner" of the telephone. No possible listener was allowed to escape.
Further to promote this campaign of publicity, Hubbard encouraged Bell and Watson to perform a series of sensational feats with the telephone.
A telegraph wire between New York and Boston was borrowed for half an hour, and in the presence of Sir William Thomson, Bell sent a tune over the two-hundred-and-fifty-mile line. "Can you hear?" he asked the operator at the New York end. "Elegantly," responded the operator. "What tune?" asked Bell.
"Yankee Doodle," came the answer. Shortly afterwards, while Bell was visiting at his father's house in Canada, he bought up all the stove-pipe wire in the town, and tacked it to a rail fence between the house and a telegraph office. Then he went to a village eight miles distant and sent scraps of songs and Shakespearean quotations over the wire.
There was still a large percentage of people who denied that spoken words could be transmitted by a wire. When Watson talked to Bell at public demonstrations, there were newspaper editors who referred sceptically to "the supposititious Watson." So, to silence these doubters, Bell and Watson planned a most severe test of the telephone. They borrowed the telegraph line between Boston and the Cambridge Observatory, and attached a telephone to each end.
Then they maintained, for three hours or longer, the FIRST SUSTAINED conversation by telephone, each one taking careful notes of what he said and of what he heard. These notes were published in parallel columns in The Boston Advertiser, October 19, 1876, and proved beyond question that the telephone was now a practical success.
After this, one event crowded quickly on the heels of another. A series of ten lectures was arranged for Bell, at a hundred dollars a lecture, which was the first money payment he had received for his invention. His opening night was in Salem, before an audience of five hundred people, and with Mrs. Sand-ers, the motherly old lady who had sheltered Bell in the days of his experiment, sitting proudly in one of the front seats. A pole was set up at the front of the hall, supporting the end of a telegraph wire that ran from Salem to Boston. And Watson, who became the first public talker by telephone, sent messages from Boston to various members of the audience. An account of this lecture was sent by telephone to The Boston Globe, which announced the next morning--"This special despatch of the Globe has been transmitted by telephone in the presence of twenty people, who have thus been witnesses to a feat never before attempted--the sending of news over the space of sixteen miles by the human voice."This Globe despatch awoke the newspaper editors with an unexpected jolt. For the first time they began to notice that there was a new word in the language, and a new idea in the scientific world. No newspaper had made any mention whatever of the telephone for seventy-five days after Bell received his patent. Not one of the swarm of reporters who thronged the Philadelphia Centennial had regarded the telephone as a matter of any public interest. But when a column of news was sent by telephone to The Boston Globe, the whole newspaper world was agog with excitement. A thousand pens wrote the name of Bell. Requests to repeat his lecture came to Bell from Cyrus W. Field, the veteran of the Atlantic Cable, from the poet Longfellow, and from many others.
As he was by profession an elocutionist, Bell was able to make the most of these opportunities.
His lectures became popular entertainments.
They were given in the largest halls. At one lecture two Japanese gentlemen were induced to talk to one another in their own language, via the telephone. At a second lecture a band played "The Star-Spangled Banner," in Boston, and was heard by an audience of two thousand people in Providence. At a third, Signor Ferranti, who was in Providence, sang a selection from "The Marriage of Figaro" to an audience in Boston. At a fourth, an exhortation from Moody and a song from Sankey came over the vibrating wire. And at a fifth, in New Haven, Bell stood sixteen Yale professors in line, hand in hand, and talked through their bodies--a feat which was then, and is to-day, almost too wonderful to believe.
Very slowly these lectures, and the tireless activity of Hubbard, pushed back the ridicule and the incredulity; and in the merry month of May, 1877, a man named Emery drifted into Hubbard's office from the near-by city of Charlestown, and leased two telephones for twenty actual dollars--the first money ever paid for a telephone. This was the first feeble sign that such a novelty as the telephone business could be established; and no money ever looked handsomer than this twenty dollars did to Bell, Sanders, Hubbard, and Watson. It was the tiny first-fruit of fortune.
Greatly encouraged, they prepared a little circular which was the first advertisement of the telephone business. It is an oddly simple little document to-day, but to the 1877 brain it was startling. It modestly claimed that a telephone was superior to a telegraph for three reasons:
"(1) No skilled operator is required, but direct communication may be had by speech without the intervention of a third person.
"(2) The communication is much more rapid, the average number of words transmitted in a minute by the Morse sounder being from fifteen to twenty, by telephone from one to two hundred.
