burst upon his mind. For years Bell had been engaged in a task
that seemed hopeless to most men--that of making deaf-mutes talk.
"If I can make a deaf-mute talk, I can make iron talk," he
declared. "If I could make a current of electricity vary in
intensity as the air varies in density," he said at another time,
"I could transmit sound telegraphically." Many others, of course,
had dreamed of inventing such an instrument. The story of the
telephone concerns many men who preceded Bell, one of whom,
Philip Reis, produced, in 1861, a mechanism that could send a few
discordant sounds, though not the human voice, over an electric
wire. Reis seemed to have based his work upon an article
published in "The American Journal of Science" by Dr. C.G. Page,
of Salem, Mass., in 1837, in which he called attention to the
sound given out by an electric magnet when the circuit is opened
or closed. The work of these experimenters involves too many
technicalities for discussion in this place. The important facts
are that they all involved different principles from those worked
out by Bell and that none of them ever attained any practical
importance. Reis, in particular, never grasped the essential
principles that ultimately made the telephone a reality. His work
occupies a place in telephone history only because certain
financial interests, many years after his death, brought it to
light in an attempt to discredit Bell's claim to priority as the
inventor. An investigator who seems to have grasped more clearly
the basic idea was the distinguished American inventor Elisha
Gray, already mentioned as the man who had succeeded in
perfecting the "harmonic telegraph." On February 14, 1876, Gray
filed a caveat in the United States Patent Office, setting forth
pretty accurately the conception of the electric telephone. The
tragedy in Gray's work consists in the fact that, two hours