wire, but Hubbard laughed him to scorn. "Now
you are talking nonsense," he said. "Such a
thing never could be more than a scientific toy.
You had better throw that idea out of your mind
and go ahead with your musical telegraph, which
if it is successful will make you a millionaire."

But the longer Bell toiled at his musical telegraph,
the more he dreamed of replacing the telegraph
and its cumbrous sign-language by a new
machine that would carry, not dots and dashes,
but the human voice. "If I can make a deaf-
mute talk," he said, "I can make iron talk." For
months he wavered between the two ideas. He
had no more than the most hazy conception of
what this voice-carrying machine would be like.
At first he conceived of having a harp at one end
of the wire, and a speaking-trumpet at the other,
so that the tones of the voice would be reproduced
by the strings of the harp.

Then, in the early Summer of 1874, while he
was puzzling over this harp apparatus, the dim
outline of a new path suddenly glinted in front
of him. He had not been forgetful of "Visible
Speech" all this while, but had been making
experiments with two remarkable machines--the
phonautograph and the manometric capsule, by
means of which the vibrations of sound were
made plainly visible. If these could be im-