proved, he thought, then the deaf might be taught
to speak by SIGHT--by learning an alphabet of
vibrations. He mentioned these experiments to
a Boston friend, Dr. Clarence J. Blake, and he,
being a surgeon and an aurist, naturally said,
"Why don't you use a REAL EAR?"

Such an idea never had, and probably never
could have, occurred to Bell; but he accepted it
with eagerness. Dr. Blake cut an ear from a dead
man's head, together with the ear-drum and the
associated bones. Bell took this fragment of
a skull and arranged it so that a straw touched
the ear-drum at one end and a piece of moving
smoked glass at the other. Thus, when Bell
spoke loudly into the ear, the vibrations of the
drum made tiny markings upon the glass.

It was one of the most extraordinary incidents
in the whole history of the telephone. To an
uninitiated onlooker, nothing could have been
more ghastly or absurd. How could any one
have interpreted the gruesome joy of this young
professor with the pale face and the black
eyes, who stood earnestly singing, whispering,
and shouting into a dead man's ear? What
sort of a wizard must he be, or ghoul, or madman?
And in Salem, too, the home of the
witchcraft superstition! Certainly it would
not have gone well with Bell had he lived