heard by a man whose ear had been trained to
recognize the strange voice of the little newcomer.
There, amidst flying belts and jarring
wheels, the baby telephone was born, as feeble
and helpless as any other baby, and "with no
language but a cry."

The professor-inventor, who had thus rescued
the tiny foundling of science, was a young Scottish
American. His name, now known as widely
as the telephone itself, was Alexander Graham
Bell. He was a teacher of acoustics and a student
of electricity, possibly the only man in his
generation who was able to focus a knowledge
of both subjects upon the problem of the telephone.
To other men that exceedingly faint
sound would have been as inaudible as silence
itself; but to Bell it was a thunder-clap. It was
a dream come true. It was an impossible thing
which had in a flash become so easy that he could
scarcely believe it. Here, without the use of a
battery, with no more electric current than that
made by a couple of magnets, all the waves of
a sound had been carried along a wire and
changed back to sound at the farther end. It
was absurd. It was incredible. It was something
which neither wire nor electricity had been
known to do before. But it was true.

No discovery has ever been less accidental.