Ellis and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who did far
more than they ever knew to forward Bell in
the direction of the telephone.

Ellis was the president of the London Philological
Society. Also, he was the translator
of the famous book on "The Sensations of Tone,"
written by Helmholtz, who, in the period from
1871 to 1894 made Berlin the world-centre for
the study of the physical sciences. So it happened
that when Bell ran to Ellis as a young
enthusiast and told his experiments, Ellis informed
him that Helmholtz had done the same
things several years before and done them more
completely. He brought Bell to his house and
showed him what Helmholtz had done--how he
had kept tuning-forks in vibration by the power
of electro-magnets, and blended the tones of several
tuning-forks together to produce the complex
quality of the human voice.

Now, Helmholtz had not been trying to invent
a telephone, nor any sort of message-carrier.
His aim was to point out the physical basis of
music, and nothing more. But this fact that
an electro-magnet would set a tuning-fork humming
was new to Bell and very attractive. It
appealed at once to him as a student of speech.
If a tuning-fork could be made to sing by a
magnet or an electrified wire, why would it not