Meanwhile the fame of the invention had spread rapidly abroad and all
sorts of people made pilgrimages to Bell’s laboratory to hear the
telephone talk. A list of the scientists who came to the attic of that
cheap boarding house to see the telephone would read like the roster of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science. My old
electrical mentor, Moses G. Farmer, called one day to see the latest
improvements. He told me then with tears in his eyes when he first read
a description of Bell’s telephone he couldn’t sleep for a week, he was
so mad with himself for not discovering the thing years before.
“Watson,” said he, “that thing has flaunted itself in my very face a
dozen times within the last ten years and every time I was too blind to
see it. But,” he continued, “if Bell had known anything about
electricity he would never have invented the telephone.”
[Illustration: _Prof. Bell’s Original Centennial Magneto
Transmitter_]
Two of our regular visitors were young Japanese pupils of Professor
Bell—very polite, deferential, quiet, bright-eyed little men, who saw
everything and made cryptic notes. They took huge delight in proving
that the telephone could talk Japanese. A curious effect of the
telephone I noticed at that time was its power to paralyze the tongues
of men otherwise fluent enough by nature and profession. I remember a
prominent lawyer who, when he heard my voice in the telephone making
some such profound remark to him as “How do you do?” could only reply,
after a long pause, “Rig a jig jig and away we go.”
A “Wireless Telephone”
Men of quite another sort came occasionally. Mr. Hubbard received a
letter one day from a man who wrote that he could put us on the track of
a secret that would enable us to talk any distance without a wire. This
interested Mr. Hubbard and he made an appointment for the man to meet
me. At the appointed time, a stout, rather unkempt man made his
appearance. He didn’t take the least interest in the telephone; he said
that was already a back number, and if we would hire him for a small sum
per week we would soon learn how to telephone without any apparatus or
any wires. He went on to tell in a most convincing way how two prominent
theatrical men in New York, whom he had never seen, had got his brain so
connected into their circuit that they could talk with him at any time,
day or night, and make all sorts of fiendish suggestions to him. He
didn’t know yet how they did it, but he was sure I could find out their
secret, if I would just take the top off his head and examine his brain.
It dawned on me then that I was dealing with an insane man. I got rid of
him as soon as I could by promising to experiment on him when I could
find time. The next I heard of the poor fellow he was in the violent
ward of an insane asylum. Several similar cases of insanity attracted by
the fame of Bell’s occult (!) invention called on us or wrote to us
within a year of that time.
[Illustration: _Prof. Bell’s Original Centennial Receiver_]