Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922)

10

    ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

                              (4)

When Bell had finished his description on that
March afternoon, as he wrote afterward, he asked
Henry’s advice. ‘What would you advise me to do,
publish it and let others work it out, or attempt to
solve the problem myself?’

‘You have the germ of a great invention,’ said
Joseph Henry. ‘Work at it.’

‘I said,’ Bell recounts, ‘that I recognized the fact
that there were mechanical difficulties in the way
that rendered the plan impracticable at the present
time. I added that I felt that I had not the electrical
knowledge to overcome the difficulties. His laconic
answer was “Get it.”’ Bell wrote the words in
capitals. ‘I cannot tell you how much these two
words have encouraged me,’ he went on, in his letter
to his father and mother in Brantford, Canada. ‘I
live too much in an atmosphere of discouragement
for scientific pursuits.... Such a chimerical idea as
telegraphing vocal sounds would indeed to most minds
seem scarcely feasible enough to spend time work-
ing over. I believe, however, that it is feasible, and
that I have got the cue to the solution of the prob-
lem.’

Bell had conceived this ‘chimerical idea’ the year
before, while spending the summer with his parents
in Brantford, but he was occupied with his multiple
telegraph at the time, and was being urged to finish
it, so that the telephone had to wait.

Improvements in the telegraph were as vital in
invention and as profitable to inventors of the
seventies as radio improvements are to-day. The
American service was notoriously slow, and brought