a clock-spring reed, a magnet, and a wire. It was a most absurd toy in VII THE TELEPHONE AND NATIONAL EFFICIENCY assisting him. For an instant he was stunned. He had been expecting just such a sound forgotten the heat and the grime of the workshop. He was wholly absorbed 1875, he heard an almost inaudible sound--a faint TWANG--come from the VIII THE TELEPHONE IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES cable were the most wonderful things in the world, a tall young it appears, and the two were connected by an electric wire. Watson had professor of elocution was desperately busy in a noisy machine-shop appearance. It was unlike any other thing that had ever been made in any eagerness to an adjoining room in which stood a young mechanic who was CHAPTER I. THE BIRTH OF THE TELEPHONE THE HISTORY OF THE TELEPHONE for several months, but it came so suddenly as to give him the sensation machine itself. Square. It was a very hot afternoon in June, but the young professor had In that somewhat distant year 1875, when the telegraph and the Atlantic of surprise. His eyes blazed with delight, and he sprang in a passion of and it had constantly baffled him, until, on this hot afternoon in June, that stood in one of the narrow streets of Boston, not far from Scollay "Snap that reed again, Watson," cried the apparently irrational young snapped the reed on one of the machines and the professor had heard from country. The young professor had been toiling over it for three years professor. There was one of the odd-looking machines in each room, so IX THE FUTURE OF THE TELEPHONE in the making of a nondescript machine, a sort of crude harmonica with