Abstract :
IT IS my privilege and pleasure to speak to you of the invention of the telephone, with which event it was my good fortune to be connected, my association with Prof. Bell as his mechanical expert having brought me into close touch with nearly all his experiments both before and after his great discovery. I shall try to tell the story as it impressed itself on my mind in those early days when I was a young man of about 20, just out of my apprenticeship as a maker of electrical apparatus, intensely interested in my work, and with a full share of youthful enthusiasm. In my story, I shall not use the terms and formulas of modern telephony, for they would certainly be out of place in speaking of the time when that science, now so complex, was contained in one human brain.
