science, and the model shown was not complete. The caveat of 1871 is indeed a reliable document; but unfortunately for him it is not quite clear from it whether he employed a 'lovers' telephone,' with a wire instead of a string, and joined a battery to it in the hope of enhancing the effect. 'I employ,' he says, 'the well known conducting effect of continuous metallic conductors as a medium for sound, and increase the effect by electrically insulating both the conductor and the parties who are communicating. It forms a speaking telegraph without the necessity of any hollow tube.' In connection with the telephone he used an electric alarm. It is by no means evident from this description that Meucci had devised a practicable speaking telephone; but he may have been the first to employ electricity in connection with the transmission of speech.[1]
'This crowning marvel of the electric telegraph,' as Sir William Thomson happily expressed it, was followed by another invention in some respects even more remarkable. During the winter of 1878 Professor Bell was in England, and while lecturing at the Royal Institution, London, he conceived the idea of the photophone. It was known that crystalline selenium is a substance peculiarly sensitive to light, for when a ray strikes it an electric current passes far more easily through it than if it were kept in the dark. It therefore occurred to Professor Bell that if a telephone were connected in circuit with the current, and the ray of light falling on the selenium was eclipsed by means of the vibrations of sound, the current would undulate in keeping with the light, and the telephone would emit a corresponding note. In this way it might be literally possible 'to hear a shadow fall athwart the stillness.'
- ↑ Meucci is dead.
