"What he says is true, my child," said the Hatter, "and in time we expect to get the thunder itself under control so that it will serve some useful purpose--I don't know yet exactly what, but I am having experiments made in storage batteries which will catch and hold the thunder with the idea of saving the noise it makes for fire-crackers, or Presidential salutes, or other things and occasions where the fracturing of silence seems desirable. Surely if we can take electricity and under suitable Municipal supervision make it serve as a substitute for a tallow dip, why shouldn't we extract the reverberance with which it is fraught to add to the general clangour of joyous occasions?" "No reason at all," said Alice. "I wonder no one has ever thought of that before. Just think of all the magnificent noises that go to waste in a thunderstorm." "You will discover in time, my dear child, that only under the Municipal Ownership of Brains such as we have here, can such great ideas be seized from the infinity of nothingness and turned into an irresistible propaganda," said the Hatter loftily. "He's the biggest gander of the bunch," whispered the March Hare. "But it isn't what we are going to do, but what we have done that we propose to show you," continued the Hatter, eyeing the March Hare coldly. "And as I have said, the Municipaphone is my crowning achievement. Just come here and I will show you." The Hatter led Alice to a nearby lamp-post, and pointing to a little box fastened to the middle of the pillar explained to her that that was the Municipaphone. "We have them in every room in every house in the City, on all the lamp-posts, hydrants, telegraph poles, in fact everywhere where there is a chance or room enough to hang one," the Hatter explained. "It's just like a telephone, isn't it?" said Alice. "Only it looks like a hat instead of a funnel." "Exactly," said the Hatter, "but we don't call it a telephone any more. The word telephone struck me as being a misnomer. You don't tell the 'phone anything when you talk into it. You tell the person at the other end of the line, and so, I changed its name to the Municipaphone, which shows that it's a 'phone that belongs to the City. Just to sort of moralise the thing I had the mouth-piece changed to look like a hat instead of a funnel, because funnels are apt to suggest alcoholic beverages and sometimes people who aren't at all thirsty are made so by the mere power of suggestion. The hat, however, has always commended itself to our greatest statesmen as a vehicle best suited for the transmission of ideas, and I therefore adopted it. "It is very pretty," commented Alice. "Only I think a few ribbons would improve it a little."