Such a man was our own Professor Joseph Henry, so long the presiding genius at the Smithsonian Institution at Washington. He worked out all the problems of the present American telegraphic system and demonstrated it practically. Everything that made the so-called Morse telegraph a success had long before been described and demonstrated by Henry. Yet with the modest grace that was ingrained in the man he yielded all to the one who was instrumental in constructing the first telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington. Great credit is due to such men as Morse and Cyrus W. Field--neither of them inventors, but promoters of great systems of communication that are of unspeakable benefit to mankind. Henry pointed out the way, and Morse carried it into effect. Morse has had no more credit than was due him, but has Henry had as much as is due him? No great invention was ever yet the work, wholly, of one man. We Americans are too apt to forget this. I shall always remember Henry as a most unassuming, kindly, genial man, and I shall never forget his kindness to me. In 1874 I began my researches in telephony, having applied for a patent for an apparatus for transmitting musical tones telegraphically. This consisted of a means of transmitting musical tones through a wire and reproducing them on a metal plate (stretched on the body of a violin to give it resonance) by rubbing the plate with the hand--the latter being a part of the circuit. The examiner refused the application at first on the ground that the inventor or operator could not be a part of his machine. I took my apparatus and went to Washington, first calling upon Professor Henry, never having met him before. He received me most kindly, and allowed me to string wires from room to room in the institute, and when he had witnessed the experiments he seemed as delighted as a child. I now brought the patent office official over to the Smithsonian and soon convinced him that the inventor could be a part of his own machine. The same year I went abroad, and Henry gave me a letter to Tyndall. It was very fortunate for me that he did, for Tyndall was very shy at first, and it was only Henry's letter that gave me a hearing for a moment. The history of the few days that followed this first interview with Tyndall at the Royal Institution would make very interesting reading, if I felt at liberty to publish it. Suffice it to say that he was convinced in a few minutes after he had reached the experimental stage that not all my work had been anticipated by Wheatstone, as he asserted before seeing the experiments. Wheatstone had transmitted the tones of a piano, mechanically, from one room to another by a wooden rod placed upon the sound-board and terminating in another room in contact with another sound-board. But this was very different from transmitting musical tones and melodies from one city to another through a wire, as I could do with my electrotelephonic apparatus.