In 1819 Sir Charles Wheatsone, an English physicist, invented an instrument popularly known as the "magic lyre," but which he called the telephone. The first part of this word is the same Greek adverb _tele_ that is found in _telegraph_. The _phone_ is from another Greek word meaning "to sound." To _telephone_, therefore, means "to sound afar." The use of the English word _telephone_ by Wheatsone is historically the first appearance of the word in our language. His device did nothing but reproduce music by means of sounding boards. The inventor of the modern telephone is Alexander Graham Bell. Mr. Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, March 3, 1847. His father was Alexander Melville Bell, a Scotch educator, inventor of a system of visible speech, and author of some text-books on elocution. His grandfather was Alexander Bell, noted for his efforts to remove impediments of speech. Alexander Graham Bell was therefore well fitted by heredity for the invention of an instrument to transmit speech. He was educated in the Edinburgh high school and in the University of Edinburgh, and in 1867 he entered the University of London. Hard study broke down his health and he moved to Canada. Thence he moved to the United States, becoming first a teacher of deaf mutes, and afterward professor of vocal physiology in Boston University. In 1874, at the suggestion of the Boston Board of Education, he began some experiments to show to the eye the vibrations of sound, for the use of the deaf and dumb. The results of these experiments convinced Bell that articulate speech could be transmitted through space. Early in 1876 he completed the first telephone. The same year he exhibited it at the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia, where it was pronounced the "wonder of wonders." He filed application for a patent on his invention at the Patent Office in Washington, February 14, 1876. It is a singular fact that another application for a patent on the telephone was received at the Patent Office a few hours later on the same day from Elisha Gray, an electrical inventor of Chicago. The patent was issued to Bell, not because his invention was superior in merit to Gray's, but on the ground that his application was received first. This is a case where "the early bird catches the worm," for the profits arising from the patent have made Mr. Bell very wealthy, and high honors have come to him as the inventor of one of the world's greatest and most marvelous inventions. The Bell Telephone Company was organized in 1877, and in 1878 the first telephone exchanges were constructed. By the following year the telephone was firmly established as a social and commercial necessity. It has grown with great rapidity. It is now found in every city of the world; hotels, large buildings, and ships have their private exchanges, and it has found its way recently into thousands of farmhouses.