But it was a far cry from that first faint sound to the actual transmission of words. For a long time his receiving instruments would only give out vague rumbling noises. In November, 1875, his experiments showed him that the vibrations created in a reed by the human voice could be transmitted in such a way as to reproduce words and sounds. Then, in January, 1876, he showed a few of the pupils at Monroe’s School of Oratory in Boston an apparatus by which singing could be carried more or less satisfactorily from the cellar of the building to a room on the fourth floor. But on March 10, 1876, the new instrument actually talked. Watson, who was at the basement end of the wire, heard the disc say, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” He dashed up the three flights of stairs to the room in which Bell was. “I can _hear_ you!” he cried. “I can _hear the words_!” “Had I known more about electricity, and less about sound,” Bell is reported to have said, “I would never have invented the telephone.” He had come upon his discovery by the right path, but it was a path that very few men could ever have picked out. Other inventors had tried to make a machine that would carry the voice, but they had all worked from the standpoint of the telegraph. Bell, inheriting unusual knowledge of the laws of speech and sound, came from the other direction. He started with the laws of sound transmission rather than with the laws of the telegraph. The result was that he had created something altogether new, basically different from all the other inventions that made use of electricity, for which there was as yet no common name even, and which he described in his application for a patent, as “an improvement in telegraphy.” Only two months after the day on which the telephone had actually talked for the first time the Centennial Exposition opened in Philadelphia. Mr. Hubbard was one of the Commissioners, and he obtained permission to have Bell’s first telephone placed on a small table in the Department of Education. Bell himself was too poor to be able to go to Philadelphia, and intended to stay in Boston, and try to find new deaf-mute pupils. But when Miss Hubbard left for the Centennial, and begged him to go with her, he could not resist. He stayed on the train, without a ticket, without baggage, and reached Philadelphia with the Hubbards. [Illustration: THE FIRST TELEPHONE Reproduced by permission From “The History of the Telephone” By Herbert N. Casson Published by A. C. McClurg & Co.]