The inventor was Alexander Graham Bell, by nativity a Scotchman, then a resident of Canada, and finally a citizen of the United States. His father was a teacher of vocal physiology at Edinburgh, and he himself became a teacher of deaf mutes. This occupation naturally led him to a thorough investigation of the laws of sound. He acknowledged the aid he received from the great work of Helmholtz on the _Theory of Tone_. His attention was called to sounds transmitted and reproduced by the electric current, especially by the ease with which telegraph operators read their messages by the duration of the “click” of their instruments. He knew of the old device of a tightly-stretched string or wire between two little boxes. He had read the publication of Prof. C. G. Page, of America, in 1837, on the _Production of Galvanic Music_, in which was described how musical notes were transmitted and reproduced by an interrupted magnetic circuit. He became acquainted with the experimental musical telephonic and acoustic researches of Reis, and others of Germany, and those of celebrated scientists in France, especially the phonautograph of Scott, a delicate instrument having a cone membrane and pointer, and used to reproduce on smoked glass the waves of sound. He commenced his experiments with magneto instruments in 1874, continued them in 1875, when he succeeded in reproducing speech, but poorly, owing to his imperfect instruments, and then made out his application, and obtained a patent in the United States in July, 1876. Like all the other remarkable inventions recorded in these pages, this “marvel” did not spring forth as a sudden creation, but was a slow growth of a plant derived from old ideas, although it blossomed out suddenly one day when audible sounds were accidentally produced upon an apparatus with which he was experimenting. It is impossible here to narrate the tremendous conflict that Bell now encountered to establish his title as first inventor, or to enumerate the multitude of improvements and changes made which go to make up the successful telephone of to-day. The messages of the voice are carried on the wings of electricity wherever any messages are carried, except under the widest seas, and this difficulty inventors are now seeking to overcome. The story of the marvellous inventions of the century in electricity is a fascinating one, but in length and details it is also marvellous, and we must hasten unwillingly to a close. Numerous applications of it will be mentioned in chapters relating to other arts.