So you see Alexander Graham Bell knew a great deal about the way we talk. He kept studying and working in his efforts to help his pupils, and his knowledge of the human ear gave him the first idea of his remarkable invention. He thought if the small and thin ear drum could send thrills and vibrations through heavy bones, then it should be possible for a small piece of electrified iron to make an iron ear drum vibrate. In his imagination he saw two iron ear drums far apart but connected by an electrified wire. One end of the wire was to catch the vibrations of the sound, and the other was to reproduce them. He was sure he could make an instrument of this kind, for he said, "If I can make deaf mutes talk, I can make iron talk." One of his pupils helped him to do this by her words of sympathy and interest. She was a young girl named Mabel Hubbard. While still a baby she had lost her hearing, and consequently her speech, through an attack of scarlet fever. She was a bright, lovable girl, and had learned to talk through the teaching of Alexander Graham Bell. Her father was a man of great public spirit and the best friend Mr. Bell had in bringing the telephone before the public. Mabel Hubbard became the wife of her teacher, and encouraged him constantly to try and try again until his telephone would work. Professor Bell made his first instrument in odd hours after he had finished teaching for the day. You may smile when you hear he used in making it an old cigar box, two hundred feet of wire, and two magnets taken from a toy fish pond. But this was because he was very poor and had scarcely any money to spend on materials for his experiments. But he kept on working, and after the Centennial he was able to found a company and put his new invention on the market. The company had little money, so Mr. Bell lectured and explained his work. By this means he not only raised money, but established his name as the inventor of the telephone. There were a number of other students who had been thinking along the same lines as Mr. Bell, but he went farther than any one else and was the first to carry the sounds of the human voice by electricity. In the year 1877, the telephone was put into practical use for the public. It grew slowly. People did not realize how it could help them and they looked upon having a telephone as a luxury rather than a necessity. It was in the same year that the first long distance line was established. Today, when we can talk from Boston to San Francisco, it seems strange to read that the first long distance telephone reached only from Boston to Salem, a distance of sixteen miles. But then Mr. Bell thought twenty miles would be the limit at which it would be possible to send messages. So you see the Salem line was really quite long enough to satisfy the inventor, whose first instrument could convey sound only from the basement to the second story of a single building.