The third Bell, the only one of this remarkable family who concerns us at this time, was a young man, barely twenty-eight, at the time when his ear caught the first cry of the telephone. But he was already a man of some note on his own account. He had been educated in Edinburgh, the city of his birth, and in London; and had in one way and another picked up a smattering of anatomy, music, electricity, and telegraphy. Until he was sixteen years of age, he had read nothing but novels and poetry and romantic tales of Scottish heroes. Then he left home to become a teacher of elocution in various British schools, and by the time he was of age he had made several slight discoveries as to the nature of vowel-sounds. Shortly afterwards, he met in London two distinguished men, Alexander J. Ellis and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who did far more than they ever knew to forward Bell in the direction of the telephone. Ellis was the president of the London Philological Society. Also, he was the translator of the famous book on "The Sensations of Tone," written by Helmholtz, who, in the period from 1871 to 1894 made Berlin the world-centre for the study of the physical sciences. So it happened that when Bell ran to Ellis as a young enthusiast and told his experiments, Ellis informed him that Helmholtz had done the same things several years before and done them more completely. He brought Bell to his house and showed him what Helmholtz had done--how he had kept tuning-forks in vibration by the power of electro-magnets, and blended the tones of several tuning-forks together to produce the complex quality of the human voice. Now, Helmholtz had not been trying to invent a telephone, nor any sort of message-carrier. His aim was to point out the physical basis of music, and nothing more. But this fact that an electro-magnet would set a tuning-fork humming was new to Bell and very attractive. It appealed at once to him as a student of speech. If a tuning-fork could be made to sing by a magnet or an electrified wire, why would it not be possible to make a musical telegraph--a telegraph with a piano key-board, so that many messages could be sent at once over a single wire? Unknown to Bell, there were several dozen inven-tors then at work upon this problem, which proved in the end to be very elusive. But it gave him at least a starting-point, and he forthwith commenced his quest of the telephone.