Bell himself hurried to England and Scotland on his wedding tour in 1878, with great expectations of having his invention appreciated in his native land. But from a business point of view, his mission was a total failure. He received dinners a-plenty, but no contracts; and came back to the United States an impoverished and disheartened man. Then the optimistic Gardiner G. Hubbard, Bell's father-in-law, threw himself against the European inertia and organized the International and Oriental Telephone Companies, which came to nothing of any importance. In the same year even Enos M. Barton, the sagacious founder of the Western Electric, went to France and England to establish an export trade in telephones, and failed. These able men found their plans thwarted by the indifference of the public, and often by open hostility. "The telephone is little better than a toy," said the Saturday Review; "it amazes ignorant people for a moment, but it is inferior to the well-established system of air-tubes." "What will become of the privacy of life?" asked another London editor. "What will become of the sanctity of the domestic hearth?" Writers vied with each other in inventing methods of pooh-poohing Bell and his invention. "It is ridiculously simple," said one. "It is only an electrical speaking-tube," said another. "It is a complicated form of speaking-trumpet," said a third. No British editor could at first conceive of any use for the telephone, except for divers and coal miners. The price, too, created a general outcry. Floods of toy telephones were being sold on the streets at a shilling apiece; and although the Government was charging sixty dollars a year for the use of its printing-telegraphs, people protested loudly against paying half as much for telephones. As late as 1882, Herbert Spencer writes: "The telephone is scarcely used at all in London, and is unknown in the other English cities." The first man of consequence to befriend the telephone was Lord Kelvin, then an untitled young scientist. He had seen the original telephones at the Centennial in Philadelphia, and was so fascinated with them that the impulsive Bell had thrust them into his hands as a gift. At the next meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Lord Kelvin exhibited these. He did more. He became the champion of the telephone. He staked his reputation upon it. He told the story of the tests made at the Centennial, and assured the sceptical scientists that he had not been deceived. "All this my own ears heard," he said, "spoken to me with unmistakable distinctness by this circular disc of iron."