Alexander Graham Bell, experimenting in the same field of long-distance communication by the aid of electricity, was more fortunate in securing early acknowledgment of the merits of his telephone, a public demonstration of which was given at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876. Connected with this invention a most interesting story is told. Bell, it is said, was experimenting with a device for multiplex telegraphy, when the accidental snapping of a wire sent a sound vibrating through another wire which had attached to it at each end a thin sheet-iron disk a few inches in circumference. At once Bell asked himself if the sound could be repeated. Experiment showed that it could, and the query then suggested itself to him, Could vocal sounds be thus transmitted? Forthwith he set himself to the task that resulted, after many failures, in the creation of the telephone. But even in the case of this marvelous instrument it was for a long time impossible to obtain the necessary financial support. When, in 1877, Bell took the telephone to England, he could find no purchaser for half the European rights at $10,000, and in this country a personal friend declined to advance $2,500 for a half interest. Today, so it is stated, there are in use in the United States alone approximately seven and a half million telephones. [Illustration: ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL’S SUBURBAN RESIDENCE AT WASHINGTON, D. C.] EDISON, THE MASTER INVENTOR [Illustration: THE EDISON HOUSE AT MILAN, OHIO _Here Thomas A. Edison was born on February 11, 1847._] Never has there been an American inventor who has contributed more abundantly than Thomas Alva Edison to the republic’s industrial expansion, nor one who has achieved greatness under a heavier handicap of early disadvantages. Born (1847) of a poor family in an obscure Ohio canal village, Edison began his career at the age of twelve in the occupation of a railway newsboy. [Illustration: THE FIRST PHONOGRAPH _It was with this machine that Edison in 1877 originally demonstrated the fact that sound could be recorded and reproduced._] It was as a telegrapher, which he became at eighteen, that his inventive genius first displayed itself. One after another various devices for improving telegraphic service flowed from his fertile mind, until, after his astonishing success in inventing a duplex and quadruplex telegraph, he was able to command the support of a group of New York capitalists in carrying through a long series of experiments that finally resulted in the invention of the now familiar Edison electric light.