The post office and its story an interesting account of the activities of a great government department

CHAPTER XIII THE TELEPHONE If there was one thing more than another which must have seemed to our forefathers essential to conversation it was the presence of two or more individuals within what we call speaking distance of one another. Even in the cases where men have believed themselves to be in communication with the unseen world, the spirit with whom they held intercourse has been with them or near them. The one thing of which they could never have dreamed was, that in London you could talk rationally to a friend in Paris on the price of Consols or the state of the weather. Yet the idea of the telephone is older than many of us think. Robert Hooke in 1667 described how by the aid of a tightly drawn wire bent in many angles, he propagated sound to a very considerable distance. Wheatstone in 1821 actually invented an instrument which he called a telephone, and in a criticism of this a journal made the remarkable prophecy: “And if music be capable of being thus conducted, perhaps words of speech may be susceptible of the same means of propagation.” A still more significant prophecy was made by Charles Bousseul, a Frenchman, who said: “It is certain that in a more or less distant future speech will be transmitted by electricity. I have made experiments in this direction: they are delicate, and demand time and patience, but the approximations obtained promise a favourable result.” Experiments went on, the musical telephone was advanced considerably in effectiveness, but it was not until 1876, when Graham Bell patented his invention in the United States, that the speaking telephone was actually born.