a caveat for
his telephone.

On February 1, 1877, Bell went to Salem, Massachusetts, and gave his first
public exhibition and lecture. It aroused some curiosity, but drew no
financial backing. On May 10 he lectured before the Boston Academy, and
there, apparently, the results were little more encouraging than they had
been at Salem.

Thought Telephone a Toy.

The general opinion expressed was that the telephone was a remarkably
clever toy, but that it was nothing more. Investors took this view of it,
and Bell, who had been reduced to poverty by the expenses of his
experiments, went from one financier to another offering stock in the
company he had formed, but everywhere he met with rebuffs. Financiers did
not care to have anything to do with a machine designed to accomplish the
impossible feat of making audible the voice of a person many miles away.

The reception he met with did not in the least shake Bell's faith in his
work, but he was sorely in need of money. He resolved on a desperate move,
and he went to Chauncey M. Depew and offered him a one-sixth interest in
the company if he would loan ten thousand dollars to put the company on
its feet. Depew took a week to consider the proposition. At the end of the
week he wrote back that the incident might be considered closed. The
telephone was a clever idea, but it was utterly lacking in commercial
possibilities, and ten thousand dollars was far too big a sum to risk in
marketing an instrument that at best could never be more than a
plaything.

Thus Depew let slip an opportunity to acquire for ten thousand dollars an
interest that to-day could not be bought for less than twenty-five
millions.

Bell was being hard pushed, and he determined to make a last offer. Don
Cameron, of Pennsylvania, was then one of the leading figures in the
United States Senate, and his influence throughout the country was very
great. Bell went to him and offered him, for nothing, one-half interest in
the invention if he would endeavor to have it introduced to the public.

Cameron would not even consider the proposition, and gave orders "that
Bell and his fool talking-machine be thrown out" if he again attempted to
get an interview.

While Bell was ineffectually struggling in this direction, a few men in
Boston, who had been interested by the exhibition before the Boston
Academy, determined to give the telephone a thorough test. A line three
miles long was built from Boston to Somerv