ful behavior. Need I add that
they were contemptuously wondered at by this same British workman as
a parcel of outlandish adult boys who sweated themselves for their
employer's benefit instead of looking after their own interest? They
adored Mr. Edison as the greatest man of all time in every possible
department of science, art, and philosophy, and execrated Mr. Graham
Bell, the inventor of the rival telephone, as his Satanic adversary;
but each of them had (or intended to have) on the brink of completion
an improvement on the telephone, usually a new transmitter. They were
free-souled creatures, excellent company, sensitive, cheerful, and
profane; liars, braggarts, and hustlers, with an air of making slow old
England hum, which never left them even when, as often happened, they
were wrestling with difficulties of their own making, or struggling in
no-thoroughfares, from which they had to be retrieved like stray sheep
by Englishmen without imagination enough to go wrong."

Mr. Samuel Insull, who afterward became private secretary to Mr. Edison,
and a leader in the development of American electrical manufacturing
and the central-station art, was also in close touch with the London
situation thus depicted, being at the time private secretary to Colonel
Gouraud, and acting for the first half hour as the amateur telephone
operator in the first experimental exchange erected in Europe. He
took notes of an early meeting where the affairs of the company were
discussed by leading men like Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury) and the
Right Hon. E. P. Bouverie (then a cabinet minister), none of whom
could see in the telephone much more than an auxiliary for getting
out promptly in the next morning's papers the midnight debates in
Parliament. "I remember another incident," says Mr. Insull. "It was at
some celebration of one of the Royal Societies at the Burlington House,
Piccadilly. We had a telephone line running across the roofs to the
basement of the building. I think it was to Tyndall's laboratory in
Burlington Street. As the ladies and gentlemen came through, they
naturally wanted to look at the great curiosity, the loud-speaking
telephone: in fact, any telephone was a curiosity then. Mr. and Mrs.
Gladstone came through. I was handling the telephone at the Burlington
House end. Mrs. Gladstone asked the man over the telephone whether he
knew if a man or woman was speaking; and the reply came in quite loud
tones that it was a man!"