uspicious-looking character, has rushed to the telephone and called
up the neighbors, so that now tramps notoriously avoid houses that
shelter the protecting wires. In remote sections, insanity, especially
among women, is frequently the result of loneliness, a calamity which
the telephone is doing much to mitigate.

In the United States today there is one telephone to every nine persons.
This achievement represents American invention, genius, industrial
organization, and business enterprise at their best. The story of
American business contains many chapters and episodes which Americans
would willingly forget. But the American Telephone and Telegraph Company
represents an industry which has made not a single "swollen fortune,"
whose largest stockholder is the wife of Alexander Graham Bell, the
inventor (a woman who, being totally deaf, has never talked over the
telephone); which has not corrupted legislatures or courts; which has
steadily decreased the prices of its products as business and profits
have increased; which has never issued watered stock or declared
fictitious dividends; and which has always manifested a high sense of
responsibility in its dealings with the public.

Two forces, American science and American business capacity, have
accomplished this result. As a mechanism, this American telephone system
is the product not of one but of many minds. What most strikes
the imagination is the story of Alexander Graham Bell, yet other
names--Carty, Scribner, Pupin--play a large part in the story.

The man who discovered that an electric current had the power
of transmitting sound over a copper wire knew very little about
electricity. Had he known more about this agency and less about
acoustics, Bell once said himself, he would never have invented the
telephone. His father and grandfather had been teachers of the deaf and
dumb and had made important researches in acoustics. Alexander Graham
Bell, born in Edinburgh in March, 1847, and educated there and in
London, followed the ancestral example. This experience gave Bell an
expert knowledge of phonetics that laid the foundation for his life
work. His invention, indeed, is clearly associated with his attempts
to make the deaf and dumb talk. He was driven to America by ill-health,
coming first to Canada, and in 1871 he settled in Boston, where he
accepted a position in Boston University to introduce his system of
teaching deaf-mutes. He opened a school of "Vocal Phy