her, several American enthusiasts rushed posthaste to
Europe, with dreams of eager nations clamoring for telephone systems,
and one after another they failed. Frederick A. Gower was the first
of these. He was an adventurous chevalier of business who gave up an
agent's contract in return for a right to become a roving propagandist.
Later he met a prima donna, fell in love with and married her, forsook
telephony for ballooning, and lost his life in attempting to fly across
the English Channel.

Next went William H. Reynolds, of Providence, who had bought five-eights
of the British patent for five thousand dollars, and half the right
to Russia, Spain, Portugal, and Italy for two thousand, five hundred
dollars. How he was received may be seen from a letter of his which
has been preserved. "I have been working in London for four months," he
writes; "I have been to the Bank of England and elsewhere; and I have
not found one man who will put one shilling into the telephone."

Bell himself hurried to England and Scotland on his wedding tour in
1878, with great expectations of having his invention appreciated in his
native land. But from a business point of view, his mission was a total
failure. He received dinners a-plenty, but no contracts; and came back
to the United States an impoverished and disheartened man. Then the
optimistic Gardiner G. Hubbard, Bell's father-in-law, threw himself
against the European inertia and organized the International and
Oriental Telephone Companies, which came to nothing of any importance.
In the same year even Enos M. Barton, the sagacious founder of the
Western Electric, went to France and England to establish an export
trade in telephones, and failed.

These able men found their plans thwarted by the indifference of the
public, and often by open hostility. "The telephone is little better
than a toy," said the Saturday Review; "it amazes ignorant people for a
moment, but it is inferior to the well-established system of air-tubes."
"What will become of the privacy of life?" asked another London editor.
"What will become of the sanctity of the domestic hearth?" Writers
vied with each other in inventing methods of pooh-poohing Bell and
his invention. "It is ridiculously simple," said one. "It is only an
electrical speaking-tube," said another. "It is a complicated form
of speaking-trumpet," said a third. No British editor could at first
conceive of any use for the telephone, except for divers a