experimental period to an end. From this time onwards the telephone
had strong friends in the financial world. It was being attacked by
the Western Union and by rival inventors who were jealous of Bell's
achievement. It was being half-starved by cheap rates and crippled by
clumsy apparatus. It was being abused and grumbled at by an impatient
public. But the art of making and marketing it had at last been built
up into a commercial enterprise. It was now a business, fighting for its
life.

CHAPTER III. THE HOLDING OF THE BUSINESS

For seventeen months no one disputed Bell's claim to be the original
inventor of the telephone. All the honor, such as it was, had been given
to him freely, and no one came forward to say that it was not rightfully
his. No one, so far as we know, had any strong desire to do so. No one
conceived that the telephone would ever be any more than a whimsical
oddity of science. It was so new, so unexpected, that from Lord
Kelvin down to the messenger boys in the telegraph offices, it was an
incomprehensible surprise. But after Bell had explained his invention
in public lectures before more than twenty thousand people, after it
had been on exhibition for months at the Philadelphia Centennial, after
several hundred articles on it had appeared in newspapers and scientific
magazines, and after actual sales of telephones had been made in
various parts of the country, there began to appear such a succession of
claimants and infringers that the forgetful public came to believe that
the telephone, like most inventions, was the product of many minds.

Just as Morse, who was the sole inventor of the American telegraph in
1837, was confronted by sixty-two rivals in 1838, so Bell, who was the
sole inventor in 1876, found himself two years later almost mobbed by
the "Tichborne claimants" of the telephone. The inventors who had been
his competitors in the attempt to produce a musical telegraph, persuaded
themselves that they had unconsciously done as much as he. Any possessor
of a telegraphic patent, who had used the common phrase "talking wire,"
had a chance to build up a plausible story of prior invention. And
others came forward with claims so vague and elusive that Bell would
scarcely have been more surprised if the heirs of Goethe had demanded a
share of the telephone royalties on the ground that Faust had spoken of
"making a bridge through the moving air."

This babel of inventors and pretenders amaz