It was one of these other twenty experimenters, Elisha Gray, who ultimately perfected this instrument.
Bell's researches have an interest only in that they taught him much about sound transmission and other kindred subjects and so paved the way for his great conception.

One day Hubbard and Sanders learned that Bell had abandoned his "harmonic telegraph" and was experimenting with an entirely new idea.

This was the possibility of transmitting the human voice over an electric wire.

While working in Sanders's basement, Bell had obtained from a doctor a dead man's ear, and it is said that while he was minutely studying and analyzing this gruesome object, the idea of the telephone first burst upon his mind.

For years Bell had been engaged in a task that seemed hopeless to most men--that of making deaf-mutes talk.