"If I can make a deaf-mute talk, I can make iron talk," he declared.

"If I could make a current of electricity vary in intensity as the air varies in density," he said at another time, "I could transmit sound telegraphically." Many others, of course, had dreamed of inventing such an instrument.

The story of the telephone concerns many men who preceded Bell, one of whom, Philip Reis, produced, in 1861, a mechanism that could send a few discordant sounds, though not the human voice, over an electric wire.

Reis seemed to have based his work upon an article published in "The American Journal of Science" by Dr.C.G.

Page, of Salem, Mass., in 1837, in which he called attention to the sound given out by an electric magnet when the circuit is opened or closed.
The work of these experimenters involves too many technicalities for discussion in this place.