"What startles and frightens the backward European in the United States," said Mr.Arnold Bennett, "is the efficiency and fearful universality of the telephone.

To me it was the proudest achievement and the most poetical achievement of the American people." Lord Northcliffe's experience had a certain dramatic justice which probably even he did not appreciate.

He is the proprietor of the London Times, a newspaper which, when the telephone was first introduced, denounced it as the "latest American humbug" and declared that it "was far inferior to the well-established system of speaking tubes." The London Times delivered this solemn judgment in 1877.

A year before, at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, Don Pedro, Emperor of Brazil, picked up, almost accidentally, a queer cone-shaped instrument and put it to his ear, "My God! It talks!" was his exclamation; an incident which, when widely published in the press, first informed the American people that another of the greatest inventions of all times had had its birth on their own soil.

Yet the initial judgment of the American people did not differ essentially from the opinion which had been more coarsely expressed by the leading English newspaper.