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.