"It is a complicated form of speaking-trumpet," said a third.

No British editor could at first conceive of any use for the telephone, except for divers and coal miners.

The price, too, created a general outcry.

Floods of toy telephones were being sold on the streets at a shilling apiece; and although the Government was charging sixty dollars a year for the use of its printing-telegraphs, people protested loudly against paying half as much for telephones.

As late as 1882, Herbert Spencer writes: "The telephone is scarcely used at all in London, and is unknown in the other English cities." The first man of consequence to befriend the telephone was Lord Kelvin, then an untitled young scientist.