"It is an evidence that we may some day have a musical telegraph, which will send as many messages simultaneously over one wire as there are notes on that piano." Later, Bell ventured to confide to Hubbard his wild dream of sending speech over an electric wire, but Hubbard laughed him to scorn.

"Now you are talking nonsense," he said.

"Such a thing never could be more than a scientific toy.

You had better throw that idea out of your mind and go ahead with your musical telegraph, which if it is successful will make you a millionaire." But the longer Bell toiled at his musical telegraph, the more he dreamed of replacing the telegraph and its cumbrous sign-language by a new machine that would carry, not dots and dashes, but the human voice.
"If I can make a deaf-mute talk," he said, "I can make iron talk." For months he wavered between the two ideas.

He had no more than the most hazy conception of what this voice-carrying machine would be like.
At first he conceived of having a harp at one end of the wire, and a speaking-trumpet at the other, so that the tones of the voice would be reproduced by the strings of the harp.
Then, in the early Summer of 1874, while he was puzzling over this harp apparatus, the dim outline of a new path suddenly glinted in front of him.