To an uninitiated onlooker, nothing could have been more ghastly or absurd.

How could any one have interpreted the gruesome joy of this young professor with the pale face and the black eyes, who stood earnestly singing, whispering, and shouting into a dead man's ear?
What sort of a wizard must he be, or ghoul, or madman?
And in Salem, too, the home of the witchcraft superstition! Certainly it would not have gone well with Bell had he lived two centuries earlier and been caught at such black magic.
What had this dead man's ear to do with the invention of the telephone?
Much.

Bell noticed how small and thin was the ear-drum, and yet how effectively it could send thrills and vibrations through heavy bones.
"If this tiny disc can vibrate a bone," he thought, "then an iron disc might vibrate an iron rod, or at least, an iron wire." In a flash the conception of a membrane telephone was pictured in his mind.

He saw in imagination two iron discs, or ear-drums, far apart and connected by an electrified wire, catching the vibrations of sound at one end, and reproducing them at the other.

At last he was on the right path, and had a theoretical knowledge of what a speaking telephone ought to be.