Then he left home to become a teacher of elocution in various British schools, and by the time he was of age he had made several slight discoveries as to the nature of vowel-sounds.
Shortly afterwards, he met in London two distinguished men, Alexander J.
Ellis and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who did far more than they ever knew to forward Bell in the direction of the telephone.
Ellis was the president of the London Philological Society.

Also, he was the translator of the famous book on "The Sensations of Tone," written by Helmholtz, who, in the period from 1871 to 1894 made Berlin the world-centre for the study of the physical sciences.

So it happened that when Bell ran to Ellis as a young enthusiast and told his experiments, Ellis informed him that Helmholtz had done the same things several years before and done them more completely.

He brought Bell to his house and showed him what Helmholtz had done--how he had kept tuning-forks in vibration by the power of electro-magnets, and blended the tones of several tuning-forks together to produce the complex quality of the human voice.
Now, Helmholtz had not been trying to invent a telephone, nor any sort of message-carrier.

His aim was to point out the physical basis of music, and nothing more.