A series of ten lectures was arranged for Bell, at a hundred dollars a lecture, which was the first money payment he had received for his invention.

His opening night was in Salem, before an audience of five hundred people, and with Mrs.Sand-ers, the motherly old lady who had sheltered Bell in the days of his experiment, sitting proudly in one of the front seats.
A pole was set up at the front of the hall, supporting the end of a telegraph wire that ran from Salem to Boston.

And Watson, who became the first public talker by telephone, sent messages from Boston to various members of the audience.

An account of this lecture was sent by telephone to The Boston Globe, which announced the next morning-- "This special despatch of the Globe has been transmitted by telephone in the presence of twenty people, who have thus been witnesses to a feat never before attempted--the sending of news over the space of sixteen miles by the human voice." This Globe despatch awoke the newspaper editors with an unexpected jolt.
For the first time they began to notice that there was a new word in the language, and a new idea in the scientific world.

No newspaper had made any mention whatever of the telephone for seventy-five days after Bell received his patent.