As well might you propose to put a telescope into a steel-mill or to hitch a balloon to a shoe-factory." Poor Bell, instead of being applauded, was pelted with a hailstorm of ridicule.

He was an "impostor," a "ventriloquist," a "crank who says he can talk through a wire." The London Times alluded pompously to the telephone as the latest American humbug, and gave many profound reasons why speech could not be sent over a wire, because of the intermittent nature of the electric current.

Almost all electricians--the men who were supposed to know--pronounced the telephone an impossible thing; and those who did not openly declare it to be a hoax, believed that Bell had stumbled upon some freakish use of electricity, which could never be of any practical value.
Even though he came late in the succession of inventors, Bell had to run the gantlet of scoffing and adversity.

By the reception that the public gave to his telephone, he learned to sympathize with Howe, whose first sewing-machine was smashed by a Boston mob; with McCormick, whose first reaper was called "a cross between an Astley chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a flying-machine"; with Morse, whom ten Congresses regarded as a nuisance; with Cyrus Field, whose Atlantic Cable was denounced as "a mad freak of stubborn ignorance"; and with Westinghouse, who was called a fool for proposing "to stop a railroad train with wind." The very idea of talking at a piece of sheet-iron was so new and extraordinary that the normal mind repulsed it.

Alike to the laborer and the scientist, it was incomprehensible.