Shortly afterwards, while Bell was visiting at his father's house in Canada, he bought up all the stove-pipe wire in the town, and tacked it to a rail fence between the house and a telegraph office.

Then he went to a village eight miles distant and sent scraps of songs and Shakespearean quotations over the wire.
There was still a large percentage of people who denied that spoken words could be transmitted by a wire.

When Watson talked to Bell at public demonstrations, there were newspaper editors who referred sceptically to "the supposititious Watson." So, to silence these doubters, Bell and Watson planned a most severe test of the telephone.
They borrowed the telegraph line between Boston and the Cambridge Observatory, and attached a telephone to each end.

Then they maintained, for three hours or longer, the FIRST SUSTAINED conversation by telephone, each one taking careful notes of what he said and of what he heard.

These notes were published in parallel columns in The Boston Advertiser, October 19, 1876, and proved beyond question that the telephone was now a practical success.
After this, one event crowded quickly on the heels of another.