It was so new, so unexpected, that from Lord Kelvin down to the messenger boys in the telegraph offices, it was an incomprehensible surprise.

But after Bell had explained his invention in public lectures before more than twenty thousand people, after it had been on exhibition for months at the Philadelphia Centennial, after several hundred articles on it had appeared in newspapers and scientific magazines, and after actual sales of telephones had been made in various parts of the country, there began to appear such a succession of claimants and infringers that the forgetful public came to believe that the telephone, like most inventions, was the product of many minds.
Just as Morse, who was the sole inventor of the American telegraph in 1837, was confronted by sixty-two rivals in 1838, so Bell, who was the sole inventor in 1876, found himself two years later almost mobbed by the "Tichborne claimants" of the telephone.

The inventors who had been his competitors in the attempt to produce a musical telegraph, persuaded themselves that they had unconsciously done as much as he.

Any possessor of a telegraphic patent, who had used the common phrase "talking wire," had a chance to build up a plausible story of prior invention.

And others came forward with claims so vague and elusive that Bell would scarcely have been more surprised if the heirs of Goethe had demanded a share of the telephone royalties on the ground that Faust had spoken of "making a bridge through the moving air." This babel of inventors and pretenders amazed Bell and disconcerted his backers.