Two courses were open; either the business had to be kept down to suit the apparatus, or the apparatus had to be developed to keep pace with the business.

The telephone men, most of them, at least, chose development; and the brilliant inventions that afterwards made some of them famous were compelled by sheer necessity and desperation.
The first notable improvement upon Bell's invention was the making of the transmitter, in 1877, by Emile Berliner.

This, too, was a romance.
Berliner, as a poor German youth of nineteen, had landed in Castle Garden in 1870 to seek his fortune.

He got a job as "a sort of bottle-washer at six dollars a week," he says, in a chemical shop in New York.

At nights he studied science in the free classes of Cooper Union.
Then a druggist named Engel gave him a copy of Muller's book on physics, which was precisely the stimulus needed by his creative brain.