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426 filed in a score of courts should satisfy all honest and unbiased minds that Bell's way is not only 'the only way' in which an electric-speaking telephone can transmit speech, but the absence of any earlier published description of a conception of a method similar in character to that first promulgated by Alexander Graham Bell proves that speech never was successfully transmitted electrically prior to its transmission by him.

After inventors, electricians and scientists had experimented with Bell's telephone for nearly two years, Dr. C. J. Blake told the eminent gentlemen who had gathered in London, in May, 1878, to hear his interesting lecture on the telephone:

When we consider the complex character of the waves resulting from the production of articulated sounds, and the loss in the excursions of the receiving disk (in the telephone), the wonder grows that this piece of metal can by its mechanical vibration reproduce so clearly and distinctly the delicate shades of quality of the human voice. That this should have been so perfectly accomplished is the result, not of inspiration, but of laborious research, and the instrument of which we reap the benefit to-day is the product, not merely of the genius, but of the patient and persistent labor of Alexander Graham Bell.

In other words, the achievement of the seemingly impossible in the invention of the electric-speaking telephone came not through utilizing the idea or suggestion of another, nor in improving a philosophical or experimental instrument advertised and sold for many years, prior to 1875, as a telephone; neither was it gained in a momentary inspiration, nor through automobilic rushes along the by-paths of superficial education.

This creation of a new art followed as the natural outcome of an original and magnificent conception that won the plaudits of scientists in all lands. The invention of the electric-speaking telephone (not the string telephone, nor the make-and-break musical telephone) followed in natural sequence. The combination of diaphragm and electromagnet was the outgrowth of conception and perfected theory, and formed a practical materialization of both. And conception, theory and apparatus were the honestly earned fruits not only of the inventor's 'intellectual capacity and precision of thought,' but of a thorough knowledge of the essential elements in every factor entering into the problem of speech transmission; a knowledge gained through long and patient research, through many experiments, through financial expenditures that involved personal deprivations and hardships and necessitated the strictest self-denial, and through discouraging criticisms and bitter ridicule on the folly of wasting time and money in inventing 'a scientific toy.'

The magnitude of the masterly conception of creating, controlling and varying the strength or flow of the electric current by the spoken words, and making that current the vehicle for the transmission of the form or quality as well as the pitch and strength of the spoken words, and of delivering at a distant point the same words, with the