40 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS
- ^ Ten years ago there were sent by the telephone in the Unit-
ed States forty-one times more messages than were sent by telegraphy although the latter method of communication was forty years older than the former.'** At the present time such a comparison is impossible. Messages by telegraph can be computed but not those by telephone. One might as well try to count the words spoken in an hour by the entire human race. The greatness of the success of the invention cannot be shown without some citations from statistics, although the fig- ures are so large as to be incomprehensible. The annual re- port of the Bell System for 1913 states the value of the plant December 31, 1913, as $797,159,487, an increase since 1907 of $294,171,587. The gross earnings for 1913 were $215,572,822 and the total expenses, $156,883,299. Let no one imagine that this transition from the toil of a modest and obscure teacher to the mastery of a colossal util- ity came with a sudden and easy ascension. The story of Pro- fessor Bell's discovery and development of the telephone con- tains the elements of romance — danger, courage, and persist- ency, terminating in exultant victory. Perhaps he never en- countered danger in the sense of bodily harm, but he did incur the peril of missing the mark in his invention, and no small risk of his being deprived of his proper meed of honor for its success. Many students in electricity had devised instruments for conveying sounds and musical notes by electric currents. Some had even transmitted the voice in certain irregular and incoherent forms. But Professor Bell persisted beyond all these elementary stages and produced a mechanism for trans- mitting speech in a definite, practicable, and reliable manner. His accuracy in the use of language gave him the sure ** cinch" on his patent. The chief sentence in his patent was : * ^ The method of and apparatus for transmitting sounds telegraphi- cally, as herein described, by causing electric undulations, sim- ilar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sounds substantially as set forth. ' ' In subse- B Thirtieth Anniversary, Scrtbner's 40:371.
