42 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS have blocked the plan for leasing them that has resulted in the present system of the nnity and universality of the telephone service.'* Another writer, speaking of the poverty of those early years, says: ^^ Month after month the little Bell Company lived from hand to month. No salaries were paid in folL Of- ten for weeks they were not paid at alL In Watson's note book there are such entries as, ^Lent Bell fifty cents, Lent Hubbard twenty cents. ' More than once Hubbard would have gone hungry had not Devonshire, the only clerk, shared with him the contents of his dinner pail." (Casson, History of the Telephone.) In the beginning the telephone was financed by the same art that produced it, the art of superior speaking. The first lec- tures of Mr. Bell were delivered without charge before the Essex Institute in Salem, Massachusetts. The lectures were received with much enthusiasm, and many engagements were made for lectures and demonstrations in other cities. Henry W. Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other men of like distinction, published an open letter inviting Bell to lecture in Boston. The people came by hundreds and thousands to hear and see. By his success in describing and illustrating the tel- ephone the professor of Vocal Physiology established sufficient control over his invention so that in its world-wide growth and extension it should forever bear his name. While the machine is known by the name of the chief inven- tor, the variety of instruments and new improvements is prac- tically numberless. It would require more than a page of this book to give the list of inventors, without specifying their par- ticular devices. The records of the United States patent office show **that there have been issued in Class No. 179, Telephony, to date (August, 1914) approximately sixty hundred and nine- ty-six (6,096) Patents. '* The intellectual energy displayed in securing over six thousand patents in one field of invention is amazing. We must not infer that this means so many in- ventors. Many of these patents belong to particular men, as for example over six hundred on the switch-board belong to Mr. Charles E. Scribner. On the other hand, thousands have
