A Wonderful Story.

Progress, Volume V, Issue 12, 1 October 1910, Page 13

A Wonderful Story.

The arrival in New Zealand of Graham Bell, of telephone memory, was an event duly celebrated by the interviewer, who is übiquitous. Dr. Bell was disappointing decidedly. He said things that hurt. (1) He had to all appearance got nothing by his invention, or nothing comparatively, the business side having soon got beyond him. (2) He had apparently lost all interest in the matter. (3) He gave proof of the same by the way in which he half shut his eyes to everything telephonic as he passed on his way round the world. For instance he told one interviewer that the Melbourne people are so far behind that they have not yet got the metallic circuit. But the fact is that they have arranged for the metallic circuit and it is actually being put in. He also declared that Invercargill possesses the only up-to-date system in the Dominion, and he has not seen any others. The doctor evidently let this child of his brain go its own way long ago.

The same appears to have been the case with his other brain child, aviation. He was the first scientific man of eminence to recognise the success of Langley's aerodrome and to point out what it meant to the world. In fact, when the first flight of Langley's model on the celebrated Potomac river, or rather just above its stream, was announced the doctor, who was present and saw the half mile or so done by the model, declared emphatically that the problem of aviation was solved. It remained, he said, only for the practical men to build airships on the plan of the successful model. Since then the doctor has been busy building aeroplanes for himself, and with others, and very strange things they have done. But no one seems to have known anything of this phase of the great inventor's life. He leaves the Dominion, therefore, with his light hidden under the same bushel under which it lay, so far as this country is concerned, when he arrived.

It is passing strange, perhaps a type of the unaceountability of genius, that this great scientific achiever who began life by managing a school for deaf-mutes, should now, after his vast scientific successes, be going about the world with the idea that there is only one thing in it, namely, the care of deaf-mutes. That is, perhaps, not to be surprised at, for the telephone was invented quite accidentally during experiments conducted for the purpose of making improvements in the system of teaching deaf-mutes.

We have told the story of the telephone and its discovery in these columns long ago, and our description was accompanied by diagrams of the first and the latest telephones. It is of rare interest, however, to have the doctor's own short sketch of his life and achievement, for there are lights in it not previously recorded for the benefit of average mankind. We take it from an interview in a paper published on the other side Of the Tasman Sea.

"I was a Scotchman by birth, but.. I am a good Yankee now," said Dr. Bell to a "Sydney Morning Herald" representative recently. "I first came to America from Canada on the invitation of the Boston Board of Education. They invited me to make the experiment in their city school for deaf mutes to see whether my father's method of symbolising the action of speech could be usefully employed in teaching the deaf mutes there. My father, you see, was an inventor before me.