It is strange that one should see another at a distance; but seeing and hearing at distances are natural functions of living creatures.  The sunlight is for one sense and the sound-wave is for the other.  The sound-wave travels on the atmosphere, and preserves its integrity.  A given sound is produced, and the same sound is heard by some ear at a distance.  All the people of the world are telephoning to one another; for oral speech leaping from the vocal organs of one human being to the ear of another is always telephonic.  It is only when this phenomenon of speech at a distance is taken from the soft wings of the air, confined to a wire, and made to fly along the slender thread and deliver itself afar in a manner to which the world has hitherto been a stranger that the thing done and the apparatus by which it is done seem miraculous.  Indeed it is a miracle; for miraculum signifies wonderful.

The history of the invention of the telephone is easily apprehended.  The scientific principles on which it depends may be understood without difficulty.  There is, however, about the instrument and its action something that is well nigh unbelievable.  It is essentially a thing contrary to universal experience, if not positively inconceivable, that the slight phenomenon of the human voice should be, so to speak, picked up by a physical contrivance, carried a thousand miles through a thread of wire not a quarter of an inch in diameter, and delivered in its integrity to the sense of another waiting to receive it!  At all events, the history of the telephone, belonging so distinctly to our own age, will stand as a reminder to after times of the great stride which the human race made in inventive skill and scientific progress in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The telephone, like many similar instruments, was the work of several ingenious minds directed at nearly the same time to the same problem.  The solution, however, must be accredited first of all to Elisha P. Gray, of Chicago, and Alexander Graham Bell, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  It should be mentioned, however, that Amos E. Dolbear, of Tufts College, Massachusetts, and Thomas A. Edison, of Menlo Park, New Jersey, likewise succeeded in solving the difficulty in the way of telephonic communication, and in answering practically several of the minor questions that hindered at first the complete success of the invention.  The telephone is an instrument for the reproduction of sounds, particularly the sounds of the human voice, by the agency of electrical conduction at long distances from the origin of the vocal disturbance.  Or it may be defined as an instrument for the transmission of the sounds referred to by the agencies described.  Indeed it were hard to say whether in a telephonic message we receive a reproduced sound or a transmitted sound.  On the whole, it is more proper to speak of a reproduction of the original sound by transmission of the waves in which that sound is first written.