As already said, the invention of the telephone stands chiefly to the credit of Professors Gray and Bell. It should be recorded that as early as 1837, the philosopher Page succeeded, by means of electro-magnetism, in transmitting _musical_ tones to a distance. It was not, however, until 1877 that Professer Bell, in a public lecture given at Salem, Mass., astonished his audience, and the whole country as well, by receiving and transmitting _vocal_ messages from Boston, twenty miles away. Incredulity had no more a place as it respected the feasibility of talking to persons at a distance. The experiments of Gray at Chicago, a few days later in the same month, were equally successful. Messages were distinctly delivered between that city and Milwaukee, a distance of eighty-five miles, nor could it be longer doubted that a new era in the means of communication had come.
The Bell telephone, with its many modifications and improvements, has come into rapid use. Within reasonable limits of distance, the new method of transmitting intelligence by direct vocal utterance, has taken the place of all slower and less convenient means of intercommunication. The appearance of the simple instrument has been one of the many harbingers of the oncoming better time, when the interchange of thought and sentiment between man and man, community and community, nation and nation, and race and race shall be the preliminary of universal peace in the world and of the good-fellowship of mankind.
Every such fact as the invention of the telephone, produces a complex and almost indescribable result in human society. This result has in it, in the first place, a change in the manners and method of the individual There is also a change in his sentiments. He whose work in life, whatever it may be, is accomplished in touch with the telephone will realize that he is in touch with the whole world. This intimacy reaches, first, his neighbors and friends. He seems to live henceforth in their presence, and in communication with them.
The isolation of the individual life is virtually obliterated by such an agency. Solitude disappears before it; for he whose ear is within hearing of his instrument, knows not at what moment any one of many thousands of people may speak to him. He knows not at what moment intelligence of an ever-varying kind may be spoken to him from his own community or out of the depths of distance. The mind is thus affiliated with an enlarged and ever-present society. These considerations do not relate to mere matters of convenience and quickness and advantage and safety, but to the larger question of the aggregate effect upon the individual.