It was one of the most extraordinary incidents in the whole history of What had this dead man's ear to do with the invention of the telephone? earnestly singing, whispering, and shouting into a dead man's ear? What effectively it could send thrills and vibrations through heavy bones. of this young professor with the pale face and the black eyes, who stood Much. Bell noticed how small and thin was the ear-drum, and yet how home of the witchcraft superstition! Certainly it would not have gone well with Bell had he lived two centuries earlier and been caught at ghastly or absurd. How could any one have interpreted the gruesome joy sort of a wizard must he be, or ghoul, or madman? And in Salem, too, the Thus, when Bell spoke loudly into the ear, the vibrations of the drum imagination two iron discs, or ear-drums, far apart and connected by made tiny markings upon the glass. man's head, together with the ear-drum and the associated bones. Bell experiments to a Boston friend, Dr. Clarence J. Blake, and he, being a such black magic. "If this tiny disc can vibrate a bone," he thought, "then an iron disc took this fragment of a skull and arranged it so that a straw touched might vibrate an iron rod, or at least, an iron wire." In a flash the an electrified wire, catching the vibrations of sound at one end, and the ear-drum at one end and a piece of moving smoked glass at the other. Such an idea never had, and probably never could have, occurred to Bell; the telephone. To an uninitiated onlooker, nothing could have been more reproducing them at the other. At last he was on the right path, and had but he accepted it with eagerness. Dr. Blake cut an ear from a dead conception of a membrane telephone was pictured in his mind. He saw in surgeon and an aurist, naturally said, "Why don't you use a REAL EAR?"