eight miles distant and sent scraps of songs and Shakespearean for three hours or longer, the FIRST SUSTAINED conversation by There was still a large percentage of people who denied that spoken quotations over the wire. and Watson to perform a series of sensational feats with the telephone. at public demonstrations, there were newspaper editors who referred while Bell was visiting at his father's house in Canada, he bought telephone was now a practical success. Further to promote this campaign of publicity, Hubbard encouraged Bell between the house and a telegraph office. Then he went to a village operator at the New York end. "Elegantly," responded the operator. "What telephone, each one taking careful notes of what he said and of what allowed to escape. of ten lectures was arranged for Bell, at a hundred dollars a lecture, Advertiser, October 19, 1876, and proved beyond question that the doubters, Bell and Watson planned a most severe test of the telephone. sceptically to "the supposititious Watson." So, to silence these hour, and in the presence of Sir William Thomson, Bell sent a tune A telegraph wire between New York and Boston was borrowed for half an Observatory, and attached a telephone to each end. Then they maintained, They borrowed the telegraph line between Boston and the Cambridge he heard. These notes were published in parallel columns in The Boston up all the stove-pipe wire in the town, and tacked it to a rail fence over the two-hundred-and-fifty-mile line. "Can you hear?" he asked the After this, one event crowded quickly on the heels of another. A series words could be transmitted by a wire. When Watson talked to Bell tune?" asked Bell. "Yankee Doodle," came the answer. Shortly afterwards,