value.

Even though he came late in the succession of
inventors, Bell had to run the gantlet of scoffing
and adversity. By the reception that the public
gave to his telephone, he learned to sympathize
with Howe, whose first sewing-machine was
smashed by a Boston mob; with McCormick,
whose first reaper was called "a cross between an
Astley chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a flying-
machine"; with Morse, whom ten Congresses regarded
as a nuisance; with Cyrus Field, whose
Atlantic Cable was denounced as "a mad freak
of stubborn ignorance"; and with Westinghouse,
who was called a fool for proposing "to stop a
railroad train with wind."

The very idea of talking at a piece of sheet-
iron was so new and extraordinary that the normal
mind repulsed it. Alike to the laborer and
the scientist, it was incomprehensible. It was
too freakish, too bizarre, to be used outside of
the laboratory and the museum. No one, literally,
could understand how it worked; and the
only man who offered a clear solution of the
mystery was a Boston mechanic, who maintained
that there was "a hole through the middle
of the wire."

People who talked for the first time into a