All About Inventions and Discoveries
The Romance of modern scientific and mechanical Achievements

152 All About Inventions due reward of perseverance and patience. Watson receiver glued to ear, suddenly started. Sharply and clearly rang out the words spoken from the upper room : “ Mr. Watson, come here, please ; I want you.” The listener dropped the receiver, paused for a second, and then, rushing from the room, darted up the stairs, two at a time, to burst into Mr. Bell’s room, shouting, “ I heard you : I could hear what you said! ” The words Watson had heard comprised the first sentence that had ever been transmitted over a telephone wire by the human voice. Two years later the laboratory in the attic was broken up and dis- mantled. Watson took down the historic short length of wire over which conversation by articulate speech had first been maintained, coiled it up, and wrap- ping it carefully in a protective covering, inscribed upon it what it was. For thirty years it remained in his safe, but in 1913 he handed it over to the chief engineer of the American Telegraph and Telephone Company for preservation in its museum. Subse- quently the wire was brought into use upon another historic occasion, which is described later. But up to this point Bell had never tested his instrument outside his laboratory. On October 9, 1876, the inventor felt that he had advanced it to a sufficiently perfect stage to warrant a test on a real live wire. Accordingly, he and Watson sallied out, and the instruments were connected up to a telegraph line two miles in length extending from Boston to Cambridge. Talking was attempted in one direction only, and Watson cherishes vivid memories of that