department was going to clean out the telephone lines: “We 
recommend that you cover your telephone with a sheet or 
pillow case to prevent your room from being filled with dirt and 
grease.” The jokester would then make the rounds of his friends 
in question to enjoy their preparations and their momentary 
expectation of a hiss and roar that was sure to come when the 
lines were blown out. The joke now serves to recall that not 
long ago the phone was a new contraption, used more for 
entertainment than for business.

     The invention of the telephone was an incident in the 
larger effort of the past century to render speech visible. 
Melville Bell, the father of Alexander Graham Bell, spent his life 
devising a universal alphabet that he published in 1867 under 
the title Visible Speech . Besides the aim to make all the 
languages of the world immediately present to each other in a