Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,4

only hope lay in the cluster of exhausted, sweat-soaked judges that wearily made its way through the Main Exhibition Building one morning, examining a seemingly endless array of inventions. For days, Bell had worked feverishly on his equipment, desperately trying to repair the damage that had been done on the journey from Boston. There was little he could do, however, to make it seem exciting. In comparison to the colossal engines and locomotives in Machinery Hall and the rows of whirring contraptions in the electrical aisles, his small, battered machines seemed hopelessly unimpressive and inconsequential.

Fearing that he would be forgotten altogether if he stayed upstairs, Bell made the long journey down to where the judges were gathered in the central hall. As the sun beat down mercilessly through the glass roof, the judges, sweltering in their stiff, formal suits, suddenly decided that they’d had enough. Unanimously, they agreed to end the day early. They would see only one more exhibit.

Standing near enough to overhear their conversation, Bell realized that he had lost his only chance. All the time, expense, and effort he had poured into the fair, all the frustration and misery, were for nothing. Even if the judges returned the following day, they would never see his invention. By then, he would be back in Boston.

As Bell stood in silence, watching the judges turn their backs to him and begin to walk away, he suddenly heard a familiar voice. “How do you do, Mr. Bell?” Surprised, he turned to find Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil, his full, white beard neatly trimmed, his deep-set eyes bright with curiosity, looking directly at him. A passionate promoter of the sciences, Dom Pedro had asked to accompany the judges on their rounds that morning, perfectly happy to be in the tropical-like heat that reminded him of home. When he saw Bell standing in the crowd of some fifty judges and a handful of hovering inventors, he immediately recognized him as the talented teacher of the deaf whom he had met in Boston.

Eager as they were to leave, the judges could not go anywhere without Dom Pedro, who was not only the leader of a large country but, with his irrepressible energy and enthusiasm, had become the darling of the centennial fair. With the judges waiting anxiously nearby, the emperor struck up a leisurely conversation with the young teacher. When Bell told him that he had come to the fair hoping to show an invention, but would have to leave early in the morning, Dom Pedro reacted with characteristic vigor. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “Then we must have a look at it now.” Taking Bell’s arm in his own, he strode toward the stairs, a long line of judges shuffling resignedly behind.

After the group had crossed the vast hall and climbed to the remote gallery, Bell led them to his table, around which he had optimistically arranged a few chairs. Among the various instruments assembled was something that Bell called an “iron box receiver,” a vertical metal cylinder that had a thin diaphragm in the center and had been secured to a square block of wood. Wires leading from the receiver had been strung along the gallery railing, disappearing into a small room about a hundred yards away. As the judges gathered around him, Bell explained his invention, the telephone. It was, he cautioned, but an “embryo of an idea.” However, with it, he had achieved something extraordinary—the electrical transmission of the human voice.

With his audience’s full attention now, Bell crossed the gallery to the room where the wires led. Leaning into a transmitter he had set up earlier in the day, he slowly began to recite Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. For Bell, it was a natural choice. He had known the speech by heart since he was fourteen, when his grandfather had taught it to him in Scotland. As he spoke, Shakespeare’s words now traveled by wire, traversing the gallery to where the judges waited in suspense.

Sitting at the table, with the iron box receiver pressed tightly to his ear, Dom Pedro heard an extraordinary sound—Bell’s voice, heart-wrenchingly clear. “To be, or not to be,” he said. Leaping from his chair, the emperor shouted, “I hear! I hear!” As the knot of judges watched in amazement, he turned toward the room at the far end of the gallery and raced off, “at a very un-emperor-like-gait.” Moments later, Bell, who was still reciting the soliloquy, with no understanding of the effect it had had, suddenly