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 simple visual form, the Bells, father and son, were much concerned to improve the state of the deaf. Visible speech seemed to promise immediate means of release for the deaf from their prison. Their struggle to perfect visible speech for the deaf led the Bells to a study of the new electrical devices that yielded the telephone. In much the same way, the Braille system of dots-for-letters had begun as a means of reading military messages in darkness, then was transferred to music, and finally to reading for the blind. Letters had been codified as dots for the fingers long before the Morse Code was developed for telegraph use. And it is relevant to note how electric technology, in like manner, had converged on the world of speech and language, from the beginning of electricity. That which had been the first great extension of our central nervous system-the mass media of the spoken word-was soon wedded to the second great extension of the central nervous system-electric technology. The New York Daily Graphic for March 15,1877, portrayed on its front page "The Terrors of the Telephone-The Orator of the Future." A disheveled Svengali stands before a microphone haranguing in a studio. The same mike is shown in London, San