Even in the 19th Century, Japanese Sounded Like the Future
I'm working through John Brooks' "Telephone: The First Hundred Years," pulling out information about the early structure of the Bell system for my Better Bell Chart, and thought this was great.
Page 52, describing some of the first public demonstrations of Bell and Watson's telephone prototypes:
The demonstration that seems most to have astonished the people of Boston occurred in January 1877, when a Japanese student of Bell's and two of his countrymen who were Harvard students tried Bell's equipment at Exeter Place and found that it worked. Yankee Boston was thereby convinced that the telephone was no trick—it could speak Japanese.
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Bell wasn't arrested for improvised electronics?!?
amazing.