Volume 15, Number 10 · December 3, 1970
It Was Morse
By Alan J. Arikian
In response to The Nature of the Miracle
(October 22, 1970)
To the Editors:
Clarence Brown's introduction to the extract from Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoirs [NYR, October 22] was marred by a glaring and altogether incredible misquotation. As any schoolboy could have told him, the question attributed to Alexander Graham Bell was asked, in fact, by Samuel Morse over the Baltimore-Washington telegraph line in 1844. Bell, your readers will recall, had carelessly spilled some acid on himself and requested his assistant's presence in the room from which he was speaking.
Alan J. Arikian
Fort Dix, N.J.