It Was Morse

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.