New York, 28th Mar 1881

Brown Ayres Esq.

University of Louisiana

New Orleans

Dear Sir

Referring to your favour of 16th inst I am sorry that the lamps should have broken. We will send you another set and will keep on sending them till they are all right as we want to find out the best way to pack them. Yours Truly,

T. A. Edison

Please state cost expressage & we will pay it here.

New York, 11th April 1881

Brown Ayres Esq

University of Louisiana New Orleans

Dear Sir, I have your favour of 6th inst. I have given instructions for half a dozen 16 candle lamps. They are more fragile and we want to see if they will break. Please note the condition in which they arrive.

Yours truly, Thos. A. Edison

Washington, D.C., Dec 23, 1878

1509 Rhode Island Ave.

John Hopkins University

Baltimore, Md.

My Dear Sir,

I must thank you very much for your kind note of Dec. 18th. I remember well how much I was indebted to you, on the reception of one of my lectures in New York, and shall be very glad to renew your acquaintance. While I would not go to the length of asking you to become my champion still, it will give me pleasure to see my articles preparing on the Bell side of the question, as all the publications heretofore, seem to have been on the other side.

I hope to be in Baltimore very soon & that I may have the opportunity of meeting you.—should you come to Washington, I shall be happy to have you call at the above address.

I am Yours very truly,

Alexander Graham Bell

May 31 1916

President Brown Ayres

University of Tennessee

Knoxville Tenn

Dear President Ayres:-

I have been very much touched by your kind note of May 18, and wish to thank you for it.

I recall very vividly that demonstration of the telephone in Chickering Hall,- which for me too was a memorable occasion. I wonder whether you were present when the insane man came up to me and claimed that he had confided to me while on a sick-bed the very invention which I was then claiming to be my own. Seeing at once that he was not quite in his right mind I listened carefully and had made this confidence. My father was at that time in Canada, and I knew out of reach of his annoyance, - so I felt safe in thus diverting his mind! The idea worked perfectly, and the man thanked me very courteously and quietly took his departure!

The incident has remained in my mind all these years, and your recollections of the occasion brings it back very clearly.

Thanking you for your kind comments and congratulations, I am, yours sincerely, Alexander Graham Bell.

18 May 1916

Professor Alexander Graham Bell,

Washington, D.C.

Dear Professor Bell:

I had the pleasure of being present on Tuesday Night, in Atlanta, on the occasion of the National Meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and of hearing your address to the meeting through the telephone. I need not say that it gave me great pleasure to hear your voice again, and when you expressed the statement that you were glad to be alive to be present at the wonderful demonstration made on that occasion, there arose in my mind, in a flash, the memory of the wonderful time, just thirty-nine years ago today, at which you demonstrated for the first time in New York City the practical operation of your great invention. It has been a source of life-long pleasure to me to remember that I had the privilege of assisting you on that occasion, and with a vivid memory of the marvel that your demonstration at that time seemed to me and to all those present, I am almost overcome with the thought of what transpired on Tuesday night and of what I have read of the recent achievements of the wireless telephone. Out of the fullness of my heart I am writing today, therefore, to offer my sincere appreciation and humble congratulations that you have been spared to see this child of your brain reach full and mature manhood. History will always write down the telephone as one of the greatest inventions of all time, and I can not conceive a greater pleasure than that which you must feel in the thought of having been its inventor.

In your busy life you may not have remembered the full circumstances of that day, May 18, 1877. My dear friend and teacher, Professor Alfred Marshall Mayer, of Stevens Institute at Hoboken, where I was a student, took me to call on you on account of the fact that I had been making a number of experiments in telephony over a period of years. I then had the pleasure of being introduced not only to you but to the lady who after became your wife. After a short visit you took Professor Mayer and myself to Chickering Hall where you had arranged your apparatus for the night’s demonstration. The whole picture is as vivid to me as though it were yesterday, and its memory has been one of the pleasantest of all my experience.

I hope that you are in excellent health and that you may be spared for many years to come to see even greater developments in the telephone.

With kind regards, I am

Very truly yours,

President.