The invention for making nature give an intelligent response may well
be regarded with wondering interest. The odd, we might say humorous,
feature of the invention is that nature, being as it were cornered and
compelled to respond, will answer nothing except _to repeat what is
said in her ear!_ The phonograph may be defined as a mechanical
parrot. Unlike the living bird, however, it never makes answers
malapropos. It never deviates from the original text. The distrust
which has been justly cherished against the talking bird on account of
his originality can never be reasonably directed against the
phonograph!
The possibility of writing sound has been recognized for a century
past. Since the discovery of the vibratory character of sound, the
physicist has seen the feasibility of recording the vibration. Nature
herself has given many hints along this line of experimentation. Long
ago it was seen that the writing sand sprinkled on the sounding board
of the piano would under the influence of a chord struck from the keys
arrange itself in geometrical figures. It was also seen that a discord
sounded from the key-board would break the figures into chaos and
confusion. Were not these phenomena sufficient to suggest that sound
might be written in intelligible characters?
The mind, however, moves slowly from the old to the new. The former
concept of physical facts and the laws which govern them is not
readily given up. A great discovery in physical science seems to
disturb the foundations of nature. It does not really do so; the
disturbance is not in nature, but in the mind. No endeavor of man, no
advance of his from some old bivouac to a new camping-ground, affects
in the least the order of the world. The change, we repeat, is in the
man, and in the race to which he belongs.
Long and tedious has been the process of getting thought into a
recorded form. The first method of expressing thought was oral. Long
before any other method of holding ideas and delivering them to others
was devised or imagined, speech came. Speech is oral. It is made of
sound. Oral utterance is no doubt as old as the race itself. It began
with the first coming of our kind into this sphere. Indeed we now know
that the rudiments of speech exist in the faculties of the lower
animals. The studies of Professor Garner have shown conclusively that
the humble simian folk of the African forest have a speech or
language. Of this the professor himself has become a student, and he
claims to have learned at least sixty words of the vocabulary!
Strange it is to note the course which linguistic development has
taken. At the first, there was a _spoken_ language only. The next
stage was to get this spoken language recorded, not in _audible_, but
in _visible_ symbols. Why should it have been so easy and apparently
natural for the old races to invent a visible form of speech-writing
rather than an audible form? Why should the ancients have fallen back
on the eye rather than the ear as the sense to be instructed? Why
should sight-writing have been invented thousands of years ago, and
sound-writing postponed until the present day?
In any event, such has been the history of recorded language. The
early races began as the mother begins with her children; that is,
with oral speech. But at a certain stage this method was abandoned,
and teachers came with pictorial symbols of words. They invented
visible characters to signify words, syllables, sounds. Thus came
alphabetical writing, syllabic writing, verbal writing, into the
world. Ever afterward the children of men learned speech first from
their parents, by oral utterance; but afterward by means of the
pictorial signs in which human language was recorded.
This method became habitual. The eye was made to be the servant of the
intellect in learning nearly all that was to be gained from the wisdom
of the past. It was by the tedious way of crooked marks signifying
words that ideas were henceforth gleaned out of human lore by all who
would learn aught from the recorded wisdom of mankind. And yet there
never was anything essentially absurd or insurmountable in the
invention of a method of recording speech in audible instead of
visible symbols.
The phonograph came swiftly after the telephone. The new instrument is
in a sense the complement of its predecessor. Both inventions are
based upon the same principle in science. The discovery that every
sound has its physical equivalent in a wave or agitation which affects
the particles of matter composing the material through which the sound
is transmitted led almost inevitably to the other discovery of
_catching_ and _retaining_ that physical equivalent or wave in the
surface of some body, and to the reproduction of the original sound
therefrom.
Such is the fundamental principle of the interesting but, thus far,
little useful instrument known as the phonograph. The same was
invented by Thomas A. Edison, of Menlo Park, in the year 1877. The
instrument differs considerably in structure and purpose from the
_Vibrograph_ and _Phonautograph_ which preceded it. The latter two
instruments were made simply to _write_ sound vibrations; the former,
to reproduce _audibly_ the sounds themselves.
The phonograph consists of three principal parts,--the sender or
funnel-shaped tube, with its open mouth-piece standing toward the
operator; the diaphragm and stylus connected therewith, which receives
the sound spoken into the tube; and thirdly, the revolving cylinder,
with its sheet-coating of tin-foil laid over the surface of a spiral
groove to receive the indentations of the point of the stylus. The
mode of operation is very simple. The cylinder is revolved; and the
point of the stylus, when there is no sound agitation in the funnel or
mouth-piece, makes a smooth, continuous depression in the tin-foil
over the spiral groove. But when any sound is thrown into the
mouth-piece the iron disk or diaphragm is agitated; this agitation is
carried through the stylus and written in irregular marks, dots, and
peculiar figures in the tin-foil over the groove.
When the utterance which is to be reproduced has been completed, the
instrument is stopped, the stylus thrown back from the groove, and the
cylinder revolved backward to the place of starting. The stylus is
then returned to its place in the groove, and the cylinder is revolved
forward at the same rate of rapidity as before. As the point of the
stylus plays up and down in the indentations and through the figures
in the tin-foil, produced by its own previous agitation, a quiver
exactly equivalent to that which was produced by the utterance in the
mouth-piece is thrown into the air. This agitation is of course the
exact physical equivalent of the original sound, or, more properly,
_is_ the sound itself. Thus it is that the phonograph is made to talk,
to sing, to cry; to utter, in short, any sound sufficiently powerful
to produce a perceptible tremor in the mouth-piece and diaphragm of
the instrument.
Much progress has been made toward the utilization of the phonograph
as a practical addition to the civilizing apparatus of our time. It
may be said, indeed, that all the difficulties in the way of such a
result have been removed. Mr. Edison has carried forward his work to
such a degree of perfection that the instrument may be practically
employed in correspondence and literary composition. The problem has
been to _stereotype_, so to speak, the tin-foil record of what has
been uttered in the mouth-piece, and thus to preserve in a permanent
form the potency of vanished sounds. Nor does it require a great
stretch of the imagination to see in the invention of the phonograph
one of the greatest achievements of the age--a discovery, indeed,
which may possibly revolutionize the whole method of learning.
It would seem clear that nature has intended the _ear_, rather than
the eye, to be the organ of education. It is manifestly against the
fitness of things that the eyes of all mankind should be strained,
weakened, permanently injured in childhood, with the unnatural tasks
which are imposed upon the delicate organ. It would seem to be more in
accordance with the nature and capacities of man, and the general
character of the external world, to reserve the eye for the
discernment and appreciation of beauty, and to impose upon the ear
the tedious and hard tasks of education.
The phonograph makes it possible to read by the ear instead of by the
eye, and it is not beyond the range of probability that the book of
the future, near or remote, will be written in phonographic plates and
made to reveal its story directly to the waiting ear, rather than
through the secondary medium of print to the enfeebled and tired eye
of the reader.
We hardly venture on prophecy; but we think that he who returns to
this scene of human activity at the close of the twentieth century
will find that sound has been substituted for sight in nearly
everything that relates to recorded information, to learning, and to
educational work. By that means the organ of hearing will be restored
to its rightful office. Enlightenment and instruction of all kinds
will be given by means of phonographic books. The sound-wave will, in
a word, be substituted for the light-wave as the vehicle of all our
best information and intercourse. The ear will have habitually taken
the place of the eye in the principal offices of interest and
information.
The unnatural method of the book--the visible book instead of the
audible book--will then be done away. Nature, who instructs the child
by sound, will continue to teach the man in the same manner. All
mothers, from the mother bird to the mother woman, begin the teaching
of their offspring by sound, by utterance. The mother bird continues
in this manner; but the mother woman is presently supplanted by a
teacher who comes in with a printed book filled with crooked marks,
and would have it that learning must be _thus_ acquired. Instead of
continuing the natural process of instruction to the complete
development and information of the mind, an abnormal method has been
adopted by mankind with many hurtful consequences.
The youth at a certain age is led into the world of science, and there
dismissed from the mother-method, to acquire, if he can, the painful
and tedious use of meaningless hieroglyphics. There he must study with
the eye, learning as best he may the significance of the crooked signs
which can at the most signify no more than words. How much of human
energy and life and thought have been thus wasted in the instruction
of the mind by characters and symbols. The eyes of mankind have, as we
said, been dimmed and shadowed, and at the same time the faculties
have been overheated and the equipose of perception and memory
seriously disturbed by this unnatural process of learning.
Human beings begin the acquirement of knowledge with words, and they
end with words; but an unnatural civilization has taught man to walk
the greater part of his intellectual journey by means of arbitrary
systems of writing and printing. When the next Columbian Year arrives
we shall see him untaught (a hard thing withal) and retaught on
nature's plan of learning. Nature teaches language by sound only.
Artificiality writes a scrawl. Nature's book is a book of words. Man's
book is as yet a book of signs and symbols. Nature's book utters
itself to the ear, and man's book blinds the eyes and overheats the
imagination. Nature's method is to teach by the ear, and to reserve
the sight for the discovery and enjoyment of beauty.
The sound-book in some form is coming; and with that the intellectual
repose of mankind will begin to be restored. The use of the eye for
the offices of education instead of the stronger ear, has, we think,
impaired, if it has not destroyed, the equilibrium of the human mind.
That equilibrium must be restored. The mental diseases and unrest of
our race are largely attributable to the over-excitement of the
faculties through ages of too much seeing.
The Age of Hearing is, we think, to be ushered in with the twentieth
century. The coming of that age will tend to restore the mental
balance of mankind. Memory, now almost obliterated, will come again.
The over-heated perceptions will cool. The imagination will become
calm, and the eye itself will recover, we hope, from the injuries, of
overstrain, and will regain its power and lustre. Man will see once
more as the eagle sees, and will learn Shakespeare by heart. He will
remember all knowledge, and will again be able to see, as of old, from
Sicily to Carthage!