Manual Training.
Drawing is one of the courses in every manual training school in America. The first of these schools was organized in 1879 St. Louis, under the direction of Professor C. M. Woodward. Within the past thirty years, from the kindergarten to the university, American education has addressed itself as never before to bringing out all the talents of pupils and students. In earlier days there was little appeal to sense perception, to dexterity, to the faculties of eye and hand which all too soon pass out of plasticity, to leave the young man or woman for life destitute of powers which, had they been duly elicited, would have broadened their careers by widening their horizons. To-day, happily, our schools are more and more supplementing literary and mathematical courses with instruction in the use of tools, in modeling, design, and pattern-making. Every process is thoroughly explained. All the studies are linked into series; these unite practice and its reasons with a thoroughness impossible in the outworn schemes of apprenticeship.
All this is a distinct aid to inventiveness. As Professor Woodward says in “Manual Training in Education”:—“Manual training cultivates a capacity for executive work, a certain power of creation. Every manual exercise involves the execution of a clearly defined plan. Familiar steps and processes are to be combined with new ones in a rational order and for a definite purpose. As a rule these exercises are carefully chosen by the instructor. At proper times and in reasonable degree, pupils are set to forming and executing their own plans. Here is developed not a single faculty, but a combination of many faculties. Memory, comparison, imagination, and a train of reasoning, all are necessary in creating something new out of the old.”
How the Phonograph was Born.
Every inventor of mark is a man of native dexterity whose skill has been thoroughly cultivated. Let us observe such a man as he came to an extraordinary triumph. One of the great inventions of all time is the phonograph, giving us as it does accurate records of sound which may be repeated as often as we please. The ideas which issued in the perfected instrument were for years germinating in Mr. Edison’s mind; they took their rise in his recording telegraph. One afternoon Mr. Edison told the story to the late Mr. George Parsons Lathrop, who published it in Harpers’ Magazine for February, 1890:—“I worked a circuit in the daytime at Indianapolis, and got a small salary for doing it. But at night with another operator named Parmley, I used to receive newspaper reports just for the practice. The regular operator, who was given to copious libations, was glad enough to sleep off the effects while we did his work for him as well as we could. I would sit down for ten minutes, and take as much as I could from the instrument, carrying the rest in my memory. Then, while I wrote out, Parmley would serve his turn at taking; and so on. This worked well until they put a new man on at the Cincinnati end. He was one of the quickest despatchers in the business, and we soon found it was hopeless for us to try to keep up with him. Then it was that I worked out my first invention, and necessity was certainly the mother of it.
“I got two old Morse registers, and arranged them in such a way that by running a strip of paper through them, the dots and dashes were recorded on it by the first instrument as fast as they were delivered from the Cincinnati end, and were transmitted to us through the other instrument at any desired rate of speed or slowness. They would come in on one instrument at the rate of forty words a minute, and we would grind them out of the other at the rate of twenty-five. Then weren’t we proud! Our copy used to be so clean and beautiful that we hung it up on exhibition; and our manager used to come and gaze at it silently, with a puzzled expression. Then he would depart, shaking his head in a troubled sort of way. He could not understand it; neither could any of the other operators; for we used to drag off my impromptu automatic recorder and hide it when our toil was over. But the crash came when there was a big night’s work—a presidential vote, I think it was—and copy kept pouring in at the top rate of speed, until we fell an hour and a half or two hours behind. The newspapers sent in frantic complaints, an investigation was made, and our little scheme was discovered. We couldn’t use it any more.
“It was that same rude automatic recorder,” Edison explained, “that indirectly—yet not by accident, but by logical deduction—led me long afterward to invent the phonograph. I’ll tell you how this came about. After thinking over the matter a great deal, I came to the point where, in 1877, I had worked out satisfactorily an instrument which would not only record telegrams by indenting a strip of paper with dots and dashes of the Morse code, but would also repeat a message any number of times at any rate of speed required. I was then experimenting with the telephone also, and my mind was filled with theories of sound vibrations and their transmission by diaphragms. Naturally enough, the idea occurred to me: If the indentations on paper could be made to give forth again the click of the instrument, why could not the vibrations of a diaphragm be recorded and similarly reproduced? I rigged up an instrument hastily, and pulled a strip of paper through it, at the same time shouting, ‘Hallo!’ Then the paper was pulled through again, my friend Batchelor and I listening breathlessly. We heard a distinct sound, which a strong imagination might have translated into the original ‘Hallo!’ That was enough to lead me to a further experiment. But Batchelor was sceptical, and bet me a barrel of apples that I couldn’t make the thing go. I made a drawing of a model, and took it to Mr. Kruesi, at that time engaged on piece-work for me. I marked it $4, and told him it was a talking machine. He grinned, thinking it a joke; but set to work, and soon had the model ready. I arranged some tin-foil on it, and spoke into the machine. Kruesi looked on, and was still grinning. But when I arranged the machine for transmission, and we both heard a distinct sound from it, he nearly fell down in his fright; I was a little scared myself, I must admit. I won that barrel of apples from Batchelor, though, and was mighty glad to get it.”
Edison phonograph.
A, speaking tube. B, D, scale. C, receiving cylinder. E, repeat lever. F, swivel plate. G, connecting key. H, foot trip. I, plug attachment. J, ear-tubes. K, switch.