‘I wish to understand you—but that is not easy,’ she replied.
He did not look round; he answered as if the subject were one of the most commonplace kind; but there was a certain emphasis in his tone as he seemed to take up her sentence and continue it.
‘Because you stand on the sunny side of life, and know nothing of its shadows. Pity that they will force themselves upon you soon enough.’
‘If you see them coming, why not give me warning?’
He turned round suddenly, his hands clasped behind him so tightly that he seemed to be striving to subdue the outcry of some physical pain.
‘It is not warning that I wish to give you, but protection,’ he said, and there was a harshness in his voice quite unusual to him.
The change of tone was so remarkable, that she drew back. There were in it bitterness, hatred, and almost something that was like malignity.
‘You must know it all—then judge for yourself,’ he said at length.
CURIOSITIES OF THE MICROPHONE.
It would be interesting to learn all the particulars relating to the birth of some great invention; to know the inventor’s frame of mind at the time the pregnant idea occurred to him, and the influences under which he lived and laboured. This is usually an unwritten chapter of biography; but sometimes we can learn a little about these things. It is not always necessity, or the need of help, that is the mother of invention. In the case of the microphone, it was the need of occupation. Professor Hughes was confined to his chamber by an attack of cold, and to beguile the tedium of the time, he began to experiment with the telephone. This was in the early winter of 1877; and at that time the transmitting and receiving parts of the Bell telephone system were identical. The result was that the received speech was very feeble; and Professor Hughes began to try whether he could not dispense with the transmitting telephone, and make the wire of the circuit speak of itself. Some experiments of Sir William Thomson had shown that the electric resistance of a wire varied when the wire was strained; and Professor Hughes thought that if he could get the vibrations of the voice to strain a wire, so as to vary its resistance in proportion to the vibrations, he might be able to make the wire itself act as a transmitter. He therefore connected a battery and telephone together by means of a fine wire, and pulled on a part of the wire in order to strain it, at the same time listening in the telephone. But he heard no sound at all until he strained the wire so much that it gave way. At the instant of rupture he heard a peculiar grating sound in the telephone; and on placing the broken ends of the wire in delicate contact, he found that the slightest agitation of the ends in contact produced a distinct noise in the instrument.