MACHINE, AN ACCURATE
A fine clock, reminding a community of the lapse of time and of the value of the fleeting minutes and hours, is an object of much public interest. Some clocks have a particular historic interest due to their long and accurate service in behalf of a hurrying and often heedless humanity. A number of invited guests were recently privileged to be present one night in Strasburg Cathedral to observe the mechanism of the famous clock. For the first time since its construction in 1842, the machinery was called upon to indicate the first leap-year of a century, after an eight-year interval. At astronomical midnight the levers and trains of wheels began to move, the movable feasts of the year took their respective places and the admirable mechanism, calculated to indicate in perpetuity all the changes of the calendar, continued its regular movement. The man who can construct a great clock like that is indeed a mechanical genius.
(1942)
Machine-shop Equipment—See [Modernity].
MACHINE TESTIMONY
In an article in the Evening Post on “Manners Over the Wire,” the writer says:
Some little thing may reform an age, the adage runs, and so perhaps the phonograph recording device, which was installed recently in the Copenhagen telephone exchange to check the ill-natured remarks of subscribers to central, by convicting offenders out of their own mouths, may bring about a revolution in the Danish city’s manners.
Probably one of the first thoughts of the man who invented the telephone, and knew that he could project sound over distance, was that now he could tell his stronger neighbor his candid opinion without risking the dog and a possible thrashing; one of his second thoughts was to put his new-found power into practise. And who, after all, should be the object of most of the exasperated remarks, shading from complaint to embroidered profanity, but central herself?
This Copenhagen found out, and set herself to remedy. University professors there who discover another flaw in Dr. Cook’s records and ring up the rector right away, only to find that the wire is busy because half a dozen colleagues have similar messages, must not abuse central; the connection will be switched at once to the phonograph, which has no feelings and is an unprejudiced witness in court. Testimony of as a will recorded thus was recently held valid in Russia; and the notaries will invent another form: “Appeared before me this day Phonograph No. 123, said phonograph being turned on, deposed, etc. ... Polonius, notary; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, witnesses.” Polonius’ advice, “Give thy thoughts no tongue,” holds good, and better for the Danes than in the times when, in language of to-day, the party at Elsinore had no ’phone.
(1943)