Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century / Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World

by Unknown

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.