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Updated: May 6, 2025
"This is an apparatus," he was saying, "that was devised by Dr. Fournier d'Albe, lecturer on physics at Birmingham University, to aid the blind. It is known as the optophone. What I am literally doing now is to HEAR light.
"See," he went on, "the moon is rising, and in a few minutes, I calculate, it will shine right into that room over there on Seventy-second Street. By using this optophone, I could tell you the moment it does. Try the thing, yourself, Tom." I did so. Though my ear was untrained to distinguish between sounds I could hear just the faintest noise. Suddenly there came a weird racket.
It had probably been the latter idea which they had had and, instead of hunting further, they had taken a quicker and more unscrupulous method than Garrick had imagined and had set the room on fire. Fortunately that had been promptly and faithfully reported to us over the optophone in time to localize the damage.
"This is an instrument which literally makes light audible," he pursued. "Hear light?" I repeated, in amazement. "Exactly," he reiterated. "You've said it. It was invented to assist the blind, but I think I'll be able to show that it can be used to assist justice which is blind sometimes, they say. It is the optophone."
Kennedy tore the wireless receiver from his ear. "Here, Walter, never mind about that electric detective any more, then. Take the optophone. Describe minutely to me just exactly what you hear." He had taken from his pocket a small metal ball. I seized the receiver from him and fitted it to my ear.
The optophone translates light into sound by means of that wonderful little element, selenium, which in darkness is a poor conductor of electricity, but in light is a good conductor. This property is used in the optophone in transmitting an electric current which is interrupted by a special clockwork interrupter. It makes light and darkness audible in the telephone.
But from the receiver of the little optophone there seemed to issue the most peculiar noise I had ever heard a mechanical instrument make. It was like a hoarse rumbling cry, now soft and almost plaintive, again louder and like a shriek of a damned soul in the fires of the nether world. Then it died down, only to spring up again, worse than before.
I had been prepared up to the time the optophone reported the fire to dash over and fight it out at close quarters with two as desperate and resourceful men as underworld conditions in New York at that time had created. Instead we saw no one at all. The robbers had evidently worked in seconds instead of minutes, realizing that they must take no risks in a showdown with Garrick.
"Somebody used a 'can-opener' on it," commented Garrick, looking at it critically and then ruefully at the charred wreck of his optophone that had tumbled in the ashes of the pile of books under which it had been hidden, "Yes, that was the scheme they must have evolved after their midnight conference, a robbery masked by a fire to cover the trail, and perhaps destroy it altogether."
Prolonged exposure, however, blinds the optophone, just as it blinds the eye." "Do you hear anything now?" I asked watching his face curiously. "No. When I turned the current on at first I heard a ticking or rasping sound. I silenced that. But any change in the amount of light in that dark room over there would restore the sound, and its intensity would indicate the power of the light."
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