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Updated: May 4, 2025
My mental diaphragm creaked with the pressure of inrushing ideas. My brain young, sensitive to every touch, took hold of facts and theories like a phonographic cylinder, and while my body softened and my muscles wasted from disuse, I skittered from pole to pole of the intellectual universe like an impatient bat. I learned a little of everything and nothing very thoroughly.
The phonograph makes it possible to read by the ear instead of by the eye, and it is not beyond the range of probability that the book of the future, near or remote, will be written in phonographic plates and made to reveal its story directly to the waiting ear, rather than through the secondary medium of print to the enfeebled and tired eye of the reader.
As well might your analysis of a phonographic record hope to disclose a sonata of Beethoven latent in the waving lines. No power of chemistry could reveal any difference between the gray matter of Plato's brain and that of the humblest citizen of Athens. All the difference between man, all that makes a man a man, and an ox an ox, is beyond the reach of any of your physico-chemical tests.
For our important records we still largely use types, of course, but the printed matter is transcribed from phonographic copy, so that really, except in emergencies, there is little use for handwriting. Curious, isn't it, when one comes to think of it, that the riper civilization has grown, the more perishable its records have become?
We say this not in the way of an apology for the extent of Edison's contribution to the motion-picture art, because there can be no question that he was as much the creator of that art as he was of the phonographic art; but to show that in a practical sense the suggestion of the art itself was original with him.
Leslie was in the midst of his phonographic dictation. He abruptly stopped the machine and whirled about in his swivel-chair to face the engineer. "Sit down," he said. "How's the Zariba Dam?" "No progress," answered Griffith with terse precision. He sat down with an air of complete absorption in the act, drew out an old knife and his pipe, and observed: "You didn't send for me for that."
Whose the hamper was, however, is a point we shall never now certainly determine, for the best fossil is worse than the worst living form. Why, alas! was not Mr. Edison alive when this chapel was made? We might then have had a daily phonographic recital of the conversation, and an announcement might be put outside the chapels, telling us at what hours the figures would speak.
Hilbrough with a message that he hoped it would not incommode her to see him, since he had some inquiries to make. Mrs. Hilbrough descended promptly, and there took place the usual preliminary parley on the subject of the fine day, a parley carried on by Millard with as little knowledge of what he was saying as a phonographic doll has.
Lawrence was faintly sorry for the poor devil, but only faintly: after all, an awkward interview once in ten years was a low price to pay for that night which Lawrence never had forgotten and never would forget. He had an excellent memory, photographic and phonographic, a gift that wise men covet for themselves but deprecate in their friends.
I have, likewise, "interviewed" prize-fighters, before they proceeded to take action in some "merry little mill;" Mormon prophets' wives, who had come east to purchase Parisian finery for the after delectation of Utah eyes, and the envy of other polygamous families not so favoured as they; Chinese missions, under the escort of a Burlinghame; condemned criminals, awaiting the fatal noose, and who wished to give their "last speech and confession" to the world; Japanese jugglers, who expressed their opinion of the States the main object of every reporter's cross- examination generally in a sort of phonographic language, too, in which the signs were feats of legerdemain and the "arbitrary characters," the butterfly and basket tricks!
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