hing to prevent a man one of these days from finding a way to give us
a daguerreotype of sound--the phonograph--something like a box in
which melodies will be fixed and kept, as images are fixed in the dark
chamber.' It is also on record that, before Edison had published his
discovery to the world, M. Charles Cros deposited a sealed packet at the
Academie des Sciences, Paris, giving an account of an invention similar
to the phonograph.

Ignorance of the true nature of sound had prevented the introduction of
such an instrument. But modern science, and in particular the invention
of the telephone with its vibrating plate, had paved the way for it. The
time was ripe, and Edison was the first to do it.

In spite of the unbridled fancies of the poets and the hints of
ingenious writers, the announcement that a means of hoarding speech had
been devised burst like a thunderclap upon the world.

[In seeing his mother's picture Byron wished that he might hear her
voice. Tennyson exclaims, 'Oh for the touch of a vanished hand, and the
sound of a voice that is still!' Shelley, in the WITCH OF ATLAS, wrote:

'The deep recesses of her odorous dwelling
Were stored with magic treasures--sounds of air,
Which had the power all spirits of compelling,
Folded in cells of crystal silence there;
Such as we hear in youth, and think the feeling
Will never die--yet ere we are aware,
The feeling and the sound are fled and gone,
And the regret they leave remains alone.'
Again, in his SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE, we find:
'The fire of those soft orbs has ceased to burn,
And silence too enamoured of that voice
Locks its mute music in her rugged cell,']

The phonograph lay under the very eyes of Science, and yet she did not
see it. The logograph had traced all the curves of speech with ink on
paper; and it only remained to impress them on a solid surface in such a
manner as to regulate the vibrations of an artificial tympanum or
drum. Yet no professor of acoustics thought of this, and it was left
to Edison, a telegraphic inventor, to show them what was lying at their
feet.

Mere knowledge, uncombined in the imagination, does not bear fruit in
new inventions. It is from the union of different facts that a new
idea springs. A scholar is apt to be content with the acquisition of
knowledge, which remains passive in his mind. An inventor seizes upon
fresh facts, and combines them with