the old, which thereby become
nascent. Through accident or premeditation he is able by uniting
scattered thoughts to add a novel instrument to a domain of science with
which he has little acquaintance. Nay, the lessons of experience and the
scruples of intimate knowledge sometimes deter a master from attempting
what the tyro, with the audacity of genius and the hardihood of
ignorance, achieves. Theorists have been known to pronounce against a
promising invention which has afterwards been carried to success, and it
is not improbable that if Edison had been an authority in acoustics
he would never have invented the phonograph. It happened in this wise.
During the spring of 1877, he was trying a device for making a telegraph
message, received on one line, automatically repeat itself along another
line. This he did by embossing the Morse signals on the travelling paper
instead of merely inking them, and then causing the paper to pass under
the point of a stylus, which, by rising and falling in the indentations,
opened and closed a sending key included in the circuit of the second
line. In this way the received message transmitted itself further,
without the aid of a telegraphist. Edison was running the cylinder which
carried the embossed paper at a high speed one day, partly, as we are
told, for amusement, and partly to test the rate at which a clerk could
read a message. As the speed was raised, the paper gave out a humming
rhythmic sound in passing under the stylus. The separate signals of the
message could no longer be distinguished by the ear, and the instrument
seemed to be speaking in a language of its own, resembling 'human talk
heard indistinctly.' Immediately it flashed on the inventor that if
he could emboss the waves of speech upon the paper the words would be
returned to him. To conceive was to execute, and it was but the work
of an hour to provide a vibrating diaphragm or tympanum fitted with an
indenting stylus, and adapt it to the apparatus. Paraffined paper was
selected to receive the indentations, and substituted for the Morse
paper on the cylinder of the machine. On speaking to the tympanum, as
the cylinder was revolved, a record of the vibrations was indented on
the paper, and by re-passing this under the indenting point an imperfect
reproduction of the sounds was heard. Edison 'saw at once that the
problem of registering human speech, so that it could be repeated by
mechanical means as often as might he d