Yet this wonderful appliance had neither tongue nor teeth, larynx nor
pharynx. It appeared as simple as a coffee-mill. A vibrating diaphragm
to collect the sounds, and a stylus to impress them on a sheet of
tinfoil, were its essential parts. Looking on the record of the sound,
one could see only the scoring of the stylus on the yielding surface of
the metal, like the track of an Alpine traveller across the virgin snow.
These puzzling scratches were the foot-prints of the voice.
Speech is the most perfect utterance of man; but its powers are limited
both in time and space. The sounds of the voice are fleeting, and do
not carry far; hence the invention of letters to record them, and of
signals to extend their range. These twin lines of invention, continued
through the ages, have in our own day reached their consummation. The
smoke of the savage, the semaphore, and the telegraph have ended in the
telephone, by which the actual voice can speak to a distance; and now at
length the clay tablet of the Assyrian, the wax of the ancient Greek,
the papyrus of the Egyptian, and the modern printing-press have
culminated in the phonograph, by which the living words can be preserved
into the future. In the light of a new discovery, we are apt to wonder
why our fathers were so blind as not to see it.
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