'It
was a book, indeed,' says Cyrano, 'but a strange and wonderful book,
which had neither leaves nor letters,' and which instructed the Youth in
their walks, so that they knew more than the Greybeards of Cyrano's
country, and need never lack the company of all the great men living or
dead to entertain them with living voices. Sir David Brewster surmised
that a talking machine mould be invented before the end of the century.
Mary Somerville, in her CONNECTION OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, wrote some
fifty years ago: 'It may be presumed that ultimately the utterances or
pronunciation of modern languages will be conveyed, not only to the eye,
but also to the ear of posterity. Had the ancients possessed the means
of transmitting such definite sounds, the civilised world must have
responded in sympathetic notes at the distance of many ages.' In the
MEMOIRES DU GEANT of M. Nadar, published in 1864, the author says:
'These last fifteen years I have amused myself in thinking there is
nothing 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.
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