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 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.
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