Phonogram

“ There are practical difficulties in the way which need not be told over. Perhaps in railway trains, steamers, and other unsteady vehicles, it will be-used for communications. The telephone may yet be adapted to work in conjunction with it, so that a phonogram can be telephoned, or a telephone message recorded in the phonograph. Such a 'telephonograph' is, however, a thing of the future. Wills and other private deeds may of course be executed by phonograph. Moreover, the loud-speaking instrument which Edison is engaged upon will probably be applied to advertising and communicating purposes. ”

“ Consonant sounds are recognized as initial, final, and medial. Next the phonogram element is analyzed into its vowel and consonant sounds. By means of familiar symbols the child has the power to pronounce new words. A knowledge of individual symbols is the foundation upon [Pg 14] which the sight recognition of words rests; hence the necessity of rapid and varied drills.
The method suggested in this Manual for phonic lessons is as follows:
1. ”

“ The number of those commonly employed in good writing is between seventy and eighty. The most important phonograms are the uniliteral or alphabetic signs, twenty-four in number in the Old Kingdom and without any homophones: later these were increased by homophones to thirty. Of biliteral phonograms—each expressing a combination of two consonants—there were about fifty commonly used: some fifteen or twenty were rarely used. As Egyptian roots seldom exceeded three letters, there was no need for triliteral phonograms to spell them. ”

“ Right of Making Available of Phonograms Producers of phonograms shall enjoy the exclusive right of authorizing the making available to the public of their phonograms, by wire or wireless means, in such a way that members of the public may access them from a place and at a time individually chosen by them. ”

“ The telegraph, the press, and the typewriter are agents of communication for the written word. The telephone is an agent for the spoken word. And there is another instrument for recording sound and reproducing it, which should not be forgotten. It was in 1877 that Thomas Alva Edison completed the first phonograph. The air vibrations set up by the human voice were utilized to make minute indentations on a sheet of tinfoil placed over a metallic cylinder, and the machine would then reproduce the sounds which had caused the indentations. ”

“ We ask in vain for an answer to the question which is upon the lips of every one-What next? The microphone has proved itself highly useful in strengthening the sounds given out by the telephone, and it is probable that we shall soon see those three inventions working unitedly; for the microphone might make the telephone sounds so powerful as to enable them to be printed by phonograph as they are received, and thus a durable record of telephonic messages would be obtained. We can now transmit sound by wire, but it may yet be possible to transmit light, and see by telegraph. ”

“ Not only is the vacuum tube a detector of electric wave signals and speech and music but it can also be used to amplify them, that is, to make them stronger and, hence, louder in the telephone receiver and further its powers of amplification are so great that it will reproduce them by means of a loud speaker, just as a horn amplifies the sounds of a phonograph reproducer, until they can be heard by a room or an auditorium full of people. ”

“ The marvellous fact that a little piece of charcoal can, as it were, both listen and speak, that a person may talk to it so that his friend can hear him at a similar piece a hundred miles away, is a miracle of nineteenth century science which far transcends the oracles of antiquity.
The articulating telephone was the forerunner of the phonograph and microphone, and led to their discovery. They in turn will doubtless lead to other new inventions, which it is now impossible to foresee. ”

“ The phonograph will register notes as low as ten vibrations a second, whereas it is well known the lowest note audible to the human ear is sixteen vibrations a second. The instrument is equally capable of service and entertainment. It can be used as a stenograph, or shorthand-writer. A business man, for instance, can dictate his letters or instructions into it, and they can be copied out by his secretary. Callers can leave a verbal message in the phonograph instead of a note. ”

“ When a telephone is placed in circuit with a telegraph line, the telephone is found seemingly to emit sounds on its own account. The most extraordinary noises are often produced, the causes of which are at present very obscure. One class of sounds is produced by the inductive influence of neighbouring wires and by leakage from them, the signals of the Morse alphabet passing over neighbouring wires being audible in the telephone, and another class can be traced to earth currents upon the wire, a curious modification of this sound revealing the presence of defective joints in the wire. ”

“ The amount of spreading of the beam being proportional to the intensity of the vibrations of m, and this again proportional to the intensity of the sounds, the sounds heard in the telephone are similar to those pro duced at the end of t. Theoretically the receiver may be at any distance from the transmitter, but considerable difficulty arises if the distance is great. One of the simplest forms of the phonograph is shown in fig. 19. Phono- It consists of a rigid spindle S screwed for about one-third of its graph. ”

“ When the nature and laws of the waves of sound became fully known a great field of inventions was opened. Then came the telephone, phonograph, graphophone and gramophone.
The telephone depends upon a combination of electricity and the waves of the human voice. The phonograph and its modifications depend alone on sound waves—the recording of the waves from one vibrating membrane and their exact reproduction on another vibrating membrane. ”

“ You have all heard a phonograph speak, or sing, or reproduce music. In its original form the Edison phonograph consisted of a cylinder covered with tinfoil, against which pressed lightly a steel point attached to the centre of a metal disc. In its modern form, as improved by Edison, Bell, Tainter, and others, it is a far more perfect instrument for recording and reproducing sound. It now consists of a cylinder covered with a composition similar to very hard soap. This cylinder is carried on a metal drum, and caused to [143] revolve by clockwork slowly and very uniformly. ”

“ This makes it possible either to begin or to interrupt a phonographic reproduction at any instant of the flow of sound reproduced. Should we wish to grasp better what we have just heard, raising the lever while we move back the arm repeats it at once; should we wish to compare it with sound from another source, simply raising the lever silences the instrument. The phonograph used in this investigation was one of those run by electrical power, the rapidity of revolution of the cylinder being regulated by a screw increasing or decreasing the strength of the current entering the motor. ”

“ This instrument is the invention of Waldemar Poulsen, whose apparatus for wireless telegraphy we shall speak of in the next chapter. The telegraphone performs at the same time the work of a telephone and of a phonograph. In the ordinary type of phonograph the record is made in the form of depressions or indentations on the surface of a cylinder of wax; these indentations being produced by a stylus actuated by vibrations set up in a diaphragm by the act of speaking. In the telegraphone the same result is obtained entirely by electro-magnetic action. ”

“ This is a recording instrument which combines the phonograph and the dictagraph. One purpose—the most practical, is that a business man may dictate his letters and memoranda while sitting at his desk, in his office, instead of having a machine with a phonograph in his private office taking up space and requiring the changing of records by the dictator—which is necessary with the present business phonograph. All that will be necessary is for him to speak into a little disc. The sound waves are carried by a simple arrangement of wiring into his outer office, or wherever his stenographer works. ”

“ It seemed to me that in this way a number of distinct telegraph messages might be sent simultaneously from the tuning-fork piano to the other end of the circuit, by operators each manipulating a different key of the instrument. These messages would be read by operators stationed at the distant piano, each receiving operator listening for signals of a certain definite pitch, and ignoring all others. In this way could be accomplished the simultaneous transmission of a number of telegraphic messages along a single wire, the number being limited only by the delicacy of the listener’s ear. ”

“ The telephone enables us to speak to distances far beyond the reach of eye or ear, 'to waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole; 'the phonograph enables us to seal the living speech on brazen tablets, and store it up for any length of time; while it is the peculiar function of the microphone to let us hear those minute sounds which are below the range of our unassisted powers of hearing. ”

“ If the trains of waves are at the rate of 50 or 100 per second, these small sounds run together into a musical note, and this continuous hum can [Pg 80] be cut up into long and short spaces, in accordance with the Morse alphabet signals. The telephone must not be an ordinary telephone, capable of being influenced by any frequency, but be one which responds only to a particular note, and under these conditions the receiving arrangement is receptive only when the trains of waves arrive at certain regular predetermined intervals, corresponding with the tone to which the telephone is sensitive. ”

“ Everybody depended upon his indispensable to remind him in time of all undertakings and responsibilities. This service it was able to render by virtue of a simple enough adjustment of a phonographic cylinder charged with the necessary word or phrase to the clockwork in the indispensable, so that at any time fixed upon in setting the arrangement an alarm would sound, and, the indispensable being raised to the ear, the phonograph would deliver its message, which at any subsequent time might be called up and repeated. ”

“ Fig. 11. Phonograph Disk.
"Then electricity must be a wonderful thing, to be able to be used by men to talk to each other all over the world, and even to preserve what they say."
"But the phonograph is not an electrical apparatus. The disk, here, with the little stylus, or pointer on it, vibrates and gives forth the sound."
"All this is most marvelous, and I would like to see some of those wonderful things," he exclaimed.
"If you will come to the ship we will show you many of the things that electricity does, as we have a phonograph there, and we have a search light thatp. ”

“ If a certain place were under suspicion the machine could rest with more ease, less food and on smaller wages than a detective and stenographer on salary. When any one started to talk in this suspected room the vibrations of the voices would start a certain connection going through this additional wire, which would set the phonograph into action. As long as the conversation continued the records would be running continuously. No matter how rapidly words are uttered the phonograph would get them, and could be run, for further investigation, as slowly and as many times as desired. ”

“ Recollect that the foreigner is in the same predicament with respect to all the words in the language; and for this reason—the letters in our alphabet have no fixed sounds attached to them, nor is the same sound invariably represented by the same combination of letters. Now what we plead for is, some system of printing and writing, in which the same sound has always the same symbol, and the same symbol has always the same sound; and this we call, when printed, Phonotypy, from "fɷnɩ," voice, and "tɩpos," type ”

“ Shall a visitor have to be careful what he says in a neighbour's house, in case his words are stored up in some concealed phonograph, just as his appearance may be registered by a detective camera? In ordinary life—no; for the phonograph has its limitations, like every other machine, and it is not sufficiently sensitive to record a conversation unless it is spoken close at hand. ”

“ If thus the reproduction [of tones] in exactly similar height and depth is easily attained, it is however difficult for our ear, amidst the always smaller vibrations, to which the diminished strength of the tone is due, to evaluate exactly the magnitude of the vibrations. But the character of the tone depends upon the number of variations of amplitude (Anschwellungen) , that is to say, depends upon whether, for example, in the tones which have similar pitch and therefore a similar number of waves per second, the fourth, sixth, eighth, tenth, or sixteenth wave is stronger than the others. ”

“ By a combination of the phonograph and the moving picture machine working in perfect synchronism the result is obtained. Wires are attached to the mechanism of both the machines, the one behind the screen and the one in front, in such a way that the two are operated simultaneously so that when a film is projected a corresponding record on the phonograph acts in perfect unison supplying the voice suitable to the moving action. Men and women pass along the canvas, act, talk, laugh, cry and "have their being" just as in real life. ”

“ Just the same, only in radio telephony we are confronted by a problem not met with in wireless telegraphy. We have not only to transmit sound, such as isolated dots and dashes, but to send through the air every rise and fall and inflection of the human voice just as it is recorded in the minute lines of a phonographic record. ”